View From a Deck: I remember taking this picture when I was maybe ten years old.
I woke up yesterday morning to the smell of my grandmother's house at the beach.
Since my grandmother's house was turned into condos more than 20 years ago - soon after cancer robbed her of countless years on earth - I knew within seconds that I had to be dreaming. But that unique, unmistakable smell ... the fresh ocean breeze, antique rattan, sand in the rugs no matter how well they were vacuumed ... it was as real as if I were sitting in her living room watching the sun come up over the horizon.
My grandfather was a captain in the Navy, and a few years before I was born, he was stationed in Norfolk for the rest of his tenure. He and my grandmother bought a beautiful old house on Oceanfront Drive in Virginia Beach, and even now, I could draw a blueprint of that place that wouldn't miss a nook or overlook a cranny.
When I was a kid, the house felt impossibly huge, and I'd spend hours exploring. The sea-level basement alone was filled with treasure - storage closets were home to (among other things) books, my mother's old stuffed animals, Halloween costumes, toys, discarded hats and clothes, and gaudy knick knacks my grandmother wanted out of sight. The basement also housed a rec room with a bar and a pool table, a workshop with a zillion tools, and the housekeeper's quarters (I'm not sure the housekeeper ever actually lived there, but it was one of my favorite hideaways. This was well before my crazy uncle Boon took over the basement and made it his bizarro lair).
There was a massive picture window in the living room - one that faced the sand dunes out front and the ocean just beyond - and beneath the cushioned bench seat that ran the the length of the window (and then some) were deep wooden cabinets. Untold goodies were stashed in there, too - including my uncle's deadly Bongo Board.
Several years ago, I found a vintage Bongo Board on eBay exactly like the one that was at the beach.
My grandmother (I called her "Roosh" from an early age because I couldn't pronounce "Ruth" and she couldn't bear being called "Grandma") was not an easy woman. In addition to going every Christmas, I used to spend half my summer there, and we always battled (most memorably) over my penchant for leaving wet towels on the bed and my piss-poor attitude when I couldn't spend 24/7 with my summer friends.
She also wrestled with depression, some of it over the fact that her first husband (my mother's father) had been killed in World War II just months before my mother was born. She also had a tough time because the man I always knew as my grandfather (her second husband, my Uncle Boon's father) could be a bit of a pain in the ass. But mostly, my grandmother suffered because she was a woman born before her time. My grandmother was a feminist, an English professor, and a poet, but that all happened in her 40s and 50s. Roosh came of age during a time when women were steered toward marriage and child-rearing rather than lives as professors and poets. It wasn't until much later that she began to pursue her own dreams, and she never felt she'd truly achieved them.
Cancer made sure she never would. She was given a very short time to live when she was diagnosed in 1981, but fought hard for the next several years. She died in 1985, when I was living in England, and Mom didn't tell me until after the funeral (my grandmother hadn't wanted me to come home). It all felt surreal, and to this day, I don't think of my grandmother as dead. It just feels like I haven't seen her in a really long time.
Roosh hosts a party back in the '70s. The window pictured looked at the house next door.
It's nagged me for years that of the thousands of pictures I've taken to document my life, there are none of the beach house. I never once stood down by the beach and took a shot of the front, or walked through the halls and rooms I loved to create an interior travelogue. Mom doesn't seem to have any, either, and my Uncle Boon has done god knows what with my grandmother's photo albums.
I almost went back to the house 15 years ago, when Sophie and I were driving across country. At the last minute, though, I couldn't bear to see the place turned into condos.
As I've written before, I wish desperately that I could travel through time. If I did, you can bet I'd go back to the beach - back to those early mornings when the sun poured down the hall to my bedroom, to days spent lounging out on my raft (well, the days before Jaws, anyway), to afternoons lost exploring the house, the sand dunes, and the neighborhood ...
And even to those angry reminders to please stop leaving my wet towels on the bed.
From Quartet: Four Virginia Poets, published 1985
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