This personal essay recounts a child's evolving relationship with his grandparents' summer cottage in the country. Initially resistant to its old-fashioned quirks — creaky floors, outdated plumbing, early bedtimes, and homemade food — the narrator gradually discovers genuine warmth and wonder in the place. Through a shared hammock, friendly wildlife, and a grandfather's lesson in salt-water floating, the cottage transforms from a source of resentment into a deeply cherished memory. The essay explores how familiarity, small rituals, and human connection can reshape our perception of a place, turning what once felt foreign and uncomfortable into something irreplaceable.
This study guide is drawn from PaperDue's library of 130,000+ paper examples across 47 subjects.
This essay demonstrates the technique of showing vs. telling: rather than stating "we grew to love the cottage," the writer accumulates small behavioral changes — drinking the juice without complaint, filling the bathtub for long soaks, trying to make the home floors creak — to let the emotional transformation emerge organically from observed detail.
The essay follows a classic chronological arc across multiple summers. It opens with sensory complaints about the cottage's physical discomforts, establishes a private refuge (the hammock), narrates the unexplained emotional shift, builds to a peak experience (the salt-water float), and closes with a bittersweet reflection on what was lost once the summers ended. Each section adds a layer of attachment that makes the final paragraph quietly moving.
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 the cottage was as old as my grandparents themselves. 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 between the two taps.
My grandmother was always making homemade foods, and they never had any of the drinks we liked at home — just various kinds of fresh fruit juices, most of them with 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 very hard or the handle would make the whole door bounce back open instead of staying shut. Sometimes it would spring open on its own and knock whatever we were carrying out of our hands, as though it were mocking us for hating it there. It was never cold enough, either, and my grandmother was always putting ice in our drinks to compensate.
The whole house was also very loud, almost as if it knew we disliked being there. The floorboards would squeak as though complaining that we were walking on them, and every door had its own distinct sound. The house had a smell to it — partly from the unfinished wood and partly from something I could never quite identify — and all I knew was that I didn't like it. None of the windows slid smoothly; they required a two-handed effort just to open. You had to be careful of splinters on the windowsills, and I had to learn to walk without shuffling my feet on the bare floor, because those boards would reliably launch their little splinter spears at us otherwise.
At home, I was allowed to stay up until 11:00 on non-school nights, but when we stayed at my grandparents' we had to be in our bedroom by 9:30, even though there was no school all summer. My grandparents always went to sleep before 10:00, and we had to keep our voices down because we knew they could hear us through the thin walls. During the day we could speak more freely, but we rarely did, because the house was small and had such a strong echo that our voices carried easily to my grandparents' bedroom. Sometimes it felt like the house was spying on us for them. Understanding how nostalgia reshapes our perception of childhood spaces makes experiences like this one particularly worth examining.
The only place where we felt truly comfortable talking and relaxing was the large hammock tied between two trees in the backyard. It was a perfect location: we could still see the house through the trees, but nobody could really see us until they came within a few feet, thanks to the surrounding bushes. My grandmother would call out from the house — "Boys? Are you OK?" — and we would both answer at the same time: "Yes, we're fine, Grandma!" We weren't allowed to cross the street, so we took turns walking to the neighborhood store to get soda that was already cold without ice, and fruit punch without pits or pulp. If my grandmother called while one of us was gone, the other would simply call back alone, and she never noticed when it was only one voice instead of two.
You’re 44% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.