Apparently prior to my birth my maternal grandmother either purchased or bartered to obtain a small vacation cottage on Arlington Pond in Salem, NH for $2100. Imagine that price. Because my mother was a stay at home mom after having me, we had the advantage of being able to go to this cottage for a good part of the summer and my father and grandmother would show up on weekends. It took what seemed to me to be an eternity to get there when, in fact, it was really only about an hours drive.
The cottage was actually just a small cabin with cold but running water. The only heat was from a stove in the kitchen area plus a space heater in the back, both of which had a small kerosene tank attached to the side. They had to be lit with a match. Nights in NH were pretty chilly even in July and August so these were frequently used at night. The camp was next door to another cottage owned by my grandmother’s sister and her husband. None of these cottages were very big or luxurious, but I loved it.
You entered a front door, into what looked to be a porch of some kind. By my time it had been made into a bathroom. The room had only a sink with a counter and the toilet which faced the door. When you opened the door you were in a mud room that looked at the road so if you forgot to close the door you could watch people and cars go by. From the mud room you took one step up to the kitchen with that stove that both heated and cooked. I loved it when my mother toasted my bread by laying in on the cast iron burner. On the other burner was a big tea kettle where water was boiled and often poured into the one sink which was large enough for me to sit in so that I could get a bath. We were in NH in the summer of 1954 when hurricane Carol arrived. Although we were not on the coastline, we did experience wind damage and power outages. Those kerosene stoves may have smelled a little funny but they didn’t go out when the electricity did. We were a very popular destination in the neighborhood that year.
From the kitchen you walked straight into a bedroom where both of my parents and I slept. This room had the most creative closet. The closet was actually the wall to this bedroom with a door cut in. On the other side of this wall was another bedroom with the same set up but the door was on the opposite end of the wall so that the closet was formed by leaving space enough to hang clothes between the walls of the two bedrooms. I thought that it was great that I could climb in the closet from my room, walk the length of the wall and out into the other room to visit. Beyond the 2nd room was a screened in porch and next to it was the living area with the second stove. My grandmother’s room was a small one off of the living room. The place was a tiny box structure but that was okay. There was a pond in the back. It was confusing for some people because we always referred to the side with the water as the front of the house and the side facing the road as the back. Large white pine trees surrounded the house so there was never any grass but the pine needles smelled wonderful.
I didn’t wear feet pajamas during the summer but that didn’t mean my feet didn’t suffer. I almost never wore shoes but rather walked around barefoot in the pine needles which felt soft. Unfortunately, that meant that at bath time my mother often found a lot of pine needle splinters in my feet which she insisted on picking out of my feet with tweezers or sterilized needles. To me it didn’t seem as though she showed much mercy.
Plenty of kids were in the neighborhood and we could pretty much run wild. Unlike today, it just didn’t seem necessary for your parents to have you in sight every minute because other parents could be trusted to keep you in line. I had a summer best friend named Donna and we had row boats, paddle boats, and rafts and spent most of the day in or on the water. I’m sure the water was probably pretty cold but it never bothered us.
Neither of my parents were swimmers but other parents in the neighborhood tried teaching me. However, I objected to getting my face wet and this stood in the way of my initial success. There was a raft in the middle of the pond and it looked like fun when I saw the other kids pushing each other off etc. However, the adults were insistent that if I wanted to play out there I had to get there by swimming and no amount of cajoling would convince anyone to take me out on a boat. I eventually gave up trying to convince them and learned to swim using the dog paddle, a stroke that is tough on the arms but minimizes the amount of water that gets in ones face. One time my grandmother was out watching me and didn’t realize I had learned this, so when I went out over my head she came running into the water. I had to tell her that she was “not supposed to go in the water with your clothes on!” She actually didn’t like going in the water with her bathing suit on either.
I was probably between 3 and 5 years old when I mastered the dog paddle. It wasn’t until I was 6 or 7 years old that my parents tried putting me into proper swimming lessons. By then I had gotten pretty comfortable in the water so I never found it important to improve on my technique. Although I can use pretty much any stroke, I have always been disappointed in myself at not working harder and learning how to swim properly.
At camp, like home, we had two stores in opposite directions but within walking distance and where there was candy or ice cream to be had. One of these had a walk up window and was almost exactly across from the public beach. We all had our own beach to swim in, but as some of the kids got a little older we would head to the public beach to sit in the sun and see who was there. I was usually the youngest until my brother came along, so some of the girls were interested when some older boys showed up with bicycles and took up a space on towels next to us. These guys got the bright idea of washing their bikes by driving them into the water. We decided to run in for a swim and get their attention. I apparently got their attention because although they let the older girls jump in, every time I got in water about my knees one of the boys would pick me up and deposit me back on the towel commenting about me being too young to go further out in the water. I protested by getting up and heading right back into the water where I would again be picked up, kicking and yelling, and brought back to be put back on the towel. Although my mother had used "time out" once on that step at home, I guess this was when I really learned what it meant because I had to give up and sit by myself until everyone came back to get their towels. I was finally able to talk my friends into going to the store and then on towards home where I could at least get in water above my knees.
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