Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Going Home


     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. 
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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