The Life of an Author

The Life of an Author
Mary C White

I wonder why New York State decided to make Rockland Lake a State Park and not complete the whole plan.

My family and others were uprooted, displaced it seems to me, and then they even tried to move the cementery.

I walk the old road up from the old firehouse and look at an overgrown piece of land filled with trees and shrubbery covering the plot that once was my home.

I travel further up the road to the end and stare at the place my Nanna's house used to be. There are no signs left of her huge vegetable garden, grape vineyard, outhouses, and the bottom lot where my dad and his brothers played horse shoes.

Gone is the path that once led to the cemetery.

The apple orchard is gone. The post office my brothers and sister used to play behind is an overgrown plot of dirt, the only thing left is the little stream that flowed to the river.

I have written a book and captured all the legends and mysteries of the lake. The tales my father and releatives told me will live forever.

You see Rockland Lake will never die, it lives in my mind forever, the stories of its early settlers, ice houses, and the ghost's of Hook Mountain will blaze themseves across the pages of Legends Of The Lake.

The tales my father told me and my cousins live, surrendered to pen, trapped in horror between the pages of Tales Of A Half Shell and Fantasies Of The Mind ( Summer 2008, Rain Publishing Inc.).

Something good came from my living in Rockland Lake, the life of an author.