Penny Harter
We have just returned from a few days at Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. I pull our dirty clothes out of the laundry basket, and shake the sand out of the pockets of my shorts. The old rituals of return.
But this year, the rituals are haunted by a sense of time. One of the pilgrimages on our occasional visits to the Island is a walk to the family cottage that I visited every summer as a child. My memory, as did my mother's before me, shimmers with endless dunes out to the ocean, old brown shingles silvered with sea salt, and cool puddles of sand and poison ivy underneath the raised floor. When I revisit the cottage, I seek time past.
The change has been gradual. Some years elapsed between my last childhood visit and first adult one. Reassuringly, the yard was still the same tangle, the familiar shingles well worn, but the new owners had installed a picture window where the attic windows used to be. That must mean that the bare-rafters bedroom used by my sister and me and our cousins was finished now. Oh well, the old Franklin stove must still be in place, and the long table around which we shared fish-fries and cornbread hot from the oven.
More years passed, and Cape Cod and its campsites became more familiar. When we next revisited the Island, the cottage had been painted salmon pink, and a balcony added under the upstairs window. But the yard was still a tangle of wild beach grass, beach plum, and poison ivy, and cool sand still sloped away from the stilts of the house into the thicket of underbrush we'd always called “the hollow.”
I had heard that the beach was suffering from erosion, so with some trepidation I climbed the dunes to look at the sea. The sand stretched to the waves almost as far as my child's eye remembered it. My faith was restored.
In the early 1990s, my husband and I moved to New Mexico, but we flew back to New Jersey most summers, both to see family and to revisit the shore. During this most recent visit, we tried to walk up the beach from our guest house and out to the lighthouse, but it was no longer possible. Where once long sweeps of sand had sloped to the sea, a large lagoon, almost an inlet now, divided the beach in two, a forced detour on our way to old Barnegat Light.
And then we came to the jetty opposite the cottage dunes, the long walkway of old wood and rock that I'd played on as a child, an integral part of my pilgrimage. It was gone, washed away by whatever fierce storm had created the lagoon. We found a piece of it where the beach now abruptly ended, far short of the lighthouse; the rocks seemed to be rusting under the waves. The ruined jetty and the discovery that we could no longer reach the lighthouse by walking the shore were omens too strong for me; I postponed our visit to the cottage until the next day.
In the morning when we drove up the street, I recognized the old houses right on the oceanfront, one on either side of the path that rose through the dunes toward the sea. But where was the cottage? No longer salmon pink, it was newly sided in yellow and sat on a concrete foundation. A "For Sale" sign stood in the driveway, though the cottage I remember had no driveway. The hollow, clear of beach grass and tangle, had been filled with orange builder's sand and apparently sold, for a large, modern beach house was going up there.
"For Sale." I remembered my parents’ regret when they found out, too late to make an offer, that the place had been sold after Mother's uncle died. For a moment, I entertained the fantasy. Maybe it wasn't that different inside. We got out of the car to study the sign, write down the information. Then we climbed the dunes and looked out at the beach. The ocean seemed cold and forbidding, far on the lagoon’s other side. The people who lived in the cottage now had to walk a distance to get to the breakers.
No. Even if we could, we wouldn't buy the place. What I wanted to buy was gone. "It's bad enough that we change and age," I ruefully said to my husband. "But why can't a place at least be sacred? A touchstone for us to come back to, unchanging and wonderful?"
Looking at the waves, he answered with the old and obvious truism: "Time and tide wait for no man." Then he reminded me that we should know by now that change was the only constant, the one thing we could count on. As we left for home, I was comforted by remembering what my mother had said: the cottage would always be there for her, tucked away into a corner of her memory to revisit whenever she wanted.
As I write this, the washing-machine scours the remaining sand out of pockets and towels. After they are in the dryer, I will go to the tin box of old snapshots and dig up those of the cottage. There's the one of my mother, her brother, sister, and cousins, children all, down in the hollow. And there I am, the one in pigtails sitting on the front porch, legs hanging over into the shadows between the weathered stilts of the Barnegat Light cottage as I need it to be.
Barnegat cottage, 1933
Copyright © 2008 The Author. All rights reserved.
