As I draft today’s article, I’m sitting at a bar in Falmouth, Maine, having a late lunch on the water before a fundraiser at Maine Audubon. The folding doors are thrown all the way open, so I’ve got a clear shot of the harbor, maybe a hundred boats still sitting on their moorings, waiting for whoever owns them to come get one last weekend out of the season. A few stalwart diners are camped outside on the patio in the sun, which keeps sliding in and out depending on the clouds.
On my walk along the dock to get here, I passed guys already pulling boats. Not all of them. Just enough.
45 minutes down the road, back home, that’s not an occasional thing anymore. It’s daily. I either see it happening in person, boats coming out, getting shrink wrapped, trailered off toward someone’s barn or a storage lot, or I see it secondhand, in the wave of Facebook posts. Last sail of the season. Until next year. Somebody always adds a sunset photo.
Nobody up here needs the leaves to tell them the season’s turning. The boats do it first.
I used to think of that as a closing sound. The hum of a shrink-wrap gun, plastic going taut in the wind. But I’ve come around on it, because I know exactly what comes next, and it’s not quiet.
The Lakes Region Newcomers Club starts scheduling its Mix and Mingles again, and if you don’t sign up within the first hour of one going up, you’ve missed it. I’m on the waitlist for October’s, which is happening at The New Woodshed, a place I love most in fall and winter, when the massive fireplace is doing real work and the light through the windows turns everything the color of the season. Last year, at that same Mix and Mingle, I ended up at a table with people who became the friends that brought laughter and long lunches to my life all winter long. I still think about the conversation from that one night, about what it actually looks like to be someone who chooses to winter over here instead of heading to Florida or South Carolina or Texas the way so many people do the second it gets cold. It’s a different kind of person who makes that choice. If you’ve been enjoying the series about what retirement looks like in the Lakes Region, in its many forms, thank the folks sitting at that table; they were the inspiration.
The Third Chapter
There is a patio not far from my house where, most days between June and September, at four o’clock exactly, my lovely clients and friends are pouring a gin and tonic or a pomegranate martini. I know this because I have driven past it enough times to set a watch by it. I join when I’m able, and I give a little honk when I drive by but can’t stop. The co…
The special interest groups fill back in too. Coffee Klatch, Lunch Bunch, the Creative Writing group I co-lead, Enquiring Minds, all of it revving back up now that the summer people have thinned out. I can walk into pretty much any restaurant in town, as long as it’s still open for the season, and actually get a seat at the bar or a table without waiting. That alone feels like a small luxury after a summer of elbow room.
There’s apple picking coming, cider donuts, and the Laconia Pumpkin Festival, which is less a festival and more a street party built around a wall of carved jack-o-lanterns that goes up something like 40 feet high. It’s a genuinely strange thing to stand in front of. Raucous, a little absurd, and more fun than a wall of pumpkins has any right to be.
And the neighbor emails start up again, the ones that say something like, now that things are quieting down, want to do a bonfire, or a supper on the porch, or drinks while we watch the leaves turn. Those emails don’t happen in July. Everyone’s too busy being busy.
So yes, my swimming’s probably done for the year, unless we get one of those freak warm pockets in October that fools everybody into thinking summer forgot something. Kayaking too. But I’ve written about this before and I’ll keep writing about it, because it keeps proving itself true: the shift from summer busy to locals busy isn’t a slowdown. It’s a different shape of full.
That’s what a real year-round community looks like. It doesn’t go dormant when the tourists stay home. It just changes what’s on the calendar, and honestly, changes who’s at the table. This is the season when you find out who your actual neighbors are, the ones still here in January, the ones who send the bonfire email instead of the Florida postcard.
The boats will all be out of the water soon. Every last one. And this place will still be exactly this busy, just indoors, and closer together, and dare I say with absolutely scintillating conversation.
Here’s to the season that starts when the boats come out.
🧭 Jennifer
Keys to the Lakes
