Sweet Childhood Memories (3)

The next day I woke up early, as is my custom, even on holiday. I sat on the veranda and contemplated the water. I can do this for hours, in total silence. It is like a form of meditation. This water reminded me of my childhood summers on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire.

My grandparents were interesting people. Born in rural New England to Jewish immigrant families at the beginning of the last century, they were a true partnership. My grandmother was an amazing person, who could recite Shakespeare by heart, and had earned a B.A. in university, even in those early times. She was a schoolteacher, one in a long line in my family. And I suspect that she was the brains behind my grandfather’s business success, which included a store and landholdings. In this environment, my mother and her two older brothers received an enriched education. Their childhoods, from my mother’s stories, seemed idyllic. When my mother was eight, my grandfather built her a playhouse for her birthday. I saw it once. It was a little cottage for a little girl, with a play kitchen for tea parties. When she was nine, he gave her a horse to ride out there on her own. My mother knows the meaning of an ideal situation. I reckon she has strived to correct imperfections along her life’s journey, and I would have to say that by and large, she has succeeded.

My grandfather built a cottage on Lake Sunapee. It had a real fireplace, built partially with stones from the lake. As children, my mother showed us her special stone that she had carefully chosen, and my grandfather had taken particular care to ensure a place of honor in the family’s summer hearth. I still remember my grandmother warming her back at that fireplace on cold summer nights.

There was a boathouse, with two boats. Once was a 1960s sky-blue motorboat, with a 40 horsepower outboard engine, that was murderously loud. I lived for rides in that boat. It was my ultimate childhood happiness. Trips to Sunapee Harbor for soft, machine-dispensed ice cream were the order of my childhood summer days. When my mother had completed her first year of university in Boston, she felt a certain unidentifiable sadness, and when my grandfather went to pick her up, she didn’t want to come home. So he offered to buy her a motorboat and water skis. I remember him telling the story of the boat purchase. How much horsepower did he need to pull up his daughter on water skis, he asked, pointing to her. She was a real beauty. She must have been quite thin, because years later, when I was eleven, she taught my sister Jessie, my cousin Susan and me how to water ski on that same boat, I can tell you that forty horsepower was not nearly enough.

There was also the small boat, which my Uncle Allan used to get to his sailboat, moored a few dozen meters away from the dock. It had a metallic blue, 1940s vintage 7.5 horsepower engine, and when I was nine, I learned to drive it myself. I spent hours upon hours of joy and solitude in that boat, taking rides around the lake, and to the marina at the end of Grandpa’s property.

One summer, when we were still quite young, Jessie and I were playing in her room in the cottage. I was in the closet, the end of which I had never been to. I crawled further and further, until I found myself in another closet! My heart leapt. I crawled through the length of this unknown closet until I found the exit curtain. There was my mother, reading on her bed in the next room. It was the Discovery of the Decade.

Today, only the boathouse remains. My mother has been back to visit the area. I haven’t. When you go back to a place you haven’t been for many years, it’s like walking into a dream. You have a sense of deja-vue familiarity, but often feel like an outside observer of external events, rather than a participant in them. My grandparent’s cottage is a memory that I wish to leave untarnished by hindsight. It is my happiest childhood memory.