Can you write an elegy for a place?
Longtime readers, if there are any, might recall that over the course of a few summers I wrote about going to a place I called the "Land of No Internets." Those of you who read writing as jo(e)'s blog have an idea of the kind of family place it was. It was a place without a lot of modern conveniences, but it was on the water, and old, and beautiful.
The house had wide-planked floors, and poles made of whole trees for supports under them, and mildly wavy glass in some of the windows. It had woods and rocks and space all around. It had deer, and birds, and more stars when night fell than I had ever seen before because there was no light from anything around. It had quiet.
But as happens, maybe inevitably, with shared family places, when some of the family want to sell, the place gets sold.
When it dawned on me that the end of the semester was coming in a couple of weeks and summer was coming in a couple of months, I thought about the place.
Maybe, like Thoreau, I can content myself with ownership of the eye of the beholder, or in this case of the eye of memory. But I can't go there any more.
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/search?q=land+of+no+internets
3 comments:
That's sad! I'm sorry to hear that you've lost access to the beautiful old place.
Me too. But you know, there are loads of places like that to rent if you really want to re-visit a lake house.
Janice--Inevitable, but, yes, sad.
Historiann--That's true, and I'll even be staying at one this summer. But this house was special, I guess, both for being in the family so long and for having such an interesting history for a long time before that.
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