Places I Remember
You know those places that were as familiar as your fingers, years ago, but no more? Old homes, schools you graduated or left, hangouts that are long gone, the houses of past friends. Like past friends, in fact, except that (at least at my relatively youthful age) anyone who I haven't seen in more than a couple years is likely to be almost unrecognizable from the tail-end of puberty. Places aren't like that: they tend to endure, in the real world at least.
Synton House, in Westport, Mass, is that kind of place for me.
Saying this is problematic, perhaps. With perhaps two exceptions, we've been back every year for Thanksgiving, one of the best of family traditions. It's a beautiful house: bookshelves stuffed with Victorian-era religious books that no one in their right mind would read, pictures of various events from English history, an entire hall and bedroom (of which there are many) with various steam-ship relics, a non-functional, more than slightly broken telephone which (at one point) functioned by turning a crank up to three times and thereby contacting one of the other houses on Scotch Pine Lane. I could get around blindfolded, easy.
But being there for three days a year is different.
In my younger years, the sorts of years which seem in your memory to have belonged to the sort of eternal youth and summer that probably never happened, the kind that got all mixed up with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and who knows what else, a ball of pastoral, 1950's-style-whitewashed wilderness paradise and nostalgic regret that rattles around and causes damage to every inter-neuron connection until you could have sworn StarCraft was fifty times cooler than you can convince yourself... in those times, we'd spend a month at Synton. All of us, back when "All of us" was Mom and Dad, (but not Zoë). We'd go to the local library there, we'd eat sweetbread for breakfast and these round white-frosted cookies for lunch and, as far as I can recollect, we probably skipped dinner so we could watch the fireflies, because the fireflies need to make an appearance in these sorts of stories.
In good weather, we'd go to the beach, as often as not. Not the tiny-sort of beach that the Yaught Club foists off on us, but an honest-to-God dune beach, where we'd spend hours grabbing a handful of sand, and watch it slip through our fingers and cause cascading avalanches down the dune, while Mom would be looking for beach-plum to turn into jam, clearly labeled "Susan's Beach Plum 1993", jam which has by now all but run out. There were long rows of wooden shacks for changing, and rivers of wet sand would flow beneath them from the hoses conveniently placed for sandy feet.
It's an old house; built in 1889 (hence all the Victoriana) by my grandmother Anne's... Grandfather, I believe. It's been in the family ever since. And back in the times I"m talking about, my dad's parents would usually be in Westport when we were. Not at Synton, exactly, but at the Barn, which was only called that because it had held horses and chickens at one point. It'd been human habitable for some time, however. Oh, how we'd makde the crossing across the fresh grass to visit Grandanne every odd morning to gorge on those little single-serving boxes of cereal. I usually favored the Cocoa Krispies, for purely philosophical reasons: Unlike the Silly Rabbit, Coco was being threatened by people who wanted to steal his delicious cereal, rather than trying to steal it from others (and these were the days before the Silly Rabbit tried to use semi-legitimate tactics like winning Trix contests to get around breakfast racism). Unlike Lucky, he usually outwitted his perusers, proving that justice would prevail after all. Lucky I generally remember having mostly pity for. We'd cut the boxes open with a butter knife, pour the milk in, and than laugh at whoever cut too deep, broke the lower layer of wax paper, and needed a bowl to contain the wet cardboard.
Plus, we got to spend time with Grandanne, which was good. Gramps, sadly, I really don't remember haivng as much interest in. I mean, I feel bad saying it, but he's never really been someone I connected with.
Anyway.
There's also this tiny two-room halfling-sized house, filled with tiny teapots and plates. I don't remember what we'd do there exactly (although I suppose simply saying "Tea" is enough). I'd try to explain that my masculinity had mind-wiped said memories but, really, what masculinity are we talking about, exactly?
One of the primary reasons for Synton's rustic charm is the sheer amount of nature. There were a few paths that were well tread, in addition to a long and winding road that wound its way past other houses on the hillside to the river, but you knew not to get off the path. Not because there was anything dangerous out there, so much as the fact that nature wasn't supposed to be spoiled outside of what we had. Sure, tread on anything that came between you and the rocks we recognized like old friends. But the woods were the woods, holy and not to be trifled with.
There's a handful of other memories sort of filtered oddly in with the rest. Some sort of hospital game played with stuffed animals under a bush. A children's museum we'd go to some rainy days (for even memory has rainy days), which was a wonderful place that I can only recall the existence of. Mom reading The Hobbit to us as we ate grapes, every grape a spider that Bilbo Baggins faced and overcame (and somehow, my mind always balks at the completely true idea that Frodo is the superior Baggins), or some other book, about a girl on a boat in a swamp, and... Fragments of fragments. (Surprisingly, Google was no help).
But those days are gone.
We'd left here late Tuesday (I'd had a minor dysfunctional period where I couldn't find the registration and insurance for my bright, shiny new 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix. Also couldn't find my cell phone. I'm classifying it as a Post-Breakup Stress-Induced Crisis, without justification, but because I have nothing else to blame on it), and arrived at about 8:30, just in time for a much-delayed supper with my aunt Loraine. The next day and a half (more or less), we worked: cleaning mildew, clearing some stumps, painting walls, picking up sticks, getting some cobwebs, repainting... That's really about it, but it took a lot longer than typing. Mildew is tenacious. It was about five yesterday when we decided there was more or less nothing left to be done.
So, we took a walk down Memory Lane. Err, Scotch Pine Lane. Actually, we didn't really use the road all that much, and it was more of a hike, come to think of it, although "Hike" implies more distance than we... I'll come in again.
So, we took a walk down to the river, attacking greenbriar with clippers and a vengeance. And as we'd walk, it came back to me, in bits and pieces which I'd at least subconsciously been waiting for: here the rock we'd known as the Big Sleeping Giant (because it was easy to anthropomorphise), there the sort of boggy bit where you could smell the fresh harvest of delightful skunk cabbage. And when you get to the stairs down to the sand, I could swear the same horseshoe crab shell had been there two years prior, on our last excursion.
Normally, we'd have just turned around. But we lingered a little, and Loraine reflected, much as I am now, on her history with this land. Calvin and I, we'd spend a month at a time here, a decade ago. But Loraine knows more than I'd ever forgotten about Synton and Westport, going back to the days where, as far as I could tell, we had owned and used half the buildings on the hill, back in the days when these black hand-crank phones were semicomprehensible. Because we weren't the first ones here by a long shot; no matter how nostalgic a place makes you, there's always someone else, someone who this is truly a paradise lost. The ten, twelve, fifteen half-wasted years since my mythic, eternal summers subsided are nothing, beside the memories of a (lets-say) forty-five year old woman, walking paths she helped clear half a lifetime ago.
And... I don't know if I've mentioned it, but my grandparents aren't exactly doing as well as they might be. I mean, they could certainly be doing worse; they're seventy five, eighty. Again, I've never been especially close to my grandfather: he's sort of gruff, and while I know even five years ago he was mentally active, it's not as much the case now. I'm closer to my grandmother, but still, I know (as is only natural) their all-but-inevitable passing is going to leave Loraine, and my dad, and my other aunt Katie, in worse shape than it will me. My seeds didn't have as much time to grow, after all.
And so, we trumped back up the hill, taking a different path, existing in the same state of verdant deja-vu, and stopped at the barn. It was as I ended up remembering: little tumbly cloth men, plastic post office, xylophone, plastic ferrys, metal dishes. A familiar-looking book about crocodile tears, another with a folk-tale about men in a jewelery box and a bad-luck cake. Synapses were triggered which had been dormant before Governor Clinton defeated President Bush.
But triggered in vain. Because for all the readily apparent similarities between Synton, the Barn, and the entire hill and the places I once used to live, it's not the same anymore. Grandanne and Gramps aren't here now; the house has seen more mice than people of late. More importantly, however, is that the house has changed because of a change in the observer. I close my eyes and look back at that bush and wonder what the hell we were doing under there with all those stuffed animals; back then, I knew exactly what was going down. At the time, everything made sense. Now, some things do, and other things don't, but the utterly different perspective on what "everything" entails makes my former brain reel ever so slightly.
You can never really go home. The best you can do is go back, remembering the past but accepting the present, and try to make your home anew. And if I ever take my kids there for a long summer, that's what I'll have to do.
Do your part: walk a turtle across the road today.