cottage time
55. Returning to a place you love to find it hasn’t changed—and neither have you.
I missed posting last week because we were driving from Santa Fe to Stony Lake, detouring 10 hours to Virginia to say hi to my stepmother. Sleep and run, we laughed next morning as we left Sperryville after breakfast, waving through open windows like we always used to do with Dad. Sometimes those quick visits are the best because they feel like a little unexpected bonus. Virginia in late June is so green and hot and humid, so unlike Santa Fe in the summer. I love those warm East Coast nights when you can go out walking after dark and the fireflies are blinking in the meadows and the air is still sultry, the nighttime a relief.
Now we are at Stony and settling into cottage life. Coming back every summer feels like catapulting ourselves into a time warp We’ve spent the last ten months away and have all turned a year older but it seems as though no time has passed. Cottage time is like dog years: 53 years of real life is like four years at the cottage. When I add up how much time I’ve spent here in my life—let’s call it six weeks, tops, each summer, sometimes less, I’m still practically a toddler.
The first few days, we stumble around in a surreal fog, trying to distinguish time in our minds. The cottage is 129 years old this summer; it has seen so many lives lived within its walls, so many changes, long before we showed up. Was it last summer I painted the verandah or the summer before? Which summer was it that we all drank too much wine and I beached the boat on the floater mat before I even got out of the bay? How long has it been since we touched up the cottage name on the cliff?
And don’t get me started on the girls. They have birthdays two days apart in early July, so that automatically speeds up my sense of time. They are four ages in the span of four days! It boggles my brain.
Hopefully their experience of time is still slower than mine. Digital life and social media have sped everything up to such a degree that almost-17-year old P complains that life is going too fast. Did we think that at 16? The summer I was 16 at the cottage I had crushes and raced sailboats and played tennis with my sister, Amy, till dark and cards with our friends at their cottages till curfew. We had only just recently gotten a telephone on our island. We made plans the old-fashioned way: in person or by dropping by friends’ docks, unannounced but always welcome. We’d known our friends’ parents since we were babies and called them Mr and Mrs until long after we had our own babies.
This is part of the magic of the cottage: The arc of time is long and visible. We can trace changes back through the summers: when McCrackens was a dimly-lit general store run by Ned Sneed that sold wilted lettuce and fishing lures, with a whole rack of magazines and comics in the back and a candy aisle as long as the store. Now it’s an upscale market that sells thin-crust pizza and smoothies.
And though time is long on the lake, it still seems short, somehow. I am always a teenager at the cottage, even as I’m a mother of two teenagers. Though I try to keep the younger version of me close at hand always, here at the cottage, I feel her just below the surface.
.Last night I went walking with P after dinner. We drove our boat to the mainland and walked up the steep hill from the landing. It was after 8:30, but the sun was still up, a fireball sinking over the island across the channel. Golden hour, the very best time of day anywhere but especially at the cottage. P ran and I walked, swinging my arms long by my side. It was warm enough to not need a shirt and the daisies were blooming along the dirt road’s edge, slabs of limestone jumbled in the grass. Our lake is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, billions of years’ old granite wrecked and worn by glaciers and time. On the mainland, the rock is peeling layered limestone marbled with sea fossils from its past life in an ocean. Our island is pink granite, timeless, ancient bedrock that stretches almost all the way to the Arctic.
Walking fast in the falling light, past clumps of Queen Anne’s Lace, scrap metal, and scratchy grass—sites as familiar to me as my own body—I felt like all the versions of me at once. Cottage time had condensed and compressed to this moment, this summer now, here.
I’m taking a short break from writing How to Disappear for the next four weeks to (I hope) finish a novel I began last summer at the cottage. In my mind, I’m calling it….The Cottage. This says everything it needs to, about family and time and the pace of life in the places we love. It’s told, of course, in cottage time. I can’t wait for you to read it.
The day after we arrived, a fellow cottager Doug came over to help me put P’s wooden boat in the water. He parked at the front dock and walked across the bare granite to the boathouse. I went out to greet him.
So here we are again, I called. Another summer.
Doug smiled wearily. How many summers had he been helping me put the boat in the water? I’d lost count. I’m sure he had, too. Down at the boathouse, we lugged the Mercury to the edge of the dock. It was only an 8 horsepower, but it seemed to dwarf the hundred-year-old skiff. “Ugh,” he said preemptively, and I laughed.
This was the part of the summer when we struggled to get the big motor on the little wooden boat, when Doug grunted and the narrow craft wobbled and we both wondered if the engine would fall over into the lake, or if it would be Doug. He grunted and tipped the propeller over the transom. The boat pitched left, then right. I held the stern line tight, holding my breath. Over the engine went, Doug with it, and then it caught. He caught. It was on, and Doug was still in the boat, still upright, but barely. He wiped his brow and we both chuckled with relief.
Some things never change.
But there’s always next year.
Sending you my best summer wishes via spotty island wifi (pls pardon any weird irregularities)!
—katie
If you’ve been thinking of joining us at Mountain Flow Camp this September 5-8 outside Telluride, you’ll want to act fast because camp is nearly full and won’t come again til next year! Early September in the San Juans is such a sweet part of the summer, and our time together at High Camp is always the highlight of my writing and teaching year. I know you’ll be as inspired by the alpine landscape and the other participants as I always am. Hiking, trail running, moving in time with the mountains, writing, dreaming, creating, connecting. Come fill your cup with us!
We’re committed to keeping the all-inclusive cost of $2600 per person, reasonable and reflective of the many offerings and teachings on hand, as well as the remote location at 11,000 feet in the mountains. There are sooo many retreats out there these days, but if you join us, I think you’ll agree that there’s nothing quite like Mountain Flow. 😊
