It was 50 years ago that I last walked these paths, felt this sea air and drank in this place. Those 50 years contain their fair measure of joy, accomplishment, contentment and peace; but also pain, fear, loneliness and heartache. We are different people now than we were then. We are adults in a far more complex world. Our world as children was fairly complex, too, with families in disarray and the adults in our lives either not willing or not able to provide us with the safety we needed. But our memories of this place are simple, happy and filled with the things of childhood: bike rides along the sandy roads to the tennis club for a soda, running through backyards, such as they were, to go down to the beach and out on the jetty. Helping our dour grandmother with anything that required help.
I have a particular memory of an overcast afternoon, wanting to help my grandmother prepare the family meal. I was in charge of the salad (and the salad dressing! what a treat!) and consulted my Fanny Farmer Junior cookbook for ways to make the salad fancy. I distinctly remember her handing me the cucumber from the icebox, cold and smooth, and me taking a fork to score ridges along the length of it – so when the cucumber was sliced, it resembled, loosely, flowers. I was seven, I think, and fancied myself a budding chef. Once the cucumber flowers were situated among the lettuce, cherry tomatoes and radish slivers, I moved onto the dressing – really, just oil, vinegar, dijon mustard (yes, we had it, but I don’t think it was Grey Poupon), salt and pepper and a pinch of sugar. My father declared it divine. But it was the cucumber flowers that I considered my culinary triumph.
This trip, I did not exercise my considerable skill in the kitchen – I have evolved from the cucumber flowers, thank goodness. Yeah, I whipped up a salad from whatever was on hand and successfully re-heated leftover pizza.
What was more important this time around was drinking in the natural beauty of the clouds, the sea, the bluffs and the salt marshes; absorbing the love of family while sharing our distant past in our very current present.
Of course, no family get-together is complete without a tragedy of epic proportion. Here, in this space infused by memories of summers past, new memories were made. On our first day together, the weather was clear just long enough for the ferry ride from Woods Hole to Oak Bluffs. No sooner did we arrive at the family house than the heavens parted and the rain poured down. And poured. And poured.
We spent the afternoon reconnecting, getting to know our cousin’s daughters, working on a jigsaw puzzle and basically just goofing around. Dinner was pizza, corn on the cob and a salad. Delicious. My big brother, who rarely eats, actually consumed real food that night.
Around 9:30, we all began drifting to our respective rooms, getting ready to settle down for the night. I sat with my cousin on the front porch where we chatted for a bit. Just as we were going to call it a night, I noticed rapid movement from inside the house out of the corner of my eye. In a flash, I saw my brother with his hand in front of him, wrapped loosely in a towel, his wife right behind him and my cousin was up and inside before I could form the words “What’s going on?” In a matter of seconds, the three of them had run out into the dark, rainy night and sped off to the island hospital. My cousin’s daughters looked completely shell-shocked. It was now that my brain was able to understand what had happened. In closing a bedroom window, my brother had tried to push up the upper sash, and the window pane shattered, sending a four-and-a-half-inch shard through his palm, fileting it while impaling him. There was blood everywhere. The girls and I quickly got to work cleaning it up, realizing that in addition to the floor and the rug, there was a significant amount of blood on the bedclothes. After taking the additional broken glass out of the window frame (which, by the way, really freaked them out), we got to work trying to remove the blood from sheets and covers. That was an exercise in futility.
All of this activity went on while my other cousin, sans his hearing aids, was fast asleep, oblivious to the chaos around him.
In the course of the next four hours, my brother was taken into emergency surgery, intubated (remember, he actually ate food for real), and had the shard removed and got sewn back together. I don’t know how much blood he lost but it looked like a lot. And then, just when we thought he would have to do an overnight stay, he was released. When I woke up the next morning, there he was, on the front porch, with a bandaged hand fat with gauze.
The attempts to leave were thwarted by a lack of space on the outgoing ferry, and then, if they were to walk on, a lack of transportation on the mainland. So they stayed put.
And we had a wonderful few more days together.
The moral of the story is that you can be very lucky in your unluckiness – my brother is the luckiest unlucky person walking – and when you are surrounded by the people you love and who love you, healing from anything is not only possible, but I think faster.
Beautiful scenery and clouds help, too.
I so loved our time together. bloodletting notwithstanding.
This is a beautifully told story! I was there, but if I wasn’t I would feel like I’d experienced it all with you. I love the contrasts!! We did have a great time, despite the bloodletting. And, don’t you think, sometimes tragedy binds as well as sunshine? Next time, tho – let’s focus on the sunshine.