Summer Vacation

My sister and I have returned to our childhood home. We are accompanied by our spouses and our cousins. While we were born here, our cousins were not. The were born to the sister that left and never returned. My sister and I grew up on an island in the middle of Narragansett Bay. It is nine miles long and one mile wide at the widest point. Our mother and our aunt grew up here, daughters of a native who came from a long line of islanders. Our mother married a navy man, moved away for a while, but returned to where her heart had always been. Our aunt also married a Navy man, but moved away and never came back to live, she raised her family in California. I think part of her heart was always here, but not enough of it to come back to this little rock.

We grew up in a house overlooking the ferry landing and the bay. From our front porch we could see Newport and all the boats that sailed by. The Navy was big across the bay, so there were always Navy ships in the bay and the sailboats that so many friends had. Today as I sit here and look out at the same view there are no longer Navy ships chugging by on their way to wherever they would go. There are still sailboats, lots of them. Small ones, big ones, beautiful ones. There are also super sized power yachts tied up at the marina at the end of the street and I have to wonder who is on them and where does all this money come from?

We have returned, not to our childhood home, but to a house around the corner. We have almost the same view and we have the same neighbors we had growing up. What I don’t have, cause I can’t speak for my sister is a sense of belonging. I thought this would be a good idea, but truthfully, as beautiful as it is here, it makes me sad. This is no longer the little sleepy island I could not wait to run away from when I as a kid, not sure what I wanted to run away from, but just knew I did not want to stay here. Today this little island is full of people that have a lot of money, people that are tearing down the history of this island to build their own history, I guess.

That leads me to the house we have rented, we rent because we no longer have family to stay with. As I said, we have rented a house right around the corner from the house that was filled with six kids, one and a half bathrooms, no heat in the bedrooms and in hindsight was the best place I could have grown up and wonder now why I wanted to leave to badly.  

The house we are in is an old house, built around 1900. It is one of those great New England shingle houses, a Victorian with the big front porch and the gingerbread trim and a view that has been changing everyday for the last hundred plus years, it changes daily, actually moment by moment and yet somehow it stays the same. A bridge replaced the ferry over 50 years ago, yet I still hope to look up and see that ferry boat chugging into the dock ready to take you across the bay. But those days are long gone, ok there is a little boat that calls itself a ferry and for 20 bucks will take you across, but it is not the same.

Anyway, sitting on this porch will never grow old, however this house is growing older and older by the moment. She - I always think of houses as female - has fallen into a bit of disrepair. The roof over the porch leaks, the kitchen floor has a sinkhole in it, which we have been told is not structural (here’s hoping), the windows need updating, there is a piece of rope holding together a spindle on the staircase (where you want to automatically hold onto as you pull yourself up the stairs), the gutters need replacing, she is decaying as I sit here and this makes me want to grab her and hold her and fix her up.

Perhaps part of the sadness I feel is that I can’t do that. Sure we might be able to swing buying her (if we sold all we own) but then what? In addition to fixing the sink hole in the kitchen we would have to put in heat. Yes, this house is a summer cottage and was built without heat. Sure it has three fireplaces that might warm you up in the fall or on a crisp fall day, but could not help in the dead of winter in this place.  

She is called the middle sister and she sits right between two other houses that you could reach out and touch. Legend has it that she and her two sisters were built by a man for his three daughters. While the one we are in (the middle sister) and her sibling on the left are basically the same as they have ever been, the sibling on the right has been transformed into something that while beautiful and tastefully done seems to have left her sisters behind. She is the shining sister that went off and made a fortune and came back and needs to show her new self to the world. And truthfully I am jealous of her beauty and her air conditioning, I am not sure I would dress up the middle sister to try and be as grand. I might put in heat and maybe air conditioning, but I like to think if I had the means, she would stay basically the same, just with a little giddy up in her step.