To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven:
It is a little after 6 on a gray Saturday morning. Downstairs one granddaughter and her friend are sleeping. Later today, another granddaughter and three of her friends will arrive. It is not a promising weekend for outdoor things, but I am sure the young ladies will find plenty of things to amuse themselves with. They are at an age when their grandparents do not have to spend all of their time being recreation directors.
I have been sitting in the little reading room just off our second-floor bedroom looking out at the lake. A slight breeze has the water in motion – most often it is as still as a millpond this time of the morning – and I haven't heard any manmade sounds. Soon, even with the possibility, even probability, that rain could come at any moment, personal watercraft will be roiling the water. After all, how many weekends are there in a summer?
I have watched the day develop from this vantage point almost every morning since we moved to the lake full-time nine years ago and on as many mornings as possible in those years when we were only part-timers.
I have never tired of the view nor unmindful of our good fortune in being able to experience every day that which so many people get only to sample.
My morning view is about to change.
We have lived in this house longer than we have lived in any house since we got married, and it is the first house that we have had designed and built just for us. Like us, the house has its eccentricities, but I hope that soon some other family will enjoy this house as much as we have.
As much as we have loved the place – and, as importantly, our neighbors and our neighborhood – we have recognized for several years that the time for change would come.Simply put, the house is simply too big for the two of us It has too many steps;. Adelaide counted the steps from the dock to the widow's walk; there were 105 of them. When the children and grandchildren are here, the house is just right, sometimes even cramped, but those times are increasingly rare, and that space is heated and cooled and cleaned year round.
So in a few days a sign will go up offering our half hill for sale. We hope that someone will think it is as right as we did when we first saw this spot and visualized putting a house on it.
I am, at least for the moment, curiously unmoved by the prospect of making some other house our home. I think that we most liberated we have felt was when we returned to the states after spending the better part of a year on a self-styled sabbatical in England and Holland. We had sold most of our belongings before setting out, and having only a few possessions made us feel, well, less possessed. That was many years ago, though, and as long as you have a place to put things, things pile up.
We have decided that we need considerably less space – and far fewer things – and that this might be the time to make that change.
We would love to stay on the water and in this neighborhood if that is possible. We don't know how that will work out, because like most folks, we cant really look for another home until we have sold this one. (I'd hate to fall in love with a place only to see it sell before we sold our own home.)
  Whatever happens, it will be an adventure.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
