There's a Summer Place

When I was a little girl, my immigrant parents took me, along with my younger siblings, to a group cottage area off Lake Ontario, where they spent a week with us, in the company of their landsmen. My father stayed only for the week-end, leaving my mother with us through the working week. I was four years older than my sister, six years older than my brother. My mother's attention was with the younger children. I was left free to wander about on my own. There were times that I spent in the company of other peoples' children, but more often I was left to my own devices.

The experience of being near a lake was a new one for me. I quickly acclimated to the new environment. I imagine I was 7 years old at the time. I can recall that at night when we children we put to bed, our parents left the tiny cottage to go out and spend time with their friends. This made me feel insecure, and there were times when I felt unable to sleep. And for the first time something made me aware of my mortality. Unbidden, the thought came to me that I could die there, and I was all alone, and my body would be placed into a cavity in the earth. I visualized the dark, the moist dirt surrounding me, the cold, and I wept.

Why such morbid thoughts would come to me is beyond my understanding. I'm not given to such morbidity at any time. But I can still recall how frightened, how frozen with fear and grief and regret I was. I don't believe I ever mentioned it to my mother or my father. I do sometimes think of that place on Lake Ontario, what it was like for me to be there, unhindered by a need to remain close to my mother. She was too busy, and seemed happy enough to have me go about on my own.

In retrospect, remembering what it was like to clamber about on huge rocks sitting at the edge of the lake, it might have been dangerous for a little girl to be out there all on her own. I certainly do know I'd never have permitted my own children, even much older, to be out on their own in like circumstances. We knew, because we experienced it, how the lake could throw up huge whitecaps during a storm, that would wash onto the beach, as though enticing us to follow them into the lake. The experience doesn't appear to have done me much harm, however.

There's a Summer Place

There's a summer place
in my memory and a small girl
warming herself on a boulder
overlooking Lake Ontario
face reflecting the sun, dreaming.

Seagulls rode updrafts -
she watched them and they her
as she clambered barefoot
over huge granite outcroppings
lining the lake - each day

venturing a little further
than the day before. She
explored the vastness of the
landscape, her fantasies
separating the waters and the

melting sky. The smells of
fish scales shining, baking,
drying. Birds swooping each
cresting wave. A jungle of
drifting fronds under the blue

the green of the water. Her
probing hands explored each crack
of the granite walkway
where one incautious move could
drop her into a watery dream
deeper than she could wake from.

Yet it was as much her element
as it was the dragonflies'
filtering about her as she lay
immovable, creating her future.
Once, I drove back that way

knowing the summer place was
still there; knew if I looked
I'd see the birds, the grey rocks
that blue vault still scudding
forms resembling clouds.

And the lake, those wild and
quiet waters, they too.
Only the child is absent.

1980