One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine.
—From “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985) is perhaps most famous for his beautiful children’s books—Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. But he was also a brilliant essayist, writing for magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. If you have never read any of his elegant essays, I encourage you to do so. One Man’s Meat is an excellent place to start.

“Once More to the Lake,” one of the pieces in One Man’s Meat, is an elegiac essay about returning to a favorite lake White and his family visited in his childhood in Belgrade, Maine, not far from where I live. White went in the summer, which is when most folks from away come to Maine lakes. Years later, White returned to the lake with his young son, and the essay is a reflection of how things both change and remain the same, how his son’s experience was a mirror of White’s own boyhood experience.

Yesterday, I had a once-more-to-the-lake moment. I live in a town in Maine with so many lakes and ponds that at times it feels as though Winthrop is an island. According to centralmaine.com, there are more than three dozen lakes and ponds in Winthrop, and some of those ponds are big enough to be considered lakes.

My lake of choice was Marancook, which sprawls between two towns, Winthrop and Readfield. Instead of going in the summer, I went on a fine February day, where the sky was a deep, impossible blue. Although I don’t like to walk on the ice anymore—my knees are too creaky for that—I still enjoy parking my car by the lake and admiring the cold view.

Clif took these pictures, and this last one caught his shadow.

However, here my story diverges from White’s essay about how the years dissolve change from one generation to the other. Although there is some ice on Marancook and a few ice fishing shacks, there is also a lot of open water. Usually, by February, the lake is pretty much frozen solid, and there are so many shacks on the lake that it looks like a colorful village has suddenly sprung up. On a fine day, when sound carries, you can here people talking and calling to each other.

Not so this winter, which has been warmer than average, when storms in December have brought rain and flood rather than blizzards. How much longer, I wonder, will people be able to go on the ice to set up their shacks?

I don’t know. And yesterday, while I still admired the lovely view, I had a shiver of apprehension, of change coming so rapidly that even a generation ago, when my parents were young, it would have been inconceivable to have open water on a Maine lake in February.

Winter,  it seems, has finally come to Maine. For now the rain is a thing of the past—may it stay that way until the end of March or the beginning of April—and cold weather has set in. We’ve also had some snow, very welcome not only for its beauty but also for its ability to insulate the plants from the extreme cold.

Here are some views from my windows.

First, the temperature a couple of days ago. Brisk, as Mainers would put it in their understated way.

With temps that cold we often get frost on some of our older windows.

And our backyard looks very wintry. Birds, in great numbers, are visiting the feeders. If you look closely, you can see a few juncos on the snow. The other day, Clif and Dee thought they might have seen a red-headed woodpecker, very rare for central Maine. I have never seen one and will be on the lookout.

Some people dread January and February, but I don’t. I find it cozy and restful, a time for popcorn and tea at 4 p.m. A time to watch movies and television series in the evening. I don’t mind the dark, and I don’t mind the cold. I suppose if I did, I wouldn’t live in Maine.

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Recovery is slow from the storms we had in December, which knocked out power to 750,000 customers and flooded rivers in inland Maine, and in January, which didn’t knock out so much power but caused terrible destruction along the coast. Some business owners are finding that their insurance doesn’t cover flooding and are at a loss as to what to do. I am hoping that communities and grants will help these businesses recover from the damage.

In Maine, as in many other places, communities were built up along the coast and inland rivers, which were used as watery highways before the industrial revolution and the internal combustion engine. In central Maine, where I live, our state capital is along the Kennebec River, which I have often featured on this blog. The picture below was taken last summer, when the river was quiet.

The same is true for other small cities, including Gardiner, Waterville (where I was born), and Skowhegan, which are all along the Kennebec. Through the years, the Kennebec has occasionally flooded, but never in December and seldom as bad. Usually, the water laps the parking lots but doesn’t destroy buildings.

This time was different, but it is likely that such storms will become more common in the years to come. So, here is the question: How close to rivers should communities be? How close to the ocean shoreline? I don’t have an answer, but it seems like it would be quite a job to relocate main streets that are close to rivers. I can’t even picture where they would go, but perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part.

In the face of such challenges, it is easy to feel hopeless about climate change and the destruction it will wreak. Just in the nick of times comes this episode of Notes from America with Kai Wright: Doom. Denial. ‘Hopium.’ What About Climate Action? In this episode, Kai Wright interviews people who have made a difference in their communities and are working to stop things from getting worse. So inspiring and well worth the listen.

On a similar note, one of my blogging friends, Caroline of Susanne’s Mom’s Blog, shares inspiring articles from around the world about people who are making a difference. The focus isn’t always on climate change—although sometimes it is—but the pieces always illustrate the power of creativity and how people can band together to do good things. When they want to.

The time has come when we should all want to.