A One Sentence Story
Memories of childhood summers spent in Maine.
The following is excerpted from a larger post about Maine here.
On the Central Coast of Maine, just after Labor Day, the “city slicker” tourist tide sweeps back out, filtering the summer people from the barnacled natives who ain’t up tuh goin’ anywayah futhah owtah town than the graveyaaaad… but in the wake of that sweeping tidal retreat up and down the coast, the accretions of shadow-box tidal-pool worlds remain, one marvelous emotional ecosystem after another, thousands of trapped, starfish family museums supplemented and nurtured a summer-at-a-time, memory by memory, barnacle by barnacle, stranded in the attics and basements and bedrooms and kitchen cabinets and thick, round, wooden pull-knob, second-hand pine drawers stocked with boat memorabilia, summer camp totems, victorious fishing lures, rusting pocket knives, half-torn Dark Side of the Moon posters rolled together with prints of Christina in her World, Down East magazines waiting exposed in lonely off-season windows slowly bleaching themselves to death, and cheap, laminated placemats of anonymous tall ships and nautical knots and coastal bird varieties, Polaroid photos of tiny fairy houses fashioned from fir trees and moss built on deserted coastal islands, fiery, abandoned summer diaries, old darkroom equipment from the week I was going to become a photographer, galvanized steel crab buckets, 47-card decks and board games with makeshift replacement pieces fashioned from shells, beach-combing harvests strung up on fishing line over the kitchen window where my late mother hung them a thousand summers ago, the flotsam castoff of relaxed, summery emotional lives, and a little tale preserved in each and every object like, for example, these Endless Love movie stubs from the night the beautiful girl unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my bare shoulder in the back of her father’s car, and slid her prayer-answering lips across my face and tingling neck, landmark by landmark, and nibbled down on my earlobe and cut free the buoy and orphaned the lobster trap and forever stranded my youth in the deep, cool currents off the Central Coast of Maine.
“…the accretions of shadow-box tidal-pool worlds remain, one marvelous emotional ecosystem after another…”
Every year spent in the same enchanted place is like a winged migration. Each season we pull in, park, vehicles filled to the brim with every single object considered a necessity for our survival (usually about half the carload of stuff). Windows opened, floors swept and mopped, kitchen stocked and beds made. Eight hours later, the season begins.
A place to make memories. And don’t we leave just a little bit of ourselves each time we wave goodbye and migrate back to our other lives. When someone asks, why don’t you just visit different places instead of staying in the same old place each season? Because camp is not just a place, it is a state of mind.
You captured it perfectly.
“cut free the buoy and orphaned the lobster trap” is the best euphemism ever, though I dare not decide just how free the buoy floated or if the lobster ever found his family.