The skies cleared enough in the Finger Lakes the day after Fathers Day so that I could take a few pictures. I headed to Skaneateles, NY. There is something special about the beautiful Skaneateles Lake and the little village of Skaneateles which beckon to me to come back again and again. I was introduced to Skaneateles by my dear friends Bob and Peg. We have had a lot of fun times in Skaneateles. Bob died five years ago and I finally picked up the phone on Monday morning to call his wife Peg to see how she was doing. She had fallen and broken her jaw and had spent the last month in a nursing home. She’s home now but was not up to a visit from me so I did what I thought was the next best thing: I returned to the place where we had had a lot of happy memories together.
I walked out on the Fishing Pier at Skaneateles just as the Judge Ben Wiles tour boat was returning from its morning run. The boat had only a handful of people on board as it pulled into the dock. I watched as a class of what was perhaps first or second grade children get off of the boat, skipping and laughing in the warm June sun. This week is the last week for many of our Upstate New York schools.
A fisherman was trying out his luck in a floating fishing ring which is propelled by your own feet. The water in Skaneateles is so clear that you can see all the way to the bottom in perhaps 20 or 30 feet of water. The fish sometimes hide in the shade of the boat dock along the pier, and the fisherman was casting his line towards the pier.
The water which flows out of Skaneateles Lake is crystal clear, but it is constantly being replaced with rain water that falls on the lake or percolates into the lake from the surrounding hills. It’s really a model of human life as we pass by certain points or milestones in our lives and then move on, only to be replaced by someone new.