Today I went to my mother’s house and completed the final tasks of closing up for the season: blankets folded into the chest with moth balls, lawn chairs and garbage cans stowed inside, and furniture covered with old sheets. The house sits on a bluff at the edge of Cape Pogue Pond and, despite all the recent building on the island, the view is essentially the same as it was fifty years ago when my family built the house for summer vacations. Now all these years later, my mother comes from her house in Sterling to stay for two weeks in the summer and a couple of spring and fall weekends. The rest of the season, friends and renters use it, and I’m in charge.
It felt good to get the house shipshape for winter, and I was glad the season was over so I didn’t have to worry anymore about the rusty pipes turning laundry orange. Or whether the coffee can we used to “temporarily” repair the septic pipe two years ago would rust through and back up the toilet while six or seven people were on their only vacation of the year.
As I took down the clothespins from the laundry line, I looked out across the pond in front of the house. The day was warm for mid-November and, almost without thinking, I headed down the path toward the beach. About halfway there, I shed my shoes and socks and walked the rest of the way barefoot, savoring the feel of the grass, the planks, and the sand on feet that still remembered the textures of summer.
I walked far down the shore, wading in the shallows at times. The water looked empty and it was cold. But if someone young and full of life had wanted to jump in for a quick dip, I would have gone right in too. No one was there though – no one anywhere to be seen.
Four or five ducks flew up from the marsh as I approached. I heard a loon call from the water, but couldn’t see it. A little further down, I spotted one lone sand- piper investigating debris at the edge of the water for some morsel to eat, its stilted walk coming in short bursts of action. It seemed that in this whole place, there were just the two of us, each alone on a solitary walk. I had this thought: The only difference between us is that after my walk, I’ll go home and rummage around in my fridge for something to eat before I get on with the rest of my life; but, for the sandpiper, this is life – walking, eating.
As I headed back toward my mother’s house, I noticed that most of the bird tracks crossed the beach from marsh to pond. The tracks looked purposeful, suggesting the birds that made them had a reason to be there, that they knew where they were going. The human footprints that were already there ran the length of the shore, as if the person was looking for something, but it was somewhere farther along. After a while, the wide-webbed tracks of a goose appeared among the human prints, giving the impression man and goose were out for a walk together.
From the shore, the bluff next to my mother’s house looked empty. Houses along this part of the pond are being taken down. So far the one next to my mother’s is gone and two more are slated for removal soon by the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission, the conservation agency that acquired the properties. Where the house used to be, the land looks so wild, as though families had never been there vacationing through long, hot summers, and the children had never grown up, become parents, then grandparents themselves.
I climbed up the path to my mother’s house, carried in the clothespins, and did the final task of closing: pulled down the window shades. The house looked old, patched here and there to hold up another few years. When my mother is done summering here, the land bank, which also recently bought this property (with a life estate agreement), will take down the house and turn the land back to its original emptiness. Meanwhile, the house sits on the bluff looking out over the pond with eyes shut as if it has had enough for one year, or has seen all it can take of change.
