Labor Day is not the day summer ends here in the Lakes Region. The calendar wants you to believe otherwise and the calendar is wrong, even if it is the end of summer in most places. Don’t get me wrong, the kids are back in school as of today (which will positively impact both my grocery bill and my overall equanimity). We will all return to routine from Monday-Friday. The weekends, though. The weekends keep coming through foliage season. Somebody will still be circling for parking on Main Streets in mid-October, tourists will still order a lobster roll like it’s July, visitors will still slow down traffic on the unfamilar twists and turns of our country roads while they gawk at the staggering beauty that surrounds us. Summer doesn’t end on this long weekend in September.
Here is what the beginning of the end of summer feels like, and I know because it happened to me this morning.
I met a friend for coffee at North Main Cafe (try the Almond Cake), on Main Street in Wolfeboro, and I parked right in front. Not near the front. In front. Then I drove two blocks to my office and parked right in front of that too, which in July would have taken me fifteen minutes and a breathing exercise I learned in therapy. I didn’t think much of it today; I just found a spot twice in one morning without circling once.
That’s the tell. Not a quiet street. Not an empty beach. A woman getting two parking spots on Main Street before ten a.m., the week of Labor Day, and feeling almost smug about it.
That’s how I know this is home now, even though I haven’t hit the two decade mark that seems to count with those who grew up here. Not because anyone said something so much as because I felt it. I clocked the season turning on Main Street before anyone told me it had, the way you know a friend’s mood has shifted before they’ve said a word. Nobody posted about it. Nobody sent a text announcing the tourists were thinning out. I just parked twice without trying and knew this is it.
The parking monitor hasn’t caught up yet, which is its own kind of proof. He is still out there chalking tires in yellow, still working the two-hour rule with the same love for rules he brought to it the week of July 4th, when there wasn’t a spot to be had for love or money. So for one more week I will begrudgingly go move my car at the appropriate interval, for a rule that no longer needs enforcing, because the street has emptied out faster than the systems built to manage it. That gap, the lag between a place quieting down and the place noticing it’s quieted down, might be the truest image I have for this whole stretch of September.
Because the visitors haven’t left. They’ve retreated to the weekend, which is a different thing entirely, and worth being honest about. If you come through Wolfeboro on a Saturday in the next eight weeks, you will still wait for a table. You will still see the Mount Washington pull out with a full load and sound her horn like she means it, same as she did on the Fourth. The lake will still be doing its lake things on both sides of the parking question, Winnipeesaukee crowded and busy, Wentworth and Lovell keeping to themselves the way they always have. Weekends, for now, still belong partly to somebody else.
But Monday through Friday. Those are mostly ours again.
That’s the part I didn’t expect to feel as sharply as I do. It’s not that the season ends. It’s that I get five out of seven days of it back, and the two I don’t get back are the two I was least attached to anyway. I don’t need Saturday morning at Lino’s to have space at the counter. I need Thursday morning to be mine, and this week, for the first time since May, it will be.
I was standing on my back stairs this morning, watching the dogs wrestle in the wet grass, when the knitting circle text came through. Seven words: My house, Thursday, bring your current project. Not an invitation, as assumption that we all know what that all means. I stood there a second longer than the text warranted, picturing the women I haven’t seen except in passing for the last three months, circled around the kitchen table by the window, a dog under somebody’s chair, the particular buzz and contentment of a room where everyone’s hands are busy and nobody has to perform being interesting. I didn’t carefully compose a text back. I gave it a thumbs up and watched 6 others roll in. More importantly, I felt my shoulders drop about an inch, which is apparently what late August has been costing me without my noticing.
I want to resist the tidy version of this, the one where the town exhales and goes still and even though we all love summer here so much, we all rejoice in the emptier streets and quieter lakes. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is more complex and, I think, more honest: the retiree down the road hasn’t felt any of this at all, because her days were never on the visitor’s clock to begin with, and she’ll tell you as much if you ask, mildly amused that the rest of us are only now catching up to a rhythm she just always lives in. The visitor’s week has shrunk from seven days to two. And my week, the year-rounder week, the one built around driving to showings and back and squeezing errands into the gaps, that week just got more expansive and generous and quieter all at once.
So no, I won’t tell you it’s gone quiet, because for the next eight weeks it will still be loud again on a Saturday and I’ll be back to circling for that same spot in front of North Main. And anyway, life here in the fall and winter is so rich and varied and busy in a different way than summer. What I’ll tell you instead is smaller and more specific. This morning I parked twice on Main Street without trying, and for one more week, I still have to go move my car from one spot to another. By next Tuesday, I won’t have to. That’s the whole shift, right there. Not an ending. A door opening five days at a time, the season still holding onto weekends for now.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
