We moved a few times when I was young- at 6 and 9- and we
often acted as if where we lived was not our home. Our home was in Vermont, in the
summer cottage my great grandparents built on a campground on an island in Lake Champlain. That cottage was haunted, teeming with
history and stories, and it had an emotional weight far heavier than the brick house we lived in in Ohio or the pre-fab ranch we owned in
Vienna VA, where we knew no one, and
where we knew we weren’t staying. Home
was the cottage in VT, where my cousins
and uncles and aunts stayed next door, where the books on the shelves were my great-grandfather’s
books, where I played with lead toy soldiers that had been my
grandfather's. For two weeks every summer,
we went home.
Home was a long drive away (12 hours from Cleveland, 11 hours from DC). It was a punishing drive, with few rest stops, sandwiches in the green cooler and an increasingly grumpy and tired pair of parent-drivers, who sometimes grew weary of my sister and me. But in the final miles, when we crossed the ferry boat, when we turned left at the old red barn with its rusty silo, when the paved West Shore road gave way to bumpy, dusty gravel, when I saw the Fincke’s grey house on the left, or when we passed the Hoagg farm where five year old me first learned about cows, the butterflies in my belly would start to rise, a tickling sensation of excitement and expectation and arrival, all at once.
Home was a long drive away (12 hours from Cleveland, 11 hours from DC). It was a punishing drive, with few rest stops, sandwiches in the green cooler and an increasingly grumpy and tired pair of parent-drivers, who sometimes grew weary of my sister and me. But in the final miles, when we crossed the ferry boat, when we turned left at the old red barn with its rusty silo, when the paved West Shore road gave way to bumpy, dusty gravel, when I saw the Fincke’s grey house on the left, or when we passed the Hoagg farm where five year old me first learned about cows, the butterflies in my belly would start to rise, a tickling sensation of excitement and expectation and arrival, all at once.
And the climax was the left turn,
onto the family driveway, passing between
two rows of trees, looking past my parents shoulders and through
the windshield to get a glimpse of the lake.
My great grandparents and their siblings planted a long row of Cedar , hiding their cottages from the
main road. But they had carved out a horse shoe at the end
of the driveway so you could see the lake as you arrived, the lake
through the trees, framed in an arboreal horseshoe of cedars. As our car jostled down the driveway, the
excitement and relief and sense of belonging was so powerful. I was coming home, no longer in exile in some
suburban sprawl. This is where my people
lived (or at least spent part of the summer).
This was who I was and where I came from.
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