a different labour day weekend

Labour Day weekend is one of my favourite times of the year. It has always been a celebration of summer. With the shorter days and cooler nights there are whispers of new beginnings. School is about to start. Fall will bring new activities and new energy. The crisp air signals a time to shift into our cosy clothes and revel in the bright colours of the changing season. Labour Day has always been a weekend to bid adieu to lazy, hot, sweaty summer days while looking forward to what is to come. 

We have usually headed to my family cottage on Labour Day weekend. It is a big family weekend. We close up the waterfront - take out the docks, put away the furniture and wrestle with deflating the water trampoline. It is a mostly collaborative effort. Someone has to corral the dogs who invariably walk on the dock just as you are lifting it out of the water. There are kayak rides, last water-skis of the summer and walks around the lake. We eat. We laugh. We dance in the kitchen. We have always had a big Labour Day party with my extended family and it is one of my favourite events of the year. Far better than Christmas in my mind.

But this year is different. This year we are separated by a pandemic. So we stay apart. Someone else will take the dock out. Someone else will figure out how to wrestle the water trampoline out of the water. And there won’t be any noise of people and laughter coming from the cottage this year. I can only remember one time in the past 20 years that I missed a Labour Day weekend at the cottage. And this year I am missing it not because I am travelling somewhere but because of the pandemic.

So this weekend there won’t be skinny dips at night, there won’t be endless vodka sodas, there won’t be late night bonfires, there won’t be cursing the dogs for getting in the way of the dock, there won’t be dance parties in the kitchen, there won’t be little kids waking me up early and there won’t be laughter around a massive harvest table at dinner. It will be a different weekend and I am still wrapping my head around missing it and how it feels.

I am trying to shift my focus of what Labour Day means when this year is so different. It is a chance to start new traditions with my own family. It is a chance to get things organized to start the school year. It is a chance to putter in my vegetable garden that is usually neglected by now or non-existent. It is a chance to be at home without packing up the car and racing up north.

This weekend will be good. The whisper of Fall and the promise of what is to come will be ever present. The shorter days and cooler nights mean I will get the chance to sit by candlelight, under my twinkle lights and enjoy my garden that I have worked hard on this year. And I will pause to relish in the memories of a summer that has been unlike any other. I am welcoming the chance to make this Labour Day weekend uniquely my own. 

I will miss the lake, the people I love and the way I have celebrated the end of summer in years gone by. Some traditions are hard to let go of. Labour Day weekend at the cottage is one of them.   

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