31 Jul Wish You Were Here

“What a magical place,” my siblings and I said as we arrived at our summer rental last week. The thing is, we kind of knew it would be: We found a house across the river from where we grew up, on an estate we used to visit as kids. This was the first time we’ve all been home together since my oldest sisters’ double wedding in our backyard 31 years ago. That was a momentous summer. Besides the weddings, Dad retired after 35 years of teaching, and Mom and Dad sold the house we grew up in and moved to Virginia.

I’d been looking forward to this week with excitement and some sadness, too. It felt like a reckoning with all that’s changed, all that’s been lost since we left. It felt like there might be ghosts. I’ve been back briefly over the years, mostly to break up the drive when my parents were still in Virginia. Those stops always brought waves of nostalgia and the wish that I could stay a little longer. Now, I could.

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You can tell you are getting old when hearing loss, cholesterol levels, and aging in place are the topics at hand. Still, my sisters and brother (and the spouses-in-law) and I told stories, confessed regrets and fears, shared plans, cooked and ate and laughed together. One evening, we talked about potential diagnoses down the road, based on our family history, and all the hard decisions that would come with them. Of course, even as we glimpse one future in the distance, we can’t know the actual course of what’s to come. That uncertainty brings its own anxiety, so it was a comfort to talk about our worries, realized or not, together.

* * * * * 

We had a mostly charmed childhood. When I was five, my parents bought a neglected Victorian farmhouse on five acres in northern NJ. Mom and Dad were in over their heads, but somehow stayed afloat, going room by room, learning how to hang drywall  and refinish floors and a hundred other skills, slowly bringing the old house back to life. It turned out my mom was a DIY wizard long before there was HGTV.

In the summer you could smell the bee balm and goldenrod that bloomed in the fields and pastures around our house. There was a steady buzz from the insects all around us. We lay in the grass, ants and the occasional cricket crawling on us, and watched the clouds drift by, debating the shapes we saw there. If it was really hot, Mom would turn on the sprinkler and our labs would join us as we ran back and forth through the spray. 

We grew up when it was still normal for kids to spend their days with little supervision, my parents trusting we would look out for each other. We would head into the woods behind the house and build pretend cabins and real lean-tos, imagining we were the Ingalls family, or try to catch crayfish in the lazy little stream, shrieking in terror when leeches instead caught us.

We built houses for Barbie with old bricks and tried to make her a swimming pool. (Alas, our engineering skills failed us.) We walked up Red Hill Road and visited the beaver pond, sitting on a little bank and waiting for the beavers to emerge and slap their tails in annoyance when they realized they had an audience. We rode our bikes to the little cemetery on Old Mine Road, bringing a sandwich and a book to pass the afternoon together. 

Another day it might be up Deckertown Turnpike, to Arnie’s small dairy farm where we would help him get the cows in, then milk them by hand. They were Jerseys, beautiful, gentle creatures – Fawn and Honey and Goldie and Blossom. We would play in the hayloft, daring each other to jump into the pile of hay below. If we were lucky, there might be kittens hidden among the hay bales, and we would sit with them in our laps, or carry them down to Arnie to get some milk in a pan.

Best of all was the river, the mighty Delaware. Sometimes Dad would drive us down Old Mine Road and then an overgrown track to the river. We would take the inflatable kayak down from the car and paddle over to the little sandbar in the river, pretending we were explorers in Africa.

On the best days, when Dad was done working on the house or in the garden, we would pile into the Blue Bomb, our trusty station wagon, and go to Bob’s Beach. It was pretty dinky as beaches go, but after a hot summer’s day, it was paradise. We would swim and practice handstands in the water and try to catch minnows and bury our feet in the mud and play Bouncy Bouncy Baby until Dad told us it was time to go and we’d reluctantly climb back in the car and head home for dinner.

* * * * * * * * * *

If there were ghosts, they were benign. Arnie’s farm is long gone, replaced by a housing development. Red Hill Road has been paved but a chunk of land, including the beaver pond, is now owned by the Nature Conservancy, so little else has changed. Old Mine Road is practically abandoned but the wild bee balm still fills its culverts, the peppery scent reminding us of those long-ago summers. Our old house is still standing.

One morning on a truly glorious day, we went to Jockey Hollow, a favorite outing when we were kids. As we walked along a trail, my sisters each carefully grabbed a pricker that had fallen across the path and handed it behind them so it wouldn’t grab our clothes or scratch us. I can’t count the number of times we did this as girls, walking through the woods single-file, our footsteps hushed by pine needles and moss. It suddenly felt as though I had fallen back decades and Dad would be waiting for us at the soldiers’ huts, and Mom would have our picnic lunch ready at the bottom of the hill. 

If I could go back and see us then, all together, I would whisper to myself, “This – this place, this time, these people – this is magic.”

Last night, our stay at an end, we finally went to Bob’s Beach. It was almost dark, long after the lifeguards had gone home, and we were the only ones there. The water was so still it looked like glass, its current hidden, the cicadas and crickets at full thrum. My sisters and I stood on the bank, then hugged for a few minutes. Magic.  ~ Hilary Farquhar

(Note: I wrote most of this piece before I saw Jennie’s August at Experienced Goods. Clearly, we were on the same wavelength this month! My stories were close at hand. HF)