December posting meme: favorite place
This is the first post from my December(ish) posting meme! And it's already a day late, which bodes well. Anyway, 
nny asked me to tell her about my favorite place.
The trouble here is my usual trouble with picking favorites, which is that I always want to pick at least six or so, and then whoever asked the question gets to sit there trying to look patient while I go "Oh, but there's this one -- and then there's that one -- and I can't forget that other --" ad nauseum.
So I made a list of places that came to mind as favorite places of mine, and there were a few running themes: somewhere up high, with (or in) trees, minimal human presence (except possibly that of my immediate family) and certainly no inherent social interaction. Those of you who know me IRL are probably nodding along with expressions of a deep lack of surprise.
There are a lot of places I love that don't qualify on that list. Places I love to bring people to; places I love for the company I have going there; places I learn things, places I get good food or new books, places full of history and beauty and excitement. But what makes a place a favorite is that it's somewhere I can go, and just being there rejuvenates me. I can relax, bone-deep, in a way one can't always day-to-day. I can sit there, and feel myself centering again. (The other place that can do that, which didn't make the list because it's way too unspecific, is the middle of the woods. Any woods, anywhere, any season that I'm dressed appropriately for. Put me in the middle of a forest without other humans around, and it's as if the air has suddenly cleared.)
So I will ramble about the one that I have the most to talk about, I guess!
When my mom was young, my grandparents bought a summer cottage in upstate New York. It's nothing too fancy, except by virtue of the fact that, you know, they had enough money to buy and keep a lakeside summer cottage. Over the decades, it's become the collective summer vacation spot of that whole side of the family - by turns, not en masse. When I was a kid, every year in July or August we'd drive up the 8 hours from southern Ohio to spend a few weeks there.
There's one of the upstairs bedrooms that I think of as mine. There are two little twin beds in it, and sometimes I shared it with a brother and sometimes I had it to myself, but I always slept there. (When we visit, I mostly still do.) It used to be my mom's favorite when she was a kid, because it had sailboat wallpaper and a horseshoe hung on the door, ends up to keep the luck from spilling out. I liked the horseshoe, and I liked it because it was Mom's old favorite, but mostly I liked it because of the roof.
Sometime back in the '50s or '60s, my grandparents put an addition on the house, which contained a kitchen and a little front-stoop kind of porch. (The main porch is at the back of the house, facing the lake. As a matter of fact it's a point of ongoing family contention what's the front and what's the back: is the front, as my mother argues, the part that faces onto what you care about most, i.e. the lake? Or is it, as I argue, the part that faces onto the road, whether or not you spend all your time out back? This is the sort of semantic contention we get into - my parents' house in Vermont has three 'fronts,' depending on whom you talk to.) Anyway, this kitchen addition is only one story tall, as opposed to the two-story rest of the house. This means that, from a certain upstairs bedroom, you can open up the inner screens and swing open the window and climb out onto the wide sloping roof.
My mother uses that window to sweep fallen leaves off the roof. (My father, eleven inches taller and afraid of heights, has always left that chore to her.) I, of course, used it to perch up there and read.
When you sit just outside the window, you've got a bit of a wall to your back, uncomfortably shingled but cool and solid, and a little bit of an eave that gives you shadow -- valuable on a sunny afternoon, when the asphalt shingles are burning hot and you have to scurry back inside to get a towel to throw down. There's a tree to the left, a nice big maple with a branch temptingly almost near enough to leap into, but not quite near enough that I've ever tried it. If you feel like being bold, and you're old enough that you're no longer on strict parental orders to stay far far away from the edge, you can walk forward and step over a little corner, over the front stoop, and onto the slanting roof of the house proper, with the bathroom's dormer gable rising beside you.
You can sit, with Cayuga lake glittering in the corner of your eye, with trees and houses around you, and the breeze rolling in off the water and sighing through leaves. In the background you can hear people sometimes -- laughing, talking, calling each other in -- but they don't look up, and you don't draw attention to yourself. In front of you is the pale graveled loop of the dead-end private road shared by everyone on this little mitten-shaped point of land, and sometimes a car crunches down it or a neighbor walks a dog. You can sit perched above them, above the world, and draw your knees to your chest and watch curiously to see who looks up and notices you. Some do, some don't.
You can read. You can write, you can draw. But mostly, I'd read.
It's not all that high up, really. Even if you go up to the front roof, you're maybe ten or fifteen feet up. You could jump off that roof onto the grass, and it'd hurt, but you wouldn't injure yourself unless you landed wrong. But it feels like being aloft. It feels like the human world is down there, and you're floating just above it, with the breeze and the treetops and the sounds of leaves and gulls.
I haven't gone to the cottage much in the last several years. It's a long solo drive to get there now, and I mostly spend my vacation time on other things. But when I do go, I still opt for that bedroom, and I still climb out the window. The old down-banging original windows have been replaced, and so have the twin beds (with new twin beds), and the people who live on the point have shifted over the years. But the roof's still there to sit on, and I still bring a suitcase full of books, and I can still feel the world drop away below me.
[List of posting topics here -- there are still several days open!]
This entry is also posted at http://genarti.dreamwidth.org/158772.html. You can comment on LJ or DW, whichever you like.
comments at DW.
nny asked me to tell her about my favorite place.
The trouble here is my usual trouble with picking favorites, which is that I always want to pick at least six or so, and then whoever asked the question gets to sit there trying to look patient while I go "Oh, but there's this one -- and then there's that one -- and I can't forget that other --" ad nauseum.
So I made a list of places that came to mind as favorite places of mine, and there were a few running themes: somewhere up high, with (or in) trees, minimal human presence (except possibly that of my immediate family) and certainly no inherent social interaction. Those of you who know me IRL are probably nodding along with expressions of a deep lack of surprise.
There are a lot of places I love that don't qualify on that list. Places I love to bring people to; places I love for the company I have going there; places I learn things, places I get good food or new books, places full of history and beauty and excitement. But what makes a place a favorite is that it's somewhere I can go, and just being there rejuvenates me. I can relax, bone-deep, in a way one can't always day-to-day. I can sit there, and feel myself centering again. (The other place that can do that, which didn't make the list because it's way too unspecific, is the middle of the woods. Any woods, anywhere, any season that I'm dressed appropriately for. Put me in the middle of a forest without other humans around, and it's as if the air has suddenly cleared.)
So I will ramble about the one that I have the most to talk about, I guess!
When my mom was young, my grandparents bought a summer cottage in upstate New York. It's nothing too fancy, except by virtue of the fact that, you know, they had enough money to buy and keep a lakeside summer cottage. Over the decades, it's become the collective summer vacation spot of that whole side of the family - by turns, not en masse. When I was a kid, every year in July or August we'd drive up the 8 hours from southern Ohio to spend a few weeks there.
There's one of the upstairs bedrooms that I think of as mine. There are two little twin beds in it, and sometimes I shared it with a brother and sometimes I had it to myself, but I always slept there. (When we visit, I mostly still do.) It used to be my mom's favorite when she was a kid, because it had sailboat wallpaper and a horseshoe hung on the door, ends up to keep the luck from spilling out. I liked the horseshoe, and I liked it because it was Mom's old favorite, but mostly I liked it because of the roof.
Sometime back in the '50s or '60s, my grandparents put an addition on the house, which contained a kitchen and a little front-stoop kind of porch. (The main porch is at the back of the house, facing the lake. As a matter of fact it's a point of ongoing family contention what's the front and what's the back: is the front, as my mother argues, the part that faces onto what you care about most, i.e. the lake? Or is it, as I argue, the part that faces onto the road, whether or not you spend all your time out back? This is the sort of semantic contention we get into - my parents' house in Vermont has three 'fronts,' depending on whom you talk to.) Anyway, this kitchen addition is only one story tall, as opposed to the two-story rest of the house. This means that, from a certain upstairs bedroom, you can open up the inner screens and swing open the window and climb out onto the wide sloping roof.
My mother uses that window to sweep fallen leaves off the roof. (My father, eleven inches taller and afraid of heights, has always left that chore to her.) I, of course, used it to perch up there and read.
When you sit just outside the window, you've got a bit of a wall to your back, uncomfortably shingled but cool and solid, and a little bit of an eave that gives you shadow -- valuable on a sunny afternoon, when the asphalt shingles are burning hot and you have to scurry back inside to get a towel to throw down. There's a tree to the left, a nice big maple with a branch temptingly almost near enough to leap into, but not quite near enough that I've ever tried it. If you feel like being bold, and you're old enough that you're no longer on strict parental orders to stay far far away from the edge, you can walk forward and step over a little corner, over the front stoop, and onto the slanting roof of the house proper, with the bathroom's dormer gable rising beside you.
You can sit, with Cayuga lake glittering in the corner of your eye, with trees and houses around you, and the breeze rolling in off the water and sighing through leaves. In the background you can hear people sometimes -- laughing, talking, calling each other in -- but they don't look up, and you don't draw attention to yourself. In front of you is the pale graveled loop of the dead-end private road shared by everyone on this little mitten-shaped point of land, and sometimes a car crunches down it or a neighbor walks a dog. You can sit perched above them, above the world, and draw your knees to your chest and watch curiously to see who looks up and notices you. Some do, some don't.
You can read. You can write, you can draw. But mostly, I'd read.
It's not all that high up, really. Even if you go up to the front roof, you're maybe ten or fifteen feet up. You could jump off that roof onto the grass, and it'd hurt, but you wouldn't injure yourself unless you landed wrong. But it feels like being aloft. It feels like the human world is down there, and you're floating just above it, with the breeze and the treetops and the sounds of leaves and gulls.
I haven't gone to the cottage much in the last several years. It's a long solo drive to get there now, and I mostly spend my vacation time on other things. But when I do go, I still opt for that bedroom, and I still climb out the window. The old down-banging original windows have been replaced, and so have the twin beds (with new twin beds), and the people who live on the point have shifted over the years. But the roof's still there to sit on, and I still bring a suitcase full of books, and I can still feel the world drop away below me.
[List of posting topics here -- there are still several days open!]
This entry is also posted at http://genarti.dreamwidth.org/158772.html. You can comment on LJ or DW, whichever you like.
comments at DW.