New Jersey 7, or How I Spent My Weekend

My parents and I moved house this weekend. Not the house we live in – our vacation house in the Adirondacks. We’ve had a place on a (very) small lake for the last nine years. I grew to love it, having first hated the fact that it was meant to replace our vacations in the northern woods of Canada, where we stayed in my great-uncle’s cabin. That place had no electricity, and was where I learned to strike a match, drive a boat, light a fire, start a pump and talk to trees. It was where I learned to tell edible berries from poisonous ones, to find my way on a path by moonlight, and where I saw my first shooting stars. I considered the house in New York to be a piss-poor second choice – it had internet, for crying out loud! It had heat! And neighbors!

The things we spoiled brats learn to live with.

My parents started searching for property elsewhere in the Adirondacks over two years ago. The lake was too small, full of noisy weekenders with their gas-dumping jet skis (as opposed to us, less noisy weekenders, with only one gas-dumping speedboat). The view my parents loved when they bought the house is now a view of newly developed lots. Still beautiful, but slowly replacing trees with three-car garages and satellite dishes.

A small part of me always suspected my parents too, felt guilty about how soft they’d gone, how mainstream. I am probably wrong about this. My parents like comfort. I like my comfort with a side of guilt about environmental damage and compromising my values.

The place they found and bought was 24 acres of land on a four-mile lake, twenty minutes to the nearest town, forty to a real grocery store. No cell phones. No internet. One rotary phone with a foot-long cord. They saw it as the place to build their dream vacation home, complete with a dock spectacular view, and more accessible space for my grandparents, who have difficulty with the uneven ground and steep stairs of the old place. There’s been talk of my parents retiring to said dream house, if they ever get to retire.

But currently, the only thing the land holds is a ramshackle cabin that looks like one puzzle made from five different sets of pieces. When my parents bought the place, it didn’t just look funny. The plumbing was screwed up. There was a mice infestation. The walls were literally paper-thin – in some places, they’d forgotten to actually fill in the walls, and just left support beams covered in paper. Both the floor and ceiling were covered in multiple layers of carpet.

My parents and sister spent the next two years fixing up the “mouse house” while I finished college and made excuses about why I couldn’t help. By the time I saw it on a brief visit last fall, it looked almost habitable. My parents stayed in it for a couple of weeks while renting out the old house for the summer, and proclaimed it pretty good.

This weekend, the other house finally got sold, and we packed it out, and moved a good bunch of it here.

There’s too much furniture everywhere, but we found out that the woodstove does a lovely job heating the house. The current view from the screened-in porch is a kaleidoscope of foliage.

Today, my father and I walked down to the water’s edge to pull the canoe and rowboat up for winter storage. On our way, we passed under some trees at odd angles. My father pointed up. Two tall, strong evergreens, their branches out like arms, were supporting a third tree, much weaker, which had fallen across the path. The effect was somewhat fort-like, although we didn’t have to duck to get through them.

And I thought: this is what we do. We hold out our arms and bear the weight of the ones who are falling. Because when it’s your path, your cluster, your trees, your family, there isn’t much else you want to do than hold them and whisper songs about how soft the ground will feel when it’s finally time to let go.

This place, this dream house, this plan – this is how my parents are building arms to reach and hold with. And the earth is full of rocks, but there’s grass growing in between them, and the leaves are converging to make a softer ground, a place where generations upon generations can grow like saplings and fall with their roots intact, supported by others’ open arms.