Summer Houses

Our house was built by a poet, at the turn of the LAST century, out of scrap lumber from the sawmill where he worked and bits of old chicken coop. It is held up by metaphor, not engineering, and this weather is not doing it any favors, although thanks to a new rubber roof (it's like an enormous inner tube, but white) there are no leaks this year. It occupies a hill at the edge of Bell Cedar Swamp, and is more than just a little damp from the daily rain.

Today, I decided that bad lighting and worse eyesight would no longer suffice, and that I had to vacuum. This is always an interesting process, as you are just as likely to suck up bits of house that have mysteriously disintegrated as you are to suck up spider webs and spinone hair.

I squinted at the bathroom ceiling, which needs a bit of work, and put up my brush to see whether it was a knot hole, dry rot or just stuff, when PLOP, something landed on my head. I hoped for dry rot until it ran down across my shoulder and leapt onto the floor. Fortunately, it was just a snake.

Mice, while inevitable (the inside/outside dichotomy is poorly defined at best, and you can't blame nature for not knowing), are an embarrassment and spiders give me the howling horrors; but I have convinced myself that snakes are interesting and exotic. The ring-necked snakes that occasionally drop in (sometimes onto guests who are just reading quietly on the couch) are very small and pretty, so there's no end to the amusement. (As my favorite sister-in-law—and it's a brave person that marries into our family—once said, "oh NO, there could be an entire nest of writhing shoelaces up there!")

This is a house that some people find reason to never, ever visit again. But others recognize that it is imbued with a charming 1930s Nick and Nora appeal. My grandparents bought the house from the poet (his family had to move to town during the war, the first one, and inexplicably refused to move back) and tacked on a bathroom and hot water. Grandma would come down from NY with the maid and children and Pop would come for weekends then his vacation, and they would have friends visit and ply them with cocktails and dress for dinner and have a wonderful time. Long summer days at the beach and evenings of talk and laughter...

I learned to mix a martini here, aged maybe 8 or 9, and to play bridge, and that I could hear everything that the grownups were saying from any part of the house as I sat up under the blankets reading my book with a flashlight. And really, what else can you ask of a summer?