On the river

To celebrate my father’s 80th birthday, we wanted to hold the party in a landscape embedded with family stories and memories. Since the whole family gathers on the river every summer for holiday weekends and a whole week during July, celebrating up on the river seemed the logical choice.

Of course, my father was born in the winter.

Many of the businesses in the little town nearest my parents’ camp shut down in the winter, since there are no tourists to support them. For anyone living in Snowstorm Region, traveling to the north country in the middle of winter is kind of crazy. So we did it anyhow.

Thankfully, we didn't get a snowstorm. We gathered, 22 of us, and we did something we’ve never done before: we stayed in a hotel on the river. Instead of cooking over a campfire and eating on picnic tables, we ate in restaurants. But we also spent time outside, walking on the frozen river and admiring the way the snow transformed the familiar landscape. It’s been years since I’ve been to the river in the winter time, and it was just as beautiful as I remembered.