25 Years of Deep Creek!

When you have the same family going to the same place year after year, you've got to delineate one year from another, or else that quarter of a century is just one big, happy blob of fishing, eating, and laughing.

There was the year Grandma fell into the sunken living room searching for the bathroom in the middle of the night. (We've since upped the beds-with-baths in the rental homes, especially for the septuagenarians.)

Or the year the kitchen sink got clogged while the traditionally enormous Saturday night fish fry was being prepared. As the rental house had no dishwasher, all the dishes were washed in the bathtub. That house also had like a hundred steps down to the lake. We did not let Grandma attempt those in the middle of the night.

We've had about three years where it snowed. In October.

The year Mom started chemo for breast cancer, she, Aunt Joan and I took a two hour hike, stopping at an overlook to lay hands on Mom and pray for her. (That is one of my personally sweetest memories.)

There were the years we rented the house with the ping pong table in the loft (same house that had the hazardous sunken living room), and there was a continual loss of the ball over the railings. "But," Josh reminded me, "there was a ping pong table." Yeah...

There was the year Mom forgot to defrost the lasagna. We had a very European dinner around 10 p.m.

One year a bunch of family was visiting from Africa, which was the first time we had to rent two houses. (We're now several years into renting two houses to accommodate everyone. That's a nice feeling.) That was the same year we all dressed in costume and played a game where you had to transfer peanuts from a pile into a cup by inhaling them to the end of a straw.

So what did we do to delineate THIS year, Deep Creek's Silver Anniversary? We decided to etch it in blood by making sure every child in attendance incurred some sort of injury.

So, on the traditional hike to Swallow Falls, we arranged for Anna to slip on some rocks and fall into the water. She was wet to her waist plus one arm. Grandma & Opah graciously took her immediately back to dry off and recover. Evelyn accompanied her for moral support.

Then when Jon, Courtney, Aidan, Amelia and I finished the hike, we allowed Amelia to get her finger slammed in the car door. We had, after all, started out with a kid falling into freezing water--we had a momentum to keep up.

Later that night, we let the four kids shut themselves in Grandma and Opah's bedroom to play rough-and-tumble games (we pride ourselves on being laid-back.) This enabled Aidan to crack his head on the door. (Prior to this, he'd had a bleeding hangnail. To him, this was very serious, but we knew we needed to take it up a notch if these injuries were going to make THIS Deep Creek stand out.)

That same night, all 18 of us turned a blind eye as barely-six-year-old Evelyn was carrying 15-month old Eva. Evelyn tripped and fell ON TOP of Eva...who was face down. Even before the copious amount of blood that resulted from her lower lip impaling on her top teeth, I knew it would be bad. How? By the horrifically long silence between Eva's first two screams.

And if you're wondering what injury Evelyn incurred, well, beyond the skinning of both her knees riding her scooter, imagine being the kid who falls on top of her adorable, 15-month-old cousin and makes her look like she's gone eight rounds with a prize fighter? Let's just hope that leaves no emotional scar.

So, to keep all the great fishing, hiking, canoeing, moonlight walks, gourmet meals, fish-eating, meaningful conversations and hilarious game playing from running all together, we spiced up our Deep Creek Silver Anniversary by injuring all the children. After all, we want THEM to remember Deep Creek, too.