This morning my friend, Mark, sent me a photo snapped exactly thirteen years ago (where does the time go?!?!) after we launched the dock and boat lift for the start of the boating season. In addition to a timely hint that spring is starting to flirt with summer — a meta metronomic rhythm reminder, if you will — another note struck me: friendship is the common denominator in so many of our Rosslyn memories. So at its core, this “photo essay” flash back thirteen lucky years ago is a meditation on seasonality and friendship.
Dock & Friends
Rosslyn seasonality is a year-round singalong, the metronomic melody I suggested above. Highest water level. Lowest water level. Docks and boat lift in. Docks and boat lift out. The photos in this post tell the springtime refrain of Rosslyn’s waterfront singalong, or at least part of it. The other is the voices joining in the singalong.
The inspiration for today’s post, a retrospective photograph texted to me by Mark, sent me digging deep into my photo history. I pulled up the photos that Susan had snapped thirteen years ago while we were readying the waterfront for an incoming boating season.
Upon locating these images I was struck far less with the docks and the boat lift and much more with the three friends braving the cold lake on an inclement day to help us get ready for months of boating, waterskiing, etc.
While I couldn’t ignore the fact that peeling a decade and change off our faces and physiques made me nostalgic for younger days, the more poignant sensation was of gratitude for the camaraderie.
Mark Englehardt, Tom Duca, and Doug Decker, I thank you. These fuzzy old photos trigger a great gusher of gratitude to you three. Yes, there’s gratitude aplenty for you waterfront assistance. Plenty! We couldn’t enjoy much of our Rosslyn lifestyle without the generous participation of so many. But there’s also something even more fundamental. Friendship. Rosslyn has, since our earliest days, been interwoven with a wondrous web of friendships.
Over the past year that I’ve been revisiting our almost seventeen years at Rosslyn it’s become abundantly obvious that first and foremost this place is a nexus of friendships, memories made, and memories still-to-be-made. Rosslyn is so much more that bricks and mortar, beach and meadows, gardens and orchard. Rosslyn is connectedness, relationships, people, stories,…
The photos so far, a 2010 dock launch “documentary” of sorts, are interspersed with stream of consciousness notes that, upon rereading, are more gush than good. Unfiltered. Unedited. And perhaps a little over the top. Perhaps. But I’m going to leave them. For now at least.
And I’ll get out of the way as we shift from dock to boat lift.
Boat Lift & Friends
Here’s the photo essay I promised at the outset (sans the sentimental soul dump that infiltrated the preceding. Thanks for your forbearance!)
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Mark, Tom, and Doug. Thank you, Griffin, who made several appearances in these photos. We still miss you. And thank you, Rosslyn, for continuing to connect amazing people (and dogs!)
What do you think?