Summer Place - Part One
Once…
in Maine and traditionally along the coast but now ever more “inland” and
approaching “up country”… some “summer people” (people “from away”) purchased
“an old place” and thereafter have their (the summer people as a population
block) grip on it, with, in these times, often four or five generations of
ownership by them (summer people but NOT necessarily the “same family” of
“summer people). The property…once
of preferably patriotic merchant sea captain heritage… is… traded amongst themselves
(“summer people”)… ever after.
The antiques “in there; used to be
FULL” are “gone” because the “summer people” either never got them because they
(the original “sea captain’s family”) “had an auction there before they (the
summer people) bought the place”, “they (the original family) sold all the
antiques before they (the summer people) bought the place”, “they (the summer
people) sold all the antiques AFTER they bought the place”, “they (the summer
people) took all the antiques to the dump[1]
when they fixed the place up” or… very rarely… “kept the good things” and “sold
the rest” “I guess”. This last is
as rare as the antiques that were “in the place”.
Growing
up under the antiquarian tutelage of a grandmother who would “set off” from her
kitchen table with a rubber banded “roll of money” at the slightest sign that a
…takeover… by summer people of “an old place” or preferably “old sea
captain ****’s PLACE has “schooled
me” in the very subtle trademark traditions of this whole… Maine… romance.
If
it were not for the perfection of the behavior of the summer people and their
takeovers, the romance of the subtle trademarks traditions would have been lost
through a simple fading away of local memory. As it stands, the annual and ritualized annoyance OF the
summer people and the… annoyances created BY… the summer people acts to “grind
home” the trademark traditions and their romance. Reduced in the same way that spring maple sap is evaporated
over a wood fire in a shanty behind the farm house to produce …sweet syrup… the
raw horror of a ‘summer people’s’ hostile takeover of an old sea captain’s
property arks with each generation into a warmer, fuzzier and ever more
…mystical… legend… presuming that the summer people …did not get… “the antiques
from that place”. IF… they “have”
“the stuff”, that mystical legend is fuzzier BUT NOT WARM. Then, of course, is the horrific middle
grounds (note plural) where who has what and why and IF they know it …in both
camps (the locals and the summer people) AND WHO of these is watching the
flanks of all of this anyway.
(?). THAT is from where and
when my grandmother “set off”.
With
her rubber banded roll of money.
[1] Where the
stuff was promptly retrieved and “taken home” by “everyone” (locals) within a
ten mile radius of “the dump” and …is still being “shown as” “its an ANTIQUE”
“from Captain ****’s HOUSE THEY TOOK IT TO THE DUMP CAN YOU BELIEVE IT”… to
this day.
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