It's about love

"Lakeside is for lovers" is a phrase I’ve seen on cards, buttons, t-shirts and other memorabilia. And it’s true--and not just for the strolling, hand-holding lovers you see on the dock.

Several years ago I wrote a poem which was published in the weekly newspaper called “The last day of July” about a young couple who met and parted at Lakeside during WWII, planning to see each other the next summer. But it didn’t happen. Finally, when both were great-grandparents some 60 summers later, they met again, but it was the last day of July and their summers were over.

Another type of love I see so often at Lakeside is that of adoptive and foster families. On my corner of Lakeside I’ve seen the American melting pot of special needs and international adoption. Now some of those children are grown and bringing their bi-racial, multi-ethnic children to be Lakesiders too. I saw these children only a few weeks of the year, so their growth and maturity are compressed. First they were toddlers and then it seemed overnight pouty teen-agers with more than the usual identity issues, and now their kids are almost as tall as grandma and grandpa.

At Lakeside I see a love for a past that is often a nostalgic fantasy. In the 70s Lakeside looked to me like the sleepy towns of the 1940s or 1950s, and now it seems to be a spiffy stage set for a 1970s or 1980s TV show, but with i-pods instead of boom boxes and rip rap along the lakefront instead of flat rocks easing into the lake. But it is always “that’s how life used to be” to people who came here as children, like my 92 year old neighbor who began coming when she was 6 months old.

Lakeside has porches often filled with four generations of family--laughing, telling stories on each other, playing monopoly or scrabble. I’ve attended 90th birthday parties and 50th wedding anniversary celebrations for people who were younger than I am now when I met them in our early years at Lakeside. But I’ve also written a poem about a college student who spent the summer riding her bike up and down the streets gazing at the homes where her family used to be--a family now torn up by divorce and scattered, a family that would never again have all those generations together.

On my walks along Lakeside streets (around 100 this summer) I see memorials and plaques for people I didn’t know had died--and family and friends wanted them to remain a part of the community with a tree, or flower bed, or a shelter for a potato digger.

At Lakeside, one can compress a love of learning into a week or a season--environment, Civil War, literature, music, politics, current events, health or finances. We do more and hear more these few weeks than all the rest of the year. I go home to Columbus in September vowing to find similar activities, but as the cold weather and early sunsets descend, I give up on being a Lakeside lover until the next year.