Summer at the Cottage

August brings the flood of family and friends for those who live in Point Roberts and all the other resort communities around. Houses slightly too small for the number suddenly accommodated; tight quarters at the dinner table, not quite enough beds, and an endless amount of dishes constantly gathering up in the sink. Grandchildren who are amazingly bigger and older than they were when last seen. Hard to know why this is so amazing, but somehow it always is. Surely we don’t expect them to grow smaller or even stay the same? I think it is more that they are so amazingly themselves at, say, ten, we can’t quite imagine they will give all that up to become some other amazingly themself person of eleven.

And then they get to be old enough to be one of the grownups, or at least almost one. A near 18-year-old grandchild seems to be thinking about whether she’ll ever be considered an adult, while all the grownups are thinking about how very adult she suddenly has become. Point Roberts is full of people who have been coming here for summers all their lives and their parents and even grandparents share that history. Thus, it seems that summers are particularly the time where you are aware of all that family history, of who they were and who they are becoming and who they indeed have solidly become. I’m not particularly interested in genealogy or in nostalgia, but both begin to fight for room in my field of attention on these occasions.

I find myself glancing at a grown daughter and suddenly noticing for the first time ever that she looks, from the side, rather like my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, a woman who has been dead for 15 years and whom I have not seen for 45 years. Her image is there inside my brain though because we spent summer vacations at her house in southern California for a few years after the war. A grandchild, we all suddenly notice, looks surprisingly like an older cousin, whom we never before thought she looked like. When did this happen? Is it something new or had we been unobservant before? It is all that history of summer vacations rattling around inside our heads, I think, mixing up our memories, comparing and reassessing our memories.

Today, we went to Maple Beach at low tide on a cloudy and occasionally rainy day, and, as time passed, we found ourselves in more water than I had expected, resulting in soaked shoes and socks and my long pants rolled up above my knees to stay dry. Walking back through eel-grass filled deep water, I was surprised at how strong the tide was, moving me along. But that’s how this week feels: the tide coming in strong and much more quickly than I had expected.