Writing Prompt: Describe a place from more than one point in time…

Apricot sunlight filtered through the tunnel of soft yellow leaves. The kind of soft yellow that lasts only a day or two between the vibrant red, orange and gold; and the decaying brown.

The camp road that had tempted Madeline off course from her visit home no longer snapped and crunched with small twigs and gravel giving way under the tires, softened as it was by spongy fallen leaves and recent puddles.

She hadn’t planned this trip down, literally, Memory Lane – a name they had often laughed at as kids. Madeline pulled the compact rental car into the dirt driveway of her aunt’s camp. She sat for a few moments and enjoyed the sparkling dance of light reflecting from the water’s surface, leaping and swirling under the camp eaves.

Getting out of the car, she walked first to the edge of the lake and touched the water for luck. Turning toward the camp she noticed the small platform landing and stairs at the front door. Not just smaller as places often appear once we are grown, but in reality so much smaller than the camp sized deck that used to dominate the front of the camp when they were kids.

Madeline chuckled to herself as the word “camp” automatically came back to her. Since moving out of state she had adjusted her vocabulary to call it a “cottage” – this after one too many friends had looked at her oddly and questioned “you worked at a kid’s camp in Maine? Were you a counselor?”

Standing on an old overturned pail she was able to peek through one of the large square windows that flanked the corner of the camp overlooking the lake. This corner was occupied by the old farmhouse table that had lived there for over 40 years. It was a dining table that had held lobster feeds; puzzles to stave off late vacation boredom; coffee with the neighbors and paint-by-number-kits purchased in town on the first rainy day. Protected from all these uses by an oversized oil cloth, the table and its pressed wood spindle chairs took up a full quarter of the one room building. The other three quarters were somewhat unevenly divided by kitchen, beds and bunk-beds sectioned off by curtains, and a few chairs and a couch that had heard “Put a towel down before you sit on it with that wet bathing suit!” so many times it was almost woven into the fabric.

Madeline shifted to the other window and was rewarded with a glimpse of the item of honor, an old wind-up mantel clock that chimed every hour and kept everyone awake the first night of vacation, but then somehow faded into the background for the next two weeks.

A quick glance under the camp confirmed the old truck tire inner tubes with their lethal metal stem valves were still a part of the camp scene, deflated now not just for the winter, but likely for the past several years.