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“Memories” Sarah Mildrum

By Like many of you, I have a plethora of fond memories involving various bodies of water, but few are more precious than the ones my family has made here in our slice of Heaven on Earth, Little Sebago Lake. I did not grow up on LSL and I’m constantly in awe of stories shared with me of generations who did. My husband Scott and I became parents in 2020 and we can now fully appreciate creating a legacy of lake life for our son and (hopefully!) our grandchildren. Truth be told, my family had a camp on Long Lake in Harrison. It was an adorable tiny campground that was impossible to get into because no one ever left. Year after year starting at age 12, my mom would “force” me into the middle of nowhere with people I hardly knew to get eaten alive by bugs every weekend. Pre-teen and teenage angst being what it was, sometimes I enjoyed myself, sometimes I was miserable and wanted to be home with my friends. But over time I began to long for those summers. I began to miss my “summer friends”- social media wasn’t around back then and we didn’t keep in touch the rest of the year. I couldn’t wait to get to camp and be with those friends; the ones who threw each other off the swim float, backflipped off bridges, water skied and tubed until boats ran out of gas, and gave everyone’s mother’s heart attacks. Summer “me” was different from the

rest-of-the-year “me”. I was a little braver, bolder, sassier, cheekier, and dumber. My poor mother, God rest her soul, had her hands full, but I was having the time of my life. I was learning about the world and about myself. About whom I was, who I wanted to be, and what my limits and boundaries were. I am forever grateful to those Summer Time Friends who lived a life worth remembering with me back in those glorious carefree days when we knew it all and had it all figured out. Like everyone else, my life changed in 2020. What we collectively experienced with the global pandemic, race riots, political upheaval and division, was the background to the hardest year of my life. I had our son on May 28 th and my beloved mother died of cancer on July 13 th . The mental health agency I built from the ground up had to shut its doors in 2021, and we lost camp to a developer. It felt like everything I held sacred and dear had been ripped away from me and I had no home, no roots, and no hope. But that wasn’t true because what I needed was right here. Neighborhood walks and boat rides where neighbors smiled and waved at us or chatted with us from across the street is what got us through those really dark times. The relationships Scott and I have built with many of

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