Having recently here expressed my devotion to cities and city living, I surprisingly found myself in the home of some of my oldest and best memories, in a canoe on a smooth small lake surrounded by skeletal birches at the water level, and endless trees progressing up the hill.

I was at my grandparent’s home, in a lakeside cottage in the middle of nowhere, reliving many slowly-eroded memories of my childhood, though those childhood memories were always from the summer and this was November. I had returned for my grandmother’s funeral, a time of remembering for the whole family. Or more specifically, of forgetting as much as we could of the last five or so years, which she spent slowly forgetting us with Alzheimer’s disease, and of remembering all those things that had made her special, lovable, a force to be reckoned with before. There was nowhere better to do this than her beloved cottage.

Like many people, I remember my grandmother there in the sun. Eating sandwiches and cottage cheese in the little screened “Bug Free Zone.” Coming down to the lake in the warm afternoon to go for her daily swim. Not a manic fiesta of splashing and diving, like that of my father and sisters and I, but a leisurely, relaxed expedition down the shoreline and back, or maybe, on an adventurous day, to the little island in the middle of the lake.

Afterwards we would read in the late afternoon sun, drinking tea and eating some biscuits (if there were none to be found it would require a trip to the freezer, bent over double in the icy depths, searching for the something that must be there somewhere. Tea bled into cocktails, and then a barbecue or some other nice dinner my grandmother had mysteriously rustled up, and late nights spent drinking wine, and pathologically stalking the occasional mosquitos that made it through the screens, and blinking back at the occasional raccoons that peered through the door, and trying not to need the toilet as long as possible, since it meant a dark climb up a gravelly hill to the outhouse…

…so many memories like these of a life well lived, and others too, of activism and depression-era stories and morals, of garage sale finds, and anti-American sentiment against California wines, of expeditions in the rowboat to see the beaver dams.
The greatest pity is that she had to forget them all herself before the end.