Balancing Work and Play

For the past 3 summers, we’ve been working like fiends on the OPO.

I’ve been coming up here my whole life. Time in Averill is usually filled with hikes up the mountain, games of tennis, lazy afternoons reading in the sun on the rocks. Lots of swimming and kayaking, maybe even taking a Sunfish out for a sail. Long cocktail hours and endless dinners that spiral into conversations that travel from the dining room to the living room to the kitchen for cleanup. There are always projects, of course. Paint touchup or picnic table fixing. Brush clearing. You can’t be around my dad or Jeremy and not have a project in the works.

The last times we’ve come up here have looked a lot different.

2018 is when Sue died. We spent 2 weeks, our normal Averill time, ripping out carpet, throwing away smoke-filled furniture and curtains, and staving off grief with aching amounts of work.

In 2019, we left Charlottesville right after Bee graduated from high school and spent the summer at the lake, through the 3rd week in September, largely head down, knocking out projects as large as installing a new sliding glass door and shoring up inadequate attic rafters and as small as installing new garage shelving and sorting an overabundance of kitchen gear.

We had a few visitors, took a couple of swims, planted a garden, took exactly one memorable boat ride around the lake at sunset.

Sunset from a motorboat, 2019

In general though, it felt very much as if any moment spent not working on the house was wasted. No hikes, no tennis, no lazy afternoons reading in the sun.

This summer we got a late start. Selling the house in Charlottesville the beginning of August meant that we really didn’t get here until August 6, though we had one precious week in late June/early July where Jeremy managed to move the French doors so they opened fully into the dining room. Since then, it’s been paint paint paint, moving ladders and perching on the rooftop, climbing up and down with scrapers and paint buckets. There’s been siding replacement and plumbing project decisions.

We replaced all this siding!

When I mentioned looking forward to being back on the boat because of the work load, a wise friend reminded me of the fact that life on the boat is an endless round of projects. True. Life on the boat IS an endless round of projects. Between maintenance, tinkering, puttering to improve, and how much longer life’s small tasks on board take - yeah, it’s not like we’ll just be suntanning on the bow and snapping our fingers for umbrella drinks to appear as if by magic.

But life on board is more balanced than we’ve allowed ourselves up here for the past 3 years.

Until the weekend of October 10 and 11. THAT weekend, we finally balanced work and play in a fashion far more reminiscent of how we live our cruising lives. Time to work and time to play.

Saturday, 69 degrees and sunny in the morning, with weather forecast to come in around noon. After a few sailing videos on YouTube (with coffee, in bed), we spent the morning bushwhacking around the property, looking for the survey marks and unearthing a couple of old bottles. There was still plenty of time for paint work, and by the time the rain clouds actually rolled in at 3:45, we’d coated all the white trim that had been scraped bare; Jeremy even had time to replace a rotten piece of a soffit box and put 2 coats of white paint on it. 1 house project, done. Relaxation, done. Time to do something just for us? Done. Ahhh.

Sunday. 45 degrees and sunny sunny sunny. So sunny we had breakfast on the south-facing deck before launching into toilet replacement and critter hole patching. Once he’d flushed the new toilet a few times, Jeremy called to me. “How about a kayak and a beer?” Bundled in a couple of layers topped with windbreakers, we headed off on the kayaks to explore.

October 11, 2020. Kayak time.

We followed loons, searched (unsuccessfully) for the flock of geese we watched land on the lake (where the heck did they go???), and learned when they close Jackson Road for traffic (only in mud season).

And that afternoon, after a delicious take out lunch from Aprils Maple, we took a walk to Snare Camp, ticked off 2 more (small) projects on the DO list, and even went up to Brousseau for the sunset. It was a day filled with projects that had to be done as well as time for us to just enjoy where we are.

For the first time in a long time it was a weekend of the kind of balance we are so good at maintaining when we’re cruising. Where the joys of life don’t get shoved to the bottom of the list or worse yet, treated as if they’re an imposition.

I’ve stated before that all of what we’re doing is part of cruising prep. Sure, we’re not on the boat or even working directly on the boat (3 more weeks!!!), but all of this work on the house is part of our preparation - it’s leaving this house, which will serve as our home base and home base for our kids, in good shape for our absence.

This weekend was part of cruising prep in another way. The balancing of activity, the knowing that there isn’t wasted time (for the most part - emergencies are a different story!) but the choosing of how to spend time.

Ahhhh.