margaret erhart
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summer hunting grounds

7/21/2020

3 Comments

 
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Last night my sister did the math. If she lives to be eighty years old, she’ll have five more biennial visits to the family summer place in Maine. Five. Five more family get-togethers on an island we’ve known since we were kids.

We were Zooming, all five of us, from Australia, California, Arizona, Minnesota and Connecticut, and we took in the news with appropriate sobriety. My youngest brother said, “Maybe you’ll live to ninety.” My sister, the Minnesotan, said, “Sure, but who’s going to drive me?” She’s afraid of flying and has big dogs besides. My youngest brother said, “I’ll drive you.” My older younger brother said, “I’ll drive you.” My youngest sister offered both her sons as drivers, even though that’s dicey and we all know it because Australians drive on the other side. I said, “I’ll drive you, but by the time you’re ninety I’ll be eighty-eight.” Not a good idea, we decided. “I’ll take the plane,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be safe to fly by then.”

It feels good to talk about mortality before it starts to weigh you down. Especially in a close family of people who will miss you when you’re gone. I can’t yet imagine life without my siblings, though my older younger brother tried to slip out in his thirties when he was mugged and suffered traumatic brain injury. I feel some relief to be the second oldest in our lineup. The grief of loss has long felt heavier to me than the fear of death. If we die in order, and there’s as good a chance as any that we won’t, I’ll only have to grieve my older sister. Sometimes I try and imagine stepping into her shoes, but it’s fruitless. Her shoes are hers and mine are mine.

I once had the pleasure of driving Heid Erdrich, the poet (though as things go, perhaps better known as the sister of Louise), to Tuba City to teach a poetry class to 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-graders. Crossing the Little Colorado River she said, “There’s a lot of similarity between Ojibwe families and the old Puritan families of New England.” I was interested and asked her to say more. “Well,” she said, “for example, my people gather in the summer in our summer hunting grounds. It’s the time for family reunions, for celebrating those who survived the winter and mourning those who did not. It’s a sacred time, a time for remembering where we come from and memorializing our kin. The old New England families have their summer places where they go to do the same.”

I’m a New Yorker, so not exactly of an “old New England family,” but close enough. We had a few Puritans who drifted up to Massachusetts a long time ago, but the rest were relative newcomers—Scots, Germans and a large handful of hungry Irish who got off the boat and stared at those Irish need not apply signs for several decades before they got a foot in the door. But as soon as the door opened, they followed the same instinct to come together, always just about the time the mosquitoes showed up.

So for all of you with a lake house memory, or a shore house memory, or if you’re experiencing, as I am, the thwarted seasonal urge to get together with family, know that you’re in good company. In the northern hemisphere, at least, the loss is being felt. My solution is to revise my definition of family to soften the feeling of longing. A friend came over the other day and brought me an apron she’d made. Family. Another friend loaned me her grommet set. Family. Another said, “Here’s a loaf of bread. You look like you could use it.” Family. We’re trying to help each other. We’re happy to do it. I talked to my sister on the phone and said, “Look. Five get-togethers is five get-togethers. That’s not so puny. And if you have five, I only have six. If that’s what’s on offer, we’ll take it, right?” “Right,” she said. “We’ll take it.”
3 Comments
Grace Osora Erhart link
7/21/2020 01:58:28 pm

Oh the life cycle!
It gives me comfort that this is the way it’s meant to be.
My childhood place of joy and gathering is still there but it’s now a house of ghosts. No visitors interested except me and occasionally, my sister.
Not far from the little city where I grew up is the shore community that we lived in all summer. A house built by my immigrant Sicilian grandparents, there was the most fun I ever had as a child. We could run free, not wear shoes all summer long, spend all day at the beach and ice cream every night, it was summerland heaven.
There were children from my (little) city hometown, also children from places I thought were strange and far away like NYC, cousins from the Polish side of the family that came to stay in the downstairs apartment and that was even more fun because one of my aunts was infatuated with malls the new thing in those days and carnivals!
Then when I reached my teen years there were so many cool friends around, they actually had cars, their parents were super permissive unlike mine. I was able to go a little wild there, unlike our apartment during the rest of the year where things were locked down tight.
But now that beach house is not a gathering place, anymore, only my sister and I recall the memories, all the neighbors are strangers, and my 91 year old mother who could in the past recall some of those memories is turning into a ghost in front of me, it seems not caring to remember much..
But it is the life cycle, it is the way it is supposed to be, so somehow for me there’s comfort in that.

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Kirsten Mueller link
7/22/2020 08:42:07 pm

Since I recently drove away from Flag for five weeks to find some wet and green wilderness, I guess I took that thwarted seasonal urge and ran with it. Ran nearly all the way to Canada. I did stop by and social distance visit with my sister in Ketchum, but mostly I just needed to be with myself. I discovered how much quiet I needed to counterbalance all of the voices I have heard in recent months, or maybe, years and decades. Fortunately, nature has retained her ability to rock, soothe and cajole me into a state of .... acceptance. However many days, months, years I have left, I'll take them.

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Stephany Brown
7/28/2020 02:09:32 pm


My family gathers in Maryland, in a spot called Ocean City, where there's a boardwalk with French fries and a Ferris wheel. The Drifters sing about such places.
My four brothers live a short distance away, so they'll be riding the waves again this year. My sisters and I, plane rides away, will miss the waves and the brothers.
Each morning they'll drive umbrellas into the sand and set up the chairs. From the chairs throughout the day they"ll review the epic events of our youth. They'll conjure our parents. Michael can get our father's exact words in their exact places, so that we hear Dad's voice, not Michael's, and we laugh. Lisa can make our mother all but re-appear, there in her striped beach chair, in her hat and unwavering resoluteness. For a brief moment, there are eight of us again. And then we return to a lonely six.
Let's go in, someone will say, and we'll all go down to the ocean.

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