When Shirley McLaughlin looks out of her window this spring, she won’t see any golfers for the first time in more than 40 years.

After struggling to make money for about five years, McLaughlin has decided to close the Pleasant Hill Golf Course next to her home on Chamberlain Road in Scarborough.

When she looks out her window these days at her flooded fairways, she doesn’t regret the decision. “I’m glad. With all this rain, we’re under water,” she said.

McLaughlin, who is now in her 70s, is planning to retire and sell about 7 acres of the 50-acre golf course to a business she declined to name. She said she planned to keep the remaining land. “Someday my son might want a home. Who knows?” she said.

McLaughlin has been running the golf course with the help of her son since her husband, Lowell, died in 1985. Lowell McLaughlin had built the golf course more than 20 years before that.

“It was quite an undertaking. He was a farmer, and they all thought he was nuts. He had never golfed a day in his life,” she said.

The course he built was a small, nine-hole course that welcomed beginners. Over the years, the McLaughlins struggled to compete with larger courses. “It may not be as nice as some of these big, fancy, 18-hole courses,” she said.

Shirley McLaughlin said her husband knew at the time he would have to give up farming and do something else. They struggled to find a bank that would loan them the money to build a golf course, until they found a banker that golfed. “Nobody will ever know how much work he did,” she said of her husband.

Shirley McLaughlin closed the Pleasant Hill Golf Course in Scarborough this year after being open for more than 40 years. When her husband, Lowell, opened it, “they all thought he was nuts. He had never golfed a day in his life,