We’re looking out over the lake from the deck of Elsie’s cottage, bundled up on this the first unofficial long weekend of the summer. What had started out as perfect weather, cloudless, unseasonably warm, has now rained itself into a sodden last thirty-six hours. Whiplash variation. Not particularly unusual for this time of year. Still somewhat disappointing given the promising start. At least the rain has stopped now. It is cool, bordering on cold, but very sunny and bright.

Elsie has declared that this will be her last Victoria Day Weekend at the cottage, their place Up North since the early-80s. Her late husband’s ashes are scattered here out on the lake. Her two daughters grew up frolicking away their summers here. A family sanctuary for over forty years.

“It’s getting too much,” she tells me. “Since Phillip died. He was the handyman. Loved tinkering around the place, keeping it in ship shape. Not my jam, man.”

The girls are patently uninterested, she tells me. Too much of a hassle, apparently. What with the twenty-minute boat ride to get here from the parking lot. Wrangling the kids is a headache. Neither of their partners are the outdoorsy types.

“And the cell service, Barnaby?” she whispers as if the family’s in the next room. “Too spotty. Heaven forbid they have to go a few days unconnected.”

Elsie immediately apologizes for being snide about it. That’s just how everyone is these days, isn’t it. Terminally online.

“That’s what they say, isn’t it, Barnaby? Terminally online?”

Sounds about right, I reckon.

“And truthfully,” Elsie confides, lowering her volume another conspiratorial notch lower, “I don’t think this place possesses the kind of social cache the girls are excited by, if you know what I mean.”

I do, but it seems at odds with the girls I know, the ones I think I know. Granted, my exposure has been limited over the past few years, decades probably. Since they got all growed up and started raising families of their own. The odd occasion here and there. A birthday party. Phillip’s memorial. That may well have been the last time I’d seen any of them.

“A little harsh on my part,” Elsie confesses, “I know. Makes them sound like social schemers or something. They aren’t that. But I do think they’d both use the place more if it was just a little further south and east. In the ‘hot’ zone,” she air quotes.

“Someplace with a shorter boat ride to get to it,” I add, helpfully, in an attempt to de-emphasize the status symbolling of the discussion.

Shirley, Elsie’s still rambunctious hound of a dog, flashes by the deck in yet another vain pursuit of a red squirrel. She spends hours in the chase, after which she crashes out unconscious for hours. Canine bliss. And she certainly doesn’t mind the boat ride.

“I’ll plan to spend most of the summer up here,” Elsie tells me, watching Shirley disappear around a bend in the bay, the red squirrel most assuredly in another direction, up one of the nearby pine trees or under a big hunk of Canadian Shield, “One last summer fling! Then start packing up and sprucing the place up a bit. Get ready to sell her off. Probably next spring. I’m told there’s a certain wealthy individual, sniffing around these parts, looking for some isolation.”

“In case the world comes crashing down around us?”

“It wouldn’t be bad place for a bunker, I guess,” she says. “Nice view.”

“Hopefully your realtor won’t confess to the spotty wifi.”

Elsie chuckles a bit, and watches as Shirley comes racing back our way, looking to have lost the trail of her quarry. She stops up short. Looks around. She’s learned. There’s always another red squirrel in the offing.

“I’ll disperse the money to the girls when it’s done,” Elsie says, thinking out loud. “Maybe let them find somewhere a little more to their liking if that’s what they want to do. Unburden them of any lingering sense of family obligations to this place.”

“Time to step aside,” I suggest. “Let them forge their own futures.”

Elsie mulls that over with tiny, almost imperceptible nodding of her head.

“Let’s not Joe Biden them,” Elsie says with a laugh.

We had been talking earlier about a couple recent books that had come out about the former president. How the people around him had tried to hide his declining health and mental state. Prop him up for one last kick at the can in the hopes that no one would notice or be so terrified about the prospect of another go-round by his opponent that they’d set aside their concerns and vote for what was pitched as the lesser evil.

Now, we were all living with the miscalculation.

One old man replaced by another old man, the second of a more tyrannical and avaricious nature. An aging cohort steadfast in its refusal to let go of the reigns of power. Ignoring nature’s call to step aside and allow a new couple generations to step up and take the wheel. Drive it all into the ground rather than gracefully wander off into the sunset.

“Like the monarch whose birthday we’re celebrating today,” I point out. “Ruled well into her dotage, and left the Empire in the hands of old men.” Her successor, Bertie, Edward VII was sixty when he ascended to the throne. Not Charles III old, granted. Still, nearly a third again older than the average life expectancy of men back in those days.

“That’s a little different, don’t you think, Barnaby?” Elsie says. “It’s not like she had a choice. Rule until you die as tradition would have it.”

True.

Problem with that is, your old ideas linger on after you. You’re succeeded by those steeped in your old ideas and beliefs, trained in your old ideas and beliefs. Can only see the world through those old ideas and beliefs, constrained by your legacy.

“Maybe the real difference,” I suggest, “is that these days we live and age with the conviction that maybe we’re never going to die.”

Elsie looks at me, surprised.

“Do we? You think?”

“Sure. Why not?” I riff. “We’re already knocking on centenary’s door. With a few more adjustments, some genetic fixes here and there. Technology, Elsie. Technology! Living forever could be right around the corner.”

“OK. Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

She turns to watch Shirley make another mad dash around the cottage. It’s unclear if the dog’s even chasing anything at this point.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not,” I continue. “If it’s all just crazy talk. But if we believe it’s possible, believe that we can live forever, will live forever, believe that we’re immortal, then we don’t put any succession plan in place. We don’t step aside and make room for the next generation. Since we’re going to live forever, we might as well run things forever too. What else will there be to do in the never-ending days our retirement?”

Elsie pffffs me with a dismissive wave.

It’s easy to wave off the idea of immortality when you’ve buried a husband at a relatively early age. Parents die. We witness death every day of our lives. That’s what makes up our news.

But who amongst us doesn’t have the occasional thought? Maybe I’m not going to die.

Unlike the elusive red squirrel, it is an easy target to prey on.

“I’m just suggesting, my dear,” I say, reaching over and taking hold of Elsie’s hand, “if we don’t wrestle successfully with that fear of our own personal extinction, we wind up becoming immovable objects on the path of humanity’s forward march in time.”

Elsie snorts a laugh. Shirley races past us again in the opposite direction this time, still no obvious object of pursuit. We both look out over the waves on this cold late-spring day, another summer ahead of us. No thought, at this point, of the fall that inevitably follows.