A getaway weekend is a lovely idea. Too bad it's such a pain in the neck getting away these days. Driving up the East Coast - often horrible. I wish there were cops every two miles to nab all the idiots. Flying? The worst. There ought to be a law forbidding airlines from loading the plane, taxiing out on the runway and then sitting there for two hours. Trains are looking better and better.
This past weekend found us way up at the tip of Boston's North Shore for a family reunion in Ipswich, Mass., where my father grew up and where I went every summer of my youth. Our family never went to the Jersey Shore. Our "shore" was Crane's Beach. No crab legs and salt water taffy for me. Give me a nice big "lobstah" and an order of "steamahs."
But I hadn't been back in years.
What fun to see all the cousins again, and to visit my grandparents' house where one cousin now lives, and to meet everyone's children, who look remarkably like us at that age! Isn't that the funniest thing.
We played horseshoes and Whiffle ball, watched old home movies and talked till we were hoarse. So much fun and some sadness over who couldn't be with us and how time is flying by. I never thought a reunion would make me melancholy, but this one did, just a little.
The setting for our get-together was a very old part of the country. Ipswich has almost 60 homes - still occupied - dating to between 1625 and 1725. So, too, Rockport, just to the east and right on the water, is a very historic place.
One morning I slipped out early from our B&B in Rockport to take a walk down the main street and smell the salty air. As I made my way down to the harbor, it amazed me to see the window boxes, containers full of flowers and old-fashioned roses woven through the white picket fences. These, by the way, were authentic wood pickets. Can I just say that there's nothing, nothing, like a real wooden fence, even if it's chipped and peeling.
Our innkeeper Kathy Fitzgerald, who with her husband runs the 1832 Sally Webster Inn in Rockport, said John occasionally complains about having to paint the wooden fence. "Let's get plastic," he suggested. Kathy exercised her veto then and there and I'm glad she did. Her fence is the real deal. Anything less in such a historic setting would look fake. All wrong.
Another thought that came to me as I walked along is that no matter where you go, flowers by the front door or the window or the sidewalk or gate make such a difference to the entryway. They're a gift to passersby, something some of us may remember always.
On a weekend when I was re-establishing connections with family and my own childhood, I realized that the times spent in this place were among the happiest in my life. And I do remember the flowers and greenery from those days - the lilies in my grandparents' yard, the white picket fence out back with the rose-covered arbor, the meadow beyond that with the path mown through it. Sadly, all gone now.
But as I think about these things, I can almost hear the kids yelling during our games of tag. I can feel myself running away from my brothers and cousins. I can just about smell the flowers and the grass. And I can remember the feel of lightning bugs in my cupped hands and the sting of those wretched greenheads on my legs!
Flowers, on this trip, evoked memories of a time when my parents were young and healthy, we kids were innocent and carefree and summer was a time to play outside - fearlessly - till it got dark.
The flowers I met on this visit, though different from those childhood blooms, were a comfort and a pleasure. They made me grateful, and added another dimension to a trip already filled with happy memories.
