I just spent an amazing weekend at a friend's parents' house for her bachelorette party. They live on a lake and have beautiful, sprawling grounds with a deck, patio tables, huge firepit, and sandy beach. The weather was perfect--warm, dry, breezy, and blue-skied. Surprisingly, there were very few mosquitoes out, and it was a full-moon night.
Not only was it fun because of all the pontoonin', swimmin', and grillin' involved, but I felt like I was 14 again, just hanging out with friends and having a slumber party. We set up tents close to the water and ate a chocolate-raspberry ice-cream pie and gooey store-bought cupcakes by the fire. My bachelorette friend A and other friend C made a late-night cigarette run, and when A's mom asked where she was, we lied and said they ran to the store to buy more tonic water. We're all over 30, for chrissakes--why did we lie to her mom about buying cigarettes?
Then, just as all of us ladies were about to fall asleep, A and S proposed a late-night pontoon ride (2am-ish) and swim. I hadn't jumped in the lake all day because it had been breezy, but the evening was still and warm, with the full moon blazing over the water. We were the only ones out on the water so the lights stayed off. Only 3 out of 7 of us jumped in, and I'm glad I did. It felt like some sort of ancient pagan pre-wedding ritual, with the moonlight blue on our skins.
Earlier in the day, we stopped to "borrow" someone's lake trampoline, which felt very rebellious.
When we got back around 2:30am, A. grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a few of us retreated to a tent to read tarot cards and talk about relationship stuff (a very teenagery-thing to do, but which I never did as a teen because none of my friends did tarot and I didn't drink till I was in college, so I was catching up, in a way).
We fell asleep around 4:30 am.
The next morning and early afternoon we boated and swam some more, and layed out on our beach towels with a few bags of chips. It reminded me of hanging out with my cousin during the summer, where we'd sit on her porch after a day at the pool, and binge on Twix bars. I loved the laziness of it, and the guilt-free indulgence of non-stop junk food. A and S were singing Aerosmith songs, and later, on the ride home with A, I noticed she had a small collection of CDs in sleeves on the sun visors. For some reason it was so refreshing not to listen to music on an iPod, to hear the soft click of the CD being sucked into the stereo.
It's just what my soul needed. But I'm afraid I'm going to need this every weekend for the rest of the summer....
Anyone need a house-sitter for your lake-front home?
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