a country holiday

Written while at the cabin. Not well written by any means. Some pictures too.


I was happy, yesterday, when I first arrived. Now I am sitting alone in our cabin near Erie while my mother, drunk, and my brother are at dinner elsewhere. I can’t be around my mother. I refuse to go with them.

I was happy here as a child, with my father (who no longer comes with us) and my mother, still drunk but not so much and less hysterical. Now I am older, 23, and only want to be here alone with a man -- age height career don’t matter. We will make love in the evening as the sun displays only patches on the trees.

I want a man more lovely than anyone I have ever met. Perfect to me only.

I am reading “The End of the Affair” and watching “The Reader”, another story about the end of an affair. Not quite to make me feel better. I once had a male professor – Rosenberg -- who said that all literature is sad, literature cannot by definition be happy: there is no reason to write if you are happy. I don’t believe that is true. You can write happy stories. They just may not be considered truthful to those of a more “practical” disposition. This theory of my professors’ – a man whom I do happen to look up to, despite (or perhaps because) of his eccentricities – does allow me to get away with my own solemn writings.

So, yes, I believe one is capable of writing eloquently about many good things, but I find it difficult. So maybe literature by definition is on the whole sad only because that is a topic easier to write.

Back to the beginning. I was happy yesterday. When we first arrived. Mother: sober. I was relaxed the moment of arrival. 4:00 pm. Raining. Cool. Dinner at The Frog Pond, a “fine dining” restaurant down the street, next to the lake. Fine dining for the country. Swimming suits allowed, paper tablecloths, and lobster for 21.99.

I suppose if I were a fancy writer I would explain in great detail the appearance of the cabin, who owns it, how memories of my childhood focus on being here. I will only say that the cabin is small, with one floor, two bedrooms, two pull out couches in the living room; that it is my mother’s ex-husbands mothers, who uses it as a summer home. That my mother has come up here since she started dating her first husband when they were teenagers. That she brought my two older brothers who are some sixteen years older than I when they were little. Obviously, she has a good relationship with her ex-husband. He owns a home down the street, where he now lives permanently with his third wife, horde of cats, sons my age who won’t leave and two dogs. after retiring from his job in Pittsburgh. He has two sisters who have summer homes here. Other appendages to the family own homes here, either for year round or just for escape. It is a small lake, hidden in a valley. Only 300 live here year round.

That was mighty boring. I hate necessary details.


Swing on which I read

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness.
The End of the Affair

There is now cable in the bedroom I sleep in. Telly in the bedroom. When we first came up, there was no television at all. By the time I was 10, there was one in the living room that received three channels. Now that telly has been placed in my bedroom and there is a larger one in the living room. Both hooked up to full cable. When I was younger my father would sleep in the room I now occupy. I'd sleep on one of the pull out couches in the living room. My mother has always slept in the middle bedroom.

I was obsessed with sand as a child. All three of us would go to the pay beach, a strip of the lake with a handful of sand thrown on the grass. Not a beach really at all. But we would go, pay to get in, rent lounge chairs, and spend the whole day there, lounging about. Mum would make snacks, chips and crackers in little bags. Drinks in a cooler. My father tanned. He never burned, but was golden brown by the end of the day.

I wouldn’t go in the lake. I hadn’t learned to swim yet and was scared. Although once I did learn to swim, at a camp that we also went to every summer, you couldn’t get me out of the water, until I was told at 11 that I had swimmers ear and would continue getting ear infections if I persevered in my swimming habit.

I played in the sand. A shovel, bucket. Sandcastles. I was there until sundown, and the staff came around with rakes to smooth out the sand, and they would ask me if it was all right to destroy my castles.

Between the ages of 3 and 15 the routine was much the same. Every summer we came to the lake, for a week or two straight. I read a lot, on the swing next to the cabin. Swinging myself back and forth while reading Jane Eyre for the first time. Sometimes it was boring. Not much to do. We’d just eat all day, go to the Amish side of town to buy fresh vegetables. Have dinner at the Frog Pond. Hang out. Father taught me poker, which one summer we spent doing nothing else. Dad and I laid out in the back yard, he getting brown, me staying pale except for my bright red nose.

Well, the point is, that things aren’t like this anymore. Dad can’t come up because he works. When he last came up, he never left the cabin. Too old and tired now. Mother has had a few strokes and drinks too much. I can’t even stand to be around her anymore. There’s a television with full cable in my bedroom. No longer have to rely on books for sole entertainment. And now I bring up my laptop to watch DVD’s and listen to music.

Trees still surround the property, children still swim in the lake, there is still sand on the pay beach, so it is still in many ways beautiful, but for me, not quite so idyllic.


On the way to Spartansburg, Amish country

I drink champagne at 9:00 pm. Mother is in bed. Brother left this morning for Pittsburgh. My other brother will come up tomorrow and stay until we all leave on Wednesday.

My mother’s ex's voice woke me up this morning. He paid an early morning visit. By early morning I mean 10:00. They get along well, as I’ve written, and talked about old times, as they always do. The Firebird cars my mother was given by her rich parents. A new one ever year, until my grandparents lost all their money through poor investments.

Not much else to report about today. Sun was out. I sun bathed. Walked to Sally’s to buy sun block. Got the only one left. Sally’s is a store that has been around for ever. Believe it or not a woman named Sally used to own it. She still lives in the tiny dolls like house next to the store, the latter of which is stuck in-between houses, so that if it weren’t for the sign saying what it is, you would think it merely a house. A couple in their fifties bought it a few years ago. They kept the name of the store out of deference to her as she is so well loved here. The store takes only cash. It is proper old-fashioned. Ideal for a lake retreat

I sip my champagne in the dark. Only lights are on in the drive, the ones you stick in the grassy ground and which light up once it is dusk. We have a gravel drive. Not that long. A big well-manured back yard. A shed to keep the canoes and bikes.
Fish caught before I was born hang alone the walls of the screened in porch connecting the home. All caught by my mother’s former father-in-law. Stuffed squirrels and birds adorn the walls inside the home. Antlers as well.

I wonder if my life had been different if I had never come up here as a child. I think it would have. The smallest events shape our lives in big ways.

It amazes me how easy it is to let everything go up here. Yes, my mother’s condition affects me. But things that seem (and perhaps are) important in Pittsburgh don’t have any relevance here: not having a job, a boy friend; worrying about whether I am making the most of my life. It is enough just to be living. No place has ever made me feel so free, so unconnected with myself. London took me out of myself, placed me in an unfamiliar territory, made me reevaulate myself. Here I don’t have to think. Nature seems to inspire non-thinking – for lack of a better word. I am disconnected from myself entirely almost.

One could easily become resigned here and never think again. It is why people retire to the country – and Florida. These places don’t require you to think. My mother’s ex does not miss his job in Pittsburgh, although he loved it while he was there. Every day he gets up, works in his shed, spends time with his family. Up here, you can’t tell one day from another.


An amish boy in his buggy (taken before I was told that they don't like photos taken of them).

It was a grey day. It was like walking in London, like walking in a dream.
Good Morning, Midnight
Jean Rhys

Quickly, because I haven’t time. Since Tom arrived yesterday I have been too busy to write. Which is a great thing.

Yesterday night we had my mothers ex and his brother here for dinner. Mother only moderately drunk, after sobering before dinner. Mum made her spaghetti sauce in a crock pot. It was nice. No, it was kind of brilliant. I always wanted this. A large family. To be in a cabin, in the woods, and have family come over for dinner. Shortly after, my mother’s ex’s step son (yeah, this gets complicated) and his girl friend and little boy came over, and we were all together until late, talking, eating. They are all coming over again tonight, and my mother’s ex’s brother (who is some twenty years younger than him: my mother had her son Bill the same year as her mother-in-law had him) is making dessert. He is a chef. The best part about this is that mother has run out of booze and she is sober. Not that other family members are sober, per se, but my mother being so is all that matters. We have dinner on the picnic bench in the wooden-beamed covered roof enclosed by screens all round but one where one enters the house.

Yesterday it rained all day. Today, not a cloud in the sky. That is how it is here. Freezing last night, at least early 40’s. This afternoon, 80’s.

I don’t want to leave. It is like being in a dream, here. All the stupid and useless worries that haunt me in the city don’t exist up here. You don’t even need to try to forget. The minute you arrive it is erased. All day Tom and I rode our bikes to and from his father’s home not even half a mile from ours. They have a little dog and a cat that love one another. When the dog is outside on his leash, the cat comes up to him and rubs himself all over the dog, who doesn’t bark or run away.

Mother: If Helen is getting in your way [in the kitchen] then tell her to get out of the way.

Mother’s subtle way of telling me, who is in the bedroom not so far from where she is on the patio, that I need to help.

More tomorrow, the last day here. Perhaps I’ll write something that is interesting.

The shed

What I mostly realize when up here is how useless are the things I worry about in the city. These are things that seem so huge and that I can’t forget no matter how I try. They are inescapable. We’re sitting in the car, saying goodbye to mum’s ex, and his dog Bo, so old that he has trouble standing for long periods of time. I think I’m more sad than I have ever been about leaving. I know that once I get home all the horrid agitations will be there again.

Today we went to Spartansburg for lunch. Amish country. I love it. I love the dirt roads, and the amish in their buggies, the women in their long solid coloured blue and white dresses and bonnets. The wild flowers along the road.

My mother hasn’t been drunk these last two days. Must have run out of booze. I haven’t seen her this sober in quite a while. It was nice.

Now I’m going to watch Doctor Who on my laptop in the car while we drive home. Awesome to watch this show in a fast moving car as it is so fast-paced itself.

I really don’t want to go home.