Summer On Lake Tulaby

May 10th When the newspaper that had been covering the windows of the Lake Tulaby Inn disappeared overnight, the buzz that flew around the lake sent the loons clamoring noisily into the early May sky. “Looks like there’s some activity over at the Inn,” commented Joe Lesmeister to his wife, Helen, over breakfast. After his retirement from the U of M security force earlier that spring, he and Helen had moved to Lake Tulaby permanently. They were sharing the cottage of Joe’s mother-in-law, Aggie, and while no one said it out loud, Aggie was pushing 80 and had a bad ticker. Everyone knew it couldn’t be that much longer before she passed on, or bought the pine condo as Joe sometimes thought of it. When that day came, the cabin would finally belong to Joe and Helen, and Joe would be able to spend the rest of his days on Lake Tulaby in a perpetual quest to snag the big-mouthed bass and silvery walleye that swam invitingly beneath the cool, blue Minnesota waters. Until then, however, he seemed destined to spend his days as Aggie’s personal handyman. “Good morning, Joe dear,” Aggie would greet him sweetly when he came down for breakfast in the morning. “’Morning, Aggie,” Joe would mutter, reaching for the cereal bowls and steeling himself for the inevitable. Aggie had yet to disappoint him. “Would you be an angel today, Joe, and trim those tree limbs hanging over the driveway?” she would say in a voice that had taken on a subtle quaver in the last few years. If it wasn’t trimming trees it was reinforcing the front steps, or sanding the rough spots out of the deck, or climbing up on the roof to clean out the gutters. Joe was beginning to think that he’d retired from one full-time job to work another one for his mother-in-law. “No problem, Aggie,” Joe would respond through clenched teeth, picturing the service revolver he’d handed in when he retired from the university force. 'I don’t know what happened, Officer,' he’d have told the Naytauwash police when they arrived, 'I could’ve sworn the safety was on….' “She’s an elderly woman, Joe,” Helen would remind him unsympathetically, whenever Joe complained. “And besides, why should Mother pay someone to do these things for her when you’re living right here under the same roof, with all this time on your hands?” “Isn’t that why I retired?” Joe would grumble under his breath, “So that I could have ‘all this time on my hands’?” He didn’t say it loudly, though. Thirty-nine years of marriage had taught him the limits of Helen’s auditory threshold, and he seldom misjudged it. Joe’s sole measure of comfort was the knowledge that the cabin would someday belong to him and Helen, meaning that in essence any repairs that he did were all for the good. Still, there were those moments when he wondered whether it was all worth it: the moments when the bottoms of his feet were aching from half a day spent standing on the rungs of Aggie’s rusty old ladder, his hands full of gutter muck, moments when he would suddenly glance up to see the mid-afternoon sun dancing invitingly across the miniature white caps of Lake Tulaby. In those moments, Joe would admit to himself that, in all honesty, seventy-nine years of age wasn’t even considered ‘old’ these days. Why, Helen herself had commented that several of Aggie’s friends at the Mahnomen County Senior Citizen’s Center were in their early nineties, and two were nearing 100. That meant that ten or even fifteen years from now, Joe might still be spending his days taking marching orders from Aggie. It was almost too much to think about.