A Second Home

In memory of Eva Beaupre, 1897 –1976

A morning without color, raw, damp, and gray. Early in the season on a day like this, some forty years ago at Wells Beach, Maine, the cool air would have held a palpable faint drizzle, constant on the skin. You would have stepped up a short wooden flight of stairs that led from the windy, roaring beach, your hair in tangles, your nose running, your soaked sneakers crusty with sand and salt. And stepping now into the sheltering grassway between two shore-front cottages, on your way to crossing the paved but narrow road back to you grandmother’s, you would have noticed, without seeming to, how the seething surf sounds, and the seaweed scent, and the wind, always the big wind that on the beach had battered your back one way and made your eyes stream the other, and which had held aloft the trembling kite at the end of its taut string, were suddenly lost and gone — as you had been, only moments before, in pauses and surges of white sound, as the gusts which set the scattered seaweed quivering caught and thundered at your hood and collar, while wave on wave murkily gathered, held, crashed, then scurried whisperingly to the shore at foamy, broken angles.

But now you were quickly returning, coming to yourself — and the sparse punctuation of familiar sounds scattered in the easy, warming air: the low, diminishing drone of a station wagon at fifteen or twenty cautious miles an hour; the faint tap tap tapping of a hammer somewhere; a screen door slamming once in the brightening distance. And crossing the little road, whose pebbly, sandy shoulders you and your cousins would walk barefoot that summer to the corner market for a glider airplane or a candy bar, you would have sensed, without seeing, how the new day had grown a lighter shade of gray and the drizzle become finer than it was.

Inside her tiny cottage, my grandmother, who never went down to the beach, was everywhere and nowhere. She was implicit to the aroma of coffee in the brisk air when you woke up in a bed that was your very own for as long as you slept there. She was in the tones of quiet conversation and lilting laughter with your aunt or mother that you heard unhearingly as you hurried past the kitchen table. And she was in the silence late at night as she lay sleeping in her room off the kitchen while you read from the yellowed pages of one of her old mystery novels.

But what I remember most of all about my grandmother is the sense of being noticed. To eat at her table was to share a meal. To ride in her car was to take a trip together. To speak was to be heard, and with a quiet interest, attention, and respect that came straight at me, level, without a trace of anything hidden or condescending. I had never experienced anything quite like it when moving in the world of adults. As a child, I took this to mean that I was something special in her eyes — and I was — without understanding back then how my sister and cousins, as free as I to play in the ocean, were getting just as wet. And if those cousins became, in any sense, our sisters and brothers — and I know they did — it is because together we shared the embrace of a larger element, a second home built on the scale of the sky or sea, where every summer it was possible to lose ourselves, come into ourselves, and find each other.