DAYS 12-21 - "Is that a long-legged bald eagle...?!"

The days are slipping by peacefully.

Sometimes I’m up at 5:00AM, sometimes 9:00AM, but it all feels blissfully the same.

Caffeine is brewing in the time-tested Braun, held together with a rubber band, when I pad out into the kitchen.

I’m hardly ever the first one up.

I reach for the mug with the lobster on it, “my” coffee cup, and fill it, leaving just enough room for an ice cube or two. Nice try Maine, but no amount of fresh air nor pace reduction can revive the patience necessary to wait for my coffee to cool.

We gather ourselves, slowly. Exchanging 'good mornings' and 'how’d you sleeps'.

This all feels normal to me, having spent my last three summers here.

But David and I are hardly the first visitors to the camp. I can only hope it’s comfortably nostalgic for Steven and Nancy to see someone sitting at their dining room table, it having been occupied by so many beloved friends and family members before.

It’s us today.

For me, hanging at the camp on Little Sebago Lake in Maine, brings a tidal wave of memories from a similar scene 3,175 miles away and 25-plus years ago, in Southern Oregon.

In Junior High and High School, I was fortunate to spend a few days each summer at The Drew’s cabin in Lake of the Woods.

Carson and Hilary would get to invite a couple friends up for a weekend here and there, and I was thrilled to be part of that rotation with Russ and Kristin and Jeff and Liz and Stephanie and certainly others.

We would exhaust ourselves on the water all day: swimming, waterskiing, inner tubing. Then, after dinner dish-duty, we’d play poker until it was suitably late enough to sprawl out on the dock, catch the Perseids, and talk into the night.

Here, the days play out in a wonderfully similar fashion, just now, I get to participate in cocktail hour.

(And, I suppose, savage wipeouts on the water have been replaced with paperback page-tuners on the dock.)

One of my favorite camp pastimes is watching 90-year-old neighbor Joanie-from-Queens, use her broom and sailor’s tongue to steer the Canadian geese off her shoreline and back into the lake.

Nancy does a similar move and it also brings me great joy.

I also love seeing the fireflies punctuate the evening sky and hearing the haunting wail of the loons at all hours of the day and night.

But don’t worry, we haven’t just been lounging around, perma-drunk, like some sort of insufferable "Great Gatsby" characters with ticks.

We caught a minor league baseball Sea Dogs game in Portland, where my new best friend Frank, the usher, upgraded our seats from Section 212, Row 14, to right. behind. the. dugout!

We took the ferry to Peaks Island one day and circumnavigated that rocky slice of heaven on bicycles. I swear, we looked so yawl that by the time we left that place, we knew everyone from the boat and half the locals. Blending!

We walk the road to the mailboxes every morning and swim to the snapping turtle rock every afternoon.

We’ve seen some awesome thunderstorms roll through, get in some great stargazing whenever possible, and are keeping an eye out for those elusive Northern Lights.

As personal as Lake of the Woods has always been and Little Sebago Lake is becoming, I’d like to think that, indeed, every lake is any-lake-USA.

DAYS 22 - 30