The keeper of places
It had started to sprinkle. I escaped to the porch and watched as the small storm made its way down the lake.
We needed the rain for the parched transplants that had been so carefully watered in the 90 plus degree days.
I suspect that the people who were beating down the lake in their sailboat wing on wing just ahead of the rain had another view of the weather.
Were they anxious to get to a port or were they exhilarated at the adventure of trying to outrun a summer squall? I’d never know.
One thing those boaters probably shared with me was the feeling that August was flying away, taking summer’s ease and comforts with it.
Wasn’t it only a breath ago that we were opening the cottage, making the beds with fresh linens, dusting off winters’ leavings?
It’s almost time when we close up the summer’s dreams and fold away the cottage for the winter?
In some ways August is like Sunday.
How many years have I done this? 35? It seems like it was only yesterday when we came out here in the fall to paint the kitchen walls, anticipating our first summer at the lake.
Thirty five years! And, yes, of late, knowing that sooner rather than later, someone else will be opening the cottage in the spring, my fall preparations include a written list of the contents of the cottage.
You see, I am the keeper of places.
I know where the bottle openers are, where the extra flip flops are stored, where we have light bulbs and toilet paper and paper towels stashed.
I know where the oilcloth tablecloths are…not that anyone cares.
I am the quartermaster of kitchen matches and soap and bleach wipes. I can direct you to the little paper umbrellas you put in drinks and birthday candles and wrapping paper and tape and glue and pens.
For some reason I am the only one who knows that we have crayons and water color paints, even the makings for baskets.
This summer I found a preciously familiar Pyrex top-of-the-stove-ware fry pan with its detachable handle in one of the closets.
I used my phone to google it and found that it was made in the late 1930s and worth maybe $25 on eBay.
I attempted to explain its unique qualities to my daughter with the references to its age and eBay valuation. She was polite.
It was the meaning that Pyrex frying pan held for me that was so much more.
You see my mother hated onions in any form. My father loved fried onions.
And, just as he taught me to mix cement and sweat pipe, he carefully showed me how to fry onions in that little blue Pyrex dish.
I can see him now, standing over the stove in our Brooklyn kitchen, explaining how much butter to use; how much heat would burn the onions.
Those moments in that kitchen are indelibly etched as a late night legacy, a treasured memory.
The cottage is rustic with nothing of much material value, but other values? There is the framed embroidery picture that I bought at the first fund raising auction that we held at Catholic Charities, the ersatz Morris chair from Tel Auc, the little ceramic ducks that my brother gave me and the comforter that my sister Kathleen gave us or the many, many beautifully sewn things that came from my sister Joan.
A Lincoln Log house made by my husband sits on the desk. There is the lamp in the boys’ room that was once the lamp in their mother’s nursery and the board games, carefully saved from the earliest summers at the cottage. And books, lots of books and magazines that are over 20 years old. So many ways to conjure memories.
What do they mean? To me? Something very different than they will mean to my children.
I wander into the world of quantum physics…yes, you are now laughing…but I read and why I read this, I have no idea, but it is apropos…that in the strange world of the reality of quantum physics there are no rules; the observer creates the rules. The observer changes reality.
My memories are my creation, only mine. As much as I can explain them, they can never be the same for another.
Still, it is part of something that is essential to life. Meaning. Shared meanings are powerful, connecting individuals through time and space.
Who knows, maybe someday 50 years from now, my memories about ordinary things will be shared with other as yet unborn family, binding us together, a cadre of observation that creates our own special view of the way the universe is organized.
In any case, explaining how I have sweet memories about simple things is a lot easier to explain than the current fondness for goat yoga…whatever that is.
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