Sunday, June 17, 2012

Grooves of Memory

My family owns a small summer home down a dirt road on the shores of Lake Winnipesauke. The roof needs fixing, the dock has issues, and the mice host winter-long rodent carnivals, inviting their squirrel and chipmunk pals to leap about and feast on morsels left behind on that inevitable brisk Sunday in October when we close up until Memorial Day.

We owe back taxes, the mattresses are lumpy, and the bathroom makes for a great “before” photo. Between my four siblings and me, our children, and my parents - twenty of us in all - we don’t use it very often, our renters have moved on, and if I never rake another wet springtime leaf, I’ll die a happy man. But it’s my favorite place in the world, and I can’t imagine life without it.

We’re selling the lake house. In a few weeks we settle on a price, and a long-time friend will buy it. Or maybe he won’t. If not him, then someone else. Selling’s not the tough part. Someone else jumping off our dock into the water? A new family sitting around the big table for a chaotic meal while the rain falls in sheets across the lake? A stranger’s daughter catching the first fish of the summer, begging someone else, between squeals of panic and laughter, to set the fish free? It makes me sick to think of this. These are our memories – our lake, our dinners, our rainstorms, our children, our grandchildren.

My grandmother bought this house on a whim in 1948. She was a dress-shop owning, chain-smoking single parent and former nun from Long Island who fell in love with the lake at first sight, buying this newly built house hundreds of miles away from her home, the drive taking more ten hours on pre-interstate roads and byways.

Twenty years later, near death from lung cancer, my grandmother insisted on one last trip to the house, hiring the local butcher to drive her, her nurse and her oxygen tank to Moultonborough where she watched her grandchildren swim and climb and dig. She died the day after leaving the lake, content she’d said goodbye the only way she may have known how.

My mother’s spent part of every summer since ‘48 at the lake house and doesn’t want to see it go. But she and my dad know it’s time. She told me a few weeks ago how the drive from Long Island only gets longer, opening and closing the house isn’t getting easier, and the taxes and upkeep show no signs of abating. They agree it would be nice to slow down as they reach their mid ‘70s. Selling the house helps them do that, providing a cushion that many don’t have. We’ve talked about it for a decade, and now it’s time to act.

Outside my parents’ bedroom, there’s a wall where we measured each other, tracking how much we’d grown year after year. It was the first thing we did every early summer, proving to ourselves that we’d spent the last twelve months growing, getting older, better, wiser. We were in a rush to outgrow those lines, not caring what we were so quick to outrace. At some point, we stopped growing, and the lines didn’t budge. Look closely and you can see my children, my brothers and sisters, their children, friends from long ago and so many others, their names etched into the pine boards like the graffiti of memory.

The other walls of the house are like a museum to inside jokes, past accomplishments and moments of fancy – Grandpa writes a book! Kara gets married! Tim finishes fourth in a five person race! Molly hates camp! Beer! Sharks! Mountain goat! America! First-time visitors can spend an hour walking around like it’s an eccentric art gallery, taking in everything we’ve hung, tacked and nailed up over the years, wondering how Civil War flags, movie posters, obscure Latin phrases and summer camp portraits tie together to tell the story of our family.

A short path leads from the house to the dock, a simple structure that juts out to give just enough runway for a hearty leap into the water. Sometimes, at moments of calm, the surface is a perfect mirror image of the islands in the distance and the indifferent blue and white sky above, shattered with a cannonball plunge.

This dock’s hosted athletes and actors, scholars and drop-outs, friends and future spouses, and even the Prince of Monaco (true story). This is the dock where my mom saved my dad from drowning and where everyone’s gone skinny dipping at least once in broad daylight. There are few moments more gratifying than leaping into the lake wearing nothing but a stupid grin. The dock’s where we’ve seen otters, bald eagles, moose and spiders that defy description – spiders showing calm defiance in the face of a wielded flip flop or a shrieking older sister. I asked my wife to marry me on this dock, getting the proposal in before she learned of the arachnid situation beneath. It’s on this dock where I felt noiseless for the first time, where I was alive in the moment, not tugged into yesterday or pushed into tomorrow, living for now. How do we put a price on that?

Practicality has a way of trumping most things, especially when money’s involved. In a few weeks we’ll pick a price, and then we may say goodbye quickly, or it may takes a little longer. If we’re lucky, we’ll spend one final week together at the lake, squeezing as much of the house into our lives to draw on it forever, like tiny sips from a bottomless cup.

If I could take one thing with me on the last day, I’d cut down that wall outside my parents’ bedroom and save it for all of us, our names and heights scratched like grooves in an old record that would play our memories every time we touched them.