My father was born, raised and buried in Maine. He instilled in us a love of the country back there, and I spent all my summers there in a little cottage on a lake that my daddy owned, just 50 miles from where they filmed "On Golden Pond." When he died 34 years ago, I couldn't bear to go back.
Finally, a few years ago I did go back to visit his grave. It was difficult at best. I searched out Aunt Mattie's house in South Berwick that I hadn't seen since I was a little girl, a good 50 years ago. It was all by memory, but I did find the house. I walked up to the front door, and looked through the glass at the long stairwell going upstairs; it was all dark and eerie. I knocked on the door, and the new owner opened it for me. I told her who I was and asked if a relative of Aunt Mattie lived there. Of course the answer was no, but they let me in to look around.
It was very spooky. Like you, everything seemed much smaller. However, things had changed. The horsehair couch in the front parlor was gone, and the place was opened up. The wood-burning stove in the gathering room was gone, replaced by a small pot-bellied stove. The water pump in the kitchen was gone, replaced by a faucet. And, last but not least, the woodshed out the back door of the kitchen to the outhouse was gone, as was the outhouse itself, replaced by indoor plumbing. Too bad. I remember that outhouse. It was scary for me as a little girl because the holes were too big and I was afraid I would fall through. Besides, it was damn cold out there, even in the summer! I would look in one hole, too big. Look in the next hole, still too big. Finally I picked the smallest hole. But I had to climb up to sit on it because my legs were too short, I was just a little tyke.
Then I went to visit the old hunting club. Daddy belonged to a club at the north end of the lake, very close to where Stephen King has a camp now (and where he was run over). It was hard to find the old cottage; we had to walk through the woods to get to it, but there it was, covered with years of overgrowth, long-since abandoned. I walked up the front steps to the front door and peeked in through the slats of the boarded-up window, and chills went down my spine as I gazed in at the long kitchen table, covered with the old plastic gingham tablecloth, plates still sitting all over the table, waiting for someone to return, exactly as I had seen it last when I was just a very little girl. The old outhouse was gone, probably rotted away, but the old bunk beds were still there, as well as the hole I kicked in the ceiling when I was playing in the top bunk with my brothers. Even the old bulletin board holding all the little squares of plaid wool from the hunters was still there. It was a rule that if a hunter shot at a deer or bear and missed it, they had to cut a little square off their L.L. Bean hunting jacket and post it on the bulletin board. At that time, old L.L. had only a little country store where he sold hunting gear to all the hunters up there.
Yeah, it was tough going back. On the return flight back to California, I went in the bathroom, locked the door, and fell apart.
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<img src="http://home.comcast.net/~letsrow/smily3481.gif">Bevvy
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The Old Maine Country Homestead
