When I was 13 or 14, my mother, along with two of her sisters, bought a large, gray, shingled house in southern Maine, a few minutes walk from the sea. The house, which sat in a copse of firs and maples, included three or four bedrooms, plus a long studio that stretched across one side of the house. In that studio, seven bunks were set up, one for each cousin, in order, as I recall, of seniority. As the oldest cousin, I slept at the end nearest the door.
We children went to summer camps, so our time at the house was limited to a week or two after school ended and a week or two before it began again. But one October, my mother took me and my brother and sister out of school and drove us all to the house, where we spent the next two weeks. At the time I didn’t understand her motivation, but now I think it must have been a reaction to her diagnosis of metastasized breast cancer. She wanted to spend a few peaceful weeks alone with her children.
The foliage, of course, was gorgeous then, especially that of the maples in front of our house. We took long drives, usually north, to look at the splendid coloring. As she drove, Mother would amuse us by humming a tune and then asking us to identify it. She was a woman of many virtues but the ability to hold a tune, even in a basket, was not one of them. Any tune that she attempted to sing, even “Three Blind Mice,” meandered uncertainly through several keys. It was a game that never failed to make us laugh.
Would it have been better had I known at the time she would be dead in just a few years? Surely she knew.
After she died, my father sold his share in the house to his two sisters-in-law and finally one sister owned it outright. She left it to her three sons, one of whom bought the shares of his brothers. He kept the house as a country retreat, finally selling it this year when he planned to move his permanent home from the East Coast to the Midwest. I’m glad for him, for it was a late romance which prompted him, at the age of 75, to move, but I’m sorry to see the house pass out of the family.
He was kind enough to invite my wife and me to spend a weekend with him there a few years ago. The air was as crisp, the water as cold, the views as spectacular as I had remembered them, although the area had become considerably more manicured, transmogrified into a northern Hamptons. But then I’ve changed too. And if I’m not more manicured now than I was when I lived there for a few weeks each summer, at least I no longer have pimples.
2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
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