Labor Day: A Labor of Love

Labor Day always signified the end of summer to me. It was the end of an era; the end of hanging out with friends, being carefree, not having a curfew, homework, demands or responsibilities.

As I got older, Labor Day became less significant because I started to get summer jobs. Summer was still going to the beach and late, lazy nights, but since I never really got time "off," I did not have an end to celebrate. After college, when I got a real adult job, a house, a mortgage and a life, Labor Day started to become just another holiday. It was a three-day weekend, an excuse to boat or swim or barbeque, but nothing too far out of the ordinary.

When my husband and I bought a cabin at the lake, I decided that Labor Day was going to start meaning something again. It would be a celebration of summer. But first, I had to make sure that summer was something to celebrate.

The cabin was a mess when we first bought it, so the first order of business was getting it back in shape. We spent almost an entire summer ripping up carpets, building walls, fixing plumbing, and cleaning mold out of places I did not know mold could collect in. Finally, it was complete. We would celebrate our accomplishment on Labor Day. It was a hard work, but a celebration of summer, and a promise of summers to come.

We gathered out best friends for a long weekend at the lake, and ended the first day with dinner and a plan to have a relaxing evening. As we gathered in the living room with a few beers, one of our friends noticed some wetness on the floor. We looked outside and saw it was raining...but it shouldn't have been raining inside, should it? As we kept looking around the floor, we noticed it getting more and more wet. We followed the puddles to what we realized was the source - the wall of one of the bedrooms was beginning to crack and leak and the water was now growing to almost an inch on the floor.

One of the guys went outside and discovered that a wall we thought had been repaired was actually coming back undone and letting all the runoff rainwater from the hill into the house. By the time we could make a temporary repair to get us through the night's storm, the entire house was flooded. We had to get down on our knees and begin to bail out the house. We got bottles, cups, buckets and whatever else we could find. When the level got manageable, we towel dried the rest. By that time, it was into the middle of the night, we had all sobered up and were exhausted.

Needless to say, the better part of the long weekend was spent repairing the broken wall. That was the bad news. The good news was that the cabin was then as good as new and the following summer went off without a hitch. In the end, it was truly a labor of love, but Labor Day was mine again.