Fish Camp

by Denise Dykstra

Once a year in June, my brother puts together the “Boys Only” fish camp week. Planning for the week-long trip begins on the way home from the Fish Camp.

My brother puts it all together and then he and his sons, my dad, my dad’s brother, my sister’s boys and my boys all go up north for one full week to fish.  I am told that what happens at Fish Camp stays at Fish Camp.  All I know is that when they arrive home, I hug my boys even though their smell is far from anything pleasant and they begin the countdown to next year’s trip.

Every.  Year.

What this means for me is that for one full week, it’s just me and my husband and I love him, but I really have no desire to do one domestic thing that week. We eat out or I serve a bowl of cereal and pretend we are empty nesters.  My cookie jar is empty for a week, I clean the main rooms of our house in a crazed deep clean for the first day the boys are gone and enjoy the blissfulness of having a clean house for a full seven days.

The lead up for the boys to go to Fish Camp is intense.  It’s weeks of being asked “Are seven fishing poles too many for one week of camping?”  Keep in mind, I don’t fish.  I can’t stand the smell of fish and I can not at all eat fish without becoming very ill.  I am the worst person to ask these questions but I am asked them all the same and I try to pay attention but I am not much help.

The boys frantically realize they should probably have clothes with them the night before leaving and then the washer gets a workout.  They may not care if they forgot some personal hygiene item, but they can not forget their best top water frogger.

They leave in a whirlwind of excitement that can not be put into words and once they are on the road, I fall into a chair and declare myself “off” for the next week and I let the odd sounding silence fall on me.

My husband can not sit still for long and has never had any desire to join Fish Camp Week, and as the years have gone on, we are realizing that now half our boys are grown and gone from this yearly tradition and it is going to happen all too suddenly that Fish Camp chaos is going to be just a memory for us and nothing more than a date we are aware of on the calendar that does not affect us.

We are close to being empty nesters.

That first day the boys left, my husband kept walking around saying “We are empty nesters! Isn’t this great?”  The draw to his garden was great and when the needed rain of the days prior made his garden too muddy to work much in, he began to mow the grass.  Then he and I called in a pizza order at about 4 p.m. so we could beat the dinner rush crowd and took it to Gun Lake to enjoy.

We commented on all the families around us and again were thankful we did not have to load up a car full of sandy, over tired children and all the beach toys to head home.  We arrived home early enough that my husband could begin watching the latest thunderstorm on his phone radar as he also turned up the sound on his police monitor app on his phone.

I lamented the fact that we could not sit on the front porch to watch the storm because it was coming in from the back field… and that my knitting needles had broken somehow from where they had been in the suburban days before… when my husband had the brilliant idea to just turn the rocking chair around so it faced the window and we then could sit and watch the storm roll in.

“This,” I thought as I busied myself in the kitchen prepping the coffee for the next morning and listening to my husband call out weather alerts and police calls, “is what our life is about to become.”

As the snaps (Snapchat seems the only way our younger boys communicate with us on their phones) came in that they had arrived and the pics of the sunset were shared with us, I thought what a gift it was that we could all take a break from each other… and still share life together.  That the giddiness over realizing the most important thing we had that evening was watching a storm roll in from a rocking chair by our back window.

And that, I hope, is what empty nesting is like.  While we are busy doing the “boring” things of life that bring such great small joys, we are still connecting in sharing our lives together.

What are some of the joys you have found being an empty nester?  And what are some of the fun yearly family traditions your family does?