Summer house in winter
Jan. 14th, 2019 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_reasonable_manI said goodbye to a house in New Hampshire today that has been part of my life for forty-three years. It was a large summer cottage, with two floors and a bead board interior, that when I first saw it, was about six decades old, and still had a heavy, black, party-line dial phone hanging from the wall. I spent many July and August weekends there with my family, and the old family friends who then owned it. It has a big screen porch overlooking a lake framed by forested hills. On Independence Day, the neighbors would shoot their store-bought fireworks over the water.
My parents have owned the house for almost fifteen years and have been trying to sell it for the past three. They finally have a buyer, and sale will close in a few days. The buyer has not said he will tear the house down, but he hasn't said he won't, either.
The family friends who owned it, Seymour and Harriett, are now dead. They were grand, larger-than-life New Yorkers--Seymour from Brooklyn, Harriett, the Bronx--but left behind few traces. I went up to the New Hampshire house with my 92-year-old father to collect a few of these remaining fragments.
There was the sjoelbak board that Seymour and Harriett brought back from a year in Holland (my brother and I learned the game on that board, and my brother became skilled at it); there were a few of Harriett's large collection of frog figurines (she had studied biology and once worked on frogs), and some of the pieces of carved beef bone Seymour made to amuse himself in retirement (he was skilled with his hands). Seymour had been a botanist by profession, and I found a short shelf of botanical guide books. I took a few of them--ones that I don't think I could easily find elsewhere, like W.C. Muenscher, Keys to Woody Plants (Fourth ed., published by the author, Ithica, NY, 1936), and Joseph Illick, Common Trees of Michigan (American Tree Association of Washington, DC, 1927).
Seymour and Harriett had lived in Michigan, where Seymour got his Ph.D. at Ann Arbor. There, they befriended my mother, a young grad student in biology shaking the dust of east Texas off her feet. Later, they all went together to Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, where my mother met my father. Now my mother is 89, in rehab hospital, and cannot walk, and my father is in the process of re-fitting their home outside Boston so she can live there again.
Today, the neighbors were ice fishing on the lake. At least six had little huts out there. The cottage of course had no heat. By the time my father and I started the drive home, my feet were like icicles.
My parents have owned the house for almost fifteen years and have been trying to sell it for the past three. They finally have a buyer, and sale will close in a few days. The buyer has not said he will tear the house down, but he hasn't said he won't, either.
The family friends who owned it, Seymour and Harriett, are now dead. They were grand, larger-than-life New Yorkers--Seymour from Brooklyn, Harriett, the Bronx--but left behind few traces. I went up to the New Hampshire house with my 92-year-old father to collect a few of these remaining fragments.
There was the sjoelbak board that Seymour and Harriett brought back from a year in Holland (my brother and I learned the game on that board, and my brother became skilled at it); there were a few of Harriett's large collection of frog figurines (she had studied biology and once worked on frogs), and some of the pieces of carved beef bone Seymour made to amuse himself in retirement (he was skilled with his hands). Seymour had been a botanist by profession, and I found a short shelf of botanical guide books. I took a few of them--ones that I don't think I could easily find elsewhere, like W.C. Muenscher, Keys to Woody Plants (Fourth ed., published by the author, Ithica, NY, 1936), and Joseph Illick, Common Trees of Michigan (American Tree Association of Washington, DC, 1927).
Seymour and Harriett had lived in Michigan, where Seymour got his Ph.D. at Ann Arbor. There, they befriended my mother, a young grad student in biology shaking the dust of east Texas off her feet. Later, they all went together to Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, where my mother met my father. Now my mother is 89, in rehab hospital, and cannot walk, and my father is in the process of re-fitting their home outside Boston so she can live there again.
Today, the neighbors were ice fishing on the lake. At least six had little huts out there. The cottage of course had no heat. By the time my father and I started the drive home, my feet were like icicles.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-15 03:42 am (UTC)I'm glad you didn't leave them.
I hope the buyer does not tear the house down.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-15 01:28 pm (UTC)