Ghosts of a Cottage Past
IN MY MEMORY, the old cottage was massive.
The last time I saw it was forty years ago, but I can still picture it: a two-level, single-family seasonal home built in 1950, white with red trim and a long screened-in porch that ran all the way down one side where my brother and sisters and I would play when it rained and we couldn't go out on the rocky, gravelly lawn that sloped down to a sandy beach and the shoreline of North River Lake.
Even now, when I think of it, I rationalize that it had to have been a pretty big place, since my grandparents, who owned the waterfront property in Barrington, had ten kids. The top floor reflected that. It was wide open and unfinished, with beds sticking out into the room from back to front. My parents would send us to bed, and we’d go upstairs to this cavernous room and look out onto the water, watching the red and green lights of the boats drift slowly by in the dark.
That side of my family was from Charlestown, Massachusetts, so when the weekends arrived, it was time to go up-country. “We lived in a third-floor rental with a tar roof at the time,” my mother tells me. “So we’d put you and your brother in the car and drive up to the cottage in the middle of the night to cool off from the heat of the city.”
Despite the lack of heat, air conditioning and anything approaching modern conveniences—we’d have to listen for our family’s particular ring on the shared phone line—being at the cottage was idyllic. The soundtrack was Elton John and Seals and Crofts coming from an old radio. There were footprints on the ceiling of that long porch, which set loose an eight-year-old kid’s imagination. I had visions of my uncles walking upside-down through the place. It never really occurred to me that they had likely just walked across the boards on the ground as the porch was being built.
My father proposed to my mother there in August 1965. It was under the trees in a grassy area off to one side, because “he was afraid we’d drop the ring in the water,” my mother says.
It’s where my father taught us how to fish. We’d get up at first light and climb into our aluminum rowboat. I’d rush to the front, because when he pushed us away from the shoreline, I could watch the bottom of the lake drop away into the depths and it felt like we were flying.
I remember sitting upstairs in that big barracks of a room, convinced I’d found my career as an artist because I added chest hair to Barry Gibb in a very 1970s coloring book.
When I was about ten, our family moved away for a couple of years. From the time we pulled into that small, far-away western Nebraska town, which was so foreign to us that it may as well have been Mars, we wanted to go home. So when it was time, home was the cottage. The first summer that found us back in New Hampshire, we lived at the cottage. Every evening, we’d watch the boats; every morning, we’d be up with the sun, down by the water.
Circumstances and situations change, and in 1980, the cottage was sold.
A few years ago, my wife and I were driving along Route 125 when we passed by Calef’s. For some reason, the car wanted to drive back to the 1970s, so I took a hard left and started toward the cottage. We wound along the twisting roadway past the Chapel of the Nativity, over the hill and around a curve that brought us to River Road. I pulled in to what should’ve been a familiar sight: a big, white house with red trim, just across a gravel road from a smaller guest cottage.
Instead, I sat for a moment, looking.
It wasn't there. I kept trying to make this nice home, which was sitting on the same spot, be that cottage. Whoever lived in it made improvements, changed the design and made it a year-round, much more useful home. And it certainly wasn’t nearly as big as I remembered.
I kept an eye on the cottage over the years from a distance, just in case it went up for sale and a windfall fell. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t, and it didn’t.
But it’s not so much that I’ll never be able to reclaim the cottage. It’s that you can’t buy your way back to what was. Those years are gone, and even if the planets aligned, it doesn't make sense to unrenovate a house.
It’s said that if you give up waterfront property, you’ll never get it back, and since 1980 that’s been true. NHH
By Bill Burke | Illustration by Carolyn Vibbert
