Bottled Memories

We were going to Nowhere, Maine again for vacation. Also referred to as "up home" and Houlton. Maine is the pine tree state. Aptly named because it was all we'd see for the last 489 miles of the 500-mile trip. The only thing they had more of was bugs, which would be splattered all over the windshield at the end of the trip, like some little buggy suicide convention we'd crashed by mistake.

The worst part was ten hours in the backseat of a Pontiac with my brother. He was 12 so everything he did annoyed me. And amused him. Enormously. Sitting next to a sweaty, giggling, humming, chanting, poking, twitchy little human torture machine for 500 miles wasn't my idea of a dream vacation.

It probably wouldn't even be warm enough to swim. Summer in northern Maine is more a window of opportunity than an actual season, and the lakes were all spring fed. If we left the windows open at night, there might be frost on the blankets in the morning, even in July. If my parents were just itching to visit the coldest, most boring place on the face of the earth, why couldn't we have stayed there to live and gone someplace good on vacation. Of course, to a fourteen year old, practically everything induces boredom, annoyance or a combination of both.

Maine had two savings graces. Nanny was one. And Grampie was the other. There have never been two people, before or since, who were happier to see me.

Escaping the backseat almost before the car stopped moving, running up the wooden steps of the little yellow gingerbread house, the twang of the spring as we'd fling open the screen door in our haste to get to the kitchen with it's confetti colored floor, freshly mopped, "for company coming," and getting the first hug erased my memory of the previous ten hours every time.

Ambitious after sitting for so long, we'd haul the suitcases upstairs. I always got the little blue bedroom with the slanted ceilings and a lock on the door because I was the oldest. The smell of the upstairs never changed, and I can never adequately describe or duplicate it. It smelled like memories, if memories could be bottled; slightly musty and a little bit sweet and just like home.

The enclosed back porch with its butter yellow walls and orangey bug light was the gathering place for the whole family to come visit every night after supper. Everyone would expectantly drive by the house, watching for the Massachusetts plates on whatever car we happened to have that year. They'd park in the "dooryard" when the driveway got full. All the aunts and uncles would bring the cousins and the neighbors who never moved away would bring their new grandchildren, and the kids my parents went to school with would stop by to catch up on the past year.

Eventually, all the grown-ups would leave for the "square" downtown just to see if it had changed since the year before. It never did. But they spent time there every year, savoring the sameness and each other's company.

A lot of times, I was bored enough to find hanging the laundry with my grandmother a form of entertainment. She never lost her initial enchantment with automatic washing machines. She liked her dryer well enough, but she was having a love affair with her washing machine. My grandfather wasn't jealous, though because he reaped the rewards of pristine white t-shirts and sweet smelling handkerchiefs every single day. We'd stand on the "doorstep" and I'd hand her the "wash" to hang on the old pulley line that went as far as the barn, even if the weatherman said rain. If it wasn't raining yet, the clothes would dry. She had a lot more faith in her own predictions than she did in the weatherman's. And if she did happen to miscalculate, we'd laugh as we hauled the clothesline hand over hand, getting in each other's way and trying to get all the clothes back in the basket before they got too wet. Then we'd blame it on the weatherman. Accompanied by the drumming of the clothes in the dryer, she'd tell me stories of myself and show me pictures of my teenaged mother posing for the camera, while we nibbled the stash of chocolate candies she hid from my grandfather.

Grampie liked to go for rides almost as much as he loved to drive his grown children crazy. He'd sneak us candy, even if we didn't eat our vegetables. We were allowed to drink coffee in the morning with six teaspoons of sugar and plenty of milk. Nanny let the girls read her True Confession magazines, and Grampie let the boys drive his truck. And they'd both let us stay up as long as we wanted to whenever our parents went out. It was one of "our little secrets."

I did wish we lived there those summers. How did I forget this feeling of home from year to year? What I wanted to forget wasn't the drive or being trapped with my brother, or the cold or my idea of boredom. I wanted to forget having to watch Nanny and Grampie standing at the end of their driveway waving good-bye and looking smaller and lonelier and pretending to smile as we pulled away at the end of every vacation.

My last two trips to Maine weren't the same as all the other trips. The ride was just as long. The trees and bugs were just as abundant. The little blue bedroom still smelled the same, and there was still candy hidden in the cupboards. All the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends were there. But there was no laundry hanging on the clothesline and no extra sweet coffee at the kitchen table because Maine's saving graces had waved good-bye for the last time. And going to Maine for vacation will never feel like going home again.