We visited the house in Gloucester...
5 months ago • 4 notes…every summer, the house that faced the water, the house at the end of the long dirt road, and I remember it as a vast rambling affair with hallways that stretched forever and secret rooms behind paneled doors. It was my grandfather’s summer home, and it was a bucolic place where cigarette smoke formed the only clouds, where everyone arrived by boat, and where not even strains of Motown on the stereo could drown out the cicadas’ drone. Gloucester, Virginia, locked forever in a salt-water snowglobe, is my summer standard.
But it wasn’t perfect. My mother tells me this. The house was not a refuge at all but a stage on which so much dysfunction came to life. The kitchen was cramped and rainy afternoons eternal when she had nothing to entertain ten crying children but a single television station. The messy politics of a Southern family and the ghosts of heartbreaks past stirred in the ceiling fans like fog blowing off the Severn River. Point Breeze was wonderful, too; she assures me of this, and photo albums stuffed full with three-by-fives serve as proof that there was in fact far more fun had on that long river lawn than her memories suggest.
Somewhere, then, we are both right, and we are both wrong. My Gloucester was not flawless, and hers was more so. Dinners could be long, dramatic affairs - and they could also be peaceful. My father always arrived late, having traveled the twelve hundred miles on his BMW motorcycle. It happened only once, but in my mind it was the rule. Perception has been distorted faster than a Polaroid in a fire.
But we both remember, my mother and I, the wet bar, tucked in a bottleneck between kitchen and dining room, and the sight of her father slicing limes on the counter. Lime after lime after lime and a few lemons, cut and squeezed over Tom Collinses and carried three at a time to cousins spinning tales or spinning into and out of one another’s arms on that wide, essential wrap-around porch, a porch that, should we visit it today, would surely be just as wide as we both remember it then.
***
About Gloucester my mother says this:
The porch was wide, as wide as we both remember it. Do you remember the heat? You cannot write about summer in the South without talking about the heat. And they didn’t want to run the inefficient air conditioning because it cost too much.
I remember: it’s the middle of the night; I’m not kidding, maybe 2:30 a.m., and your aunt and I meet in the hallways and on the porch downstairs. She’s holding your cousin N, and I’m holding you, and you’re probably six weeks old and N three weeks old. And we have to keep you quiet because your grandparents are asleep, and God knows we don’t want to wake them up. So we’re walking and pacing and exhausted, and we don’t even talk. We just look at each other as we pass in the hallways and sigh. It’s so hot. We’re tired. We miss my mom.
