A secret place of my childhood

¶ … Special Place

When I was about seven years old, my parents started sending me to visit my grandparents in their summer cottage in the country. Having been raised in the city, I really disliked it at first. My cousins and I used to arrive at the same time and they felt the same way. There was no air conditioning and it seemed to us as though everything in there was as old as my grandparents. There were no showers, just huge bathtubs with old-fashioned shower curtains around them. The faucets separated the hot and cold water so it was impossible to get warm water without cupping your hands and moving them back and forth from the hot water faucet to the cold water faucet. My grandmother was always making homemade foods and they never had any of the drinks that we liked at home, just various different kinds of fresh fruit juices and most of them hat pits and pulp in them. The refrigerator was so old that it had a great big handle on it and you had to close the door really hard or the handle would make the whole door bounce back instead of staying closed. Sometimes, it would spring open because of that and make us spill what we had in our hands when it hit us, as though it was mocking us because it knew that we hated being there. It was never cold enough either and my grandmother was always putting ice in our drinks so that they would be cold enough.

The whole house was also very loud, almost like it knew that we hated being there: the floorboards would squeak as though they were complaining that we were walking on them and every door had its own sound. The house had a smell to it that was partly from the unfinished wood and partly from something else that I could never identify; all I knew was that I didn't like it. None of the windows slid smoothly; they required a two-handed effort just to get them open. You had to be careful because it was easy to get splinters on the windows and I had to learn to walk without shuffling my feet on the floor if I was barefoot or in my socks because those floors would always launch their little splinter spears at us otherwise. At home, I was allowed to stay up until 11:00 o'clock on non-school nights but when we stayed at my grandparents, we had to be in our bedroom at 9:30 even though we had no school all summer. My grandparents always went to sleep before 10:00 and we had to be quiet talking because we knew they could hear us if we talked too loud or laughed. During the day, we could talk louder but we didn't because the house was very small and the whole house had an echo so that our voices could always be heard by my grandparents in their bedroom. Sometimes it felt like the house was spying on us for them.

The only place where we felt comfortable talking and relaxing was in the large hammock that was tied between two trees in the backyard. It was a perfect location because we could still see the house through the trees but nobody could really see us until they approached within a few feet because of the bushes. My grandmother would always call out "Boys? Are you OK?" from the house to make sure we were there and we would both answer at the same time. "Yes, we're fine, Grandma!" We weren't allowed to cross the street so we would take turns going to the neighborhood store to get soda that was already cold without ice and fruit punch without pits and pulp in it. If my grandmother called while one of us was gone, the other would just yell back and she never noticed when it was just one voice instead of two.

I don't remember exactly when it happened, but we must have changed our minds about being at "Grandma's" because one summer she was sick and when we found out that we couldn't go we were both disappointed. The next summer was a totally different feeling because we were happy to be there. Instead of talking about how much we wished we were home, we spent hours in that hammock talking about just about everything. There were squirrels there that were not scared of us the way the squirrels were at home and they would come right over to us for chips or pretzels or whatever other snacks we had. My grandmother said that our snacks were bad for them and she always gave us a bag of trail mix that had different kinds of nuts and dried fruits to give the squirrels. There were also some birds that always came around. They would stop about ten feet away from us and look at us sideways the way birds do. Then, they would take a few hops until they were a little bit closer, stop, and look at us sideways again. When they got very close to the hammock, we gave them some of the nuts and fruits too, and they would grab them and fly away for a little while before coming back for more.

At some point, we stopped going to the store and we would drink the entire pitcher of juice that my grandmother brought out for us, even with the ice and pits, and pulp in it. We still spent most of our time talking outside but going back into the house no longer felt like such a bad thing. Sometimes, when the summer was over and I was back home, I tried to see if I could get my floors in our house to make any noise by walking on them as hard as I could but they always ignored me. We also had squirrels and birds at home but they never came within twenty feet of me and they would scurry away or fly off, half terrified, if I made even the slightest move in their direction.

I had started filling up the bathtubs at Grandmas and sometimes, I would take a long soak instead of a shower. Those tubs were so big that I could put my head completely under the water and stretch out, pretending that I was in the ocean. I mentioned that to my grandfather and a few days later, he told my cousin and me that he was going to show us how to float like magic. We helped him carry these big heavy bags into the house from the garage and up the stairs to the bathroom. That was the loudest those stairs every squeaked but they no longer sounded unfriendly; now, they sounded like they were excited for us. The bags were each full of twenty-five pounds of salt and we poured it all into the tub. Then, my grandfather told us to get into the tub and see what happens. My cousin and I both got into the tub on opposite ends and to our shock we were floating on top of the water just like logs on the lake. He left us in there and we floated like that for hours, talking about all the same things we used to talk about in the hammock. After a few minutes, we couldn't feel the water against our skin anymore and it felt like we were floating in space. The following summer, the first thing we did when we got there was fill up the tub with salt and start floating again.