The Dream of a Second Home

Souvenirs of France: the tablecloth - gift
from my mother's trip to Provence,
 the eau de vie-from our exchange student.

The French House is Don Wallace's memoir about the second home that he and his wife purchased on the island of Belle Ile in the Bay of Biscay off of France's Brittany coast. After one visit to the island they were under its charm and when the opportunity of purchasing a property there came, they jumped at it. Granted the property was a real fixer upper, and they were barely making ends meet in their first home (apartment life in New York City) they decided to throw caution to the wind and make the purchase. It would be several years before they could afford to make the house habitable. I'll let you read about their adventures with builders and financing, not too mention the neighbors and the local building authorities.

Reading the book reminded me of my time spent in France as an exchange student during my high school days. The Nacel program was a four week, summertime opportunity for students to stay with a host family and be immersed in the language and culture of a foreign country. Since I was studying French in school, and my ancestors came from France that's where I choose to visit. I arrived to find my host family on vacation in Les Issambres on the Cote d'Azur. We would spend three weeks there with most of our time at the beach, swimming and windsurfing. Windsurfing was a challenge to me, I knew how to sail a sunfish but standing up on a board and holding onto the sail was a totally different experience. I finally learned to keep my balance, and could tack (mainly a sailing term I imagine), but when the area got busy with other windsurfers, I became frightened of colliding with others.

My host family were staying in the summer home of my "mom's" parents; my "father's" parent's summer place was not far off. I imagine that may be how Claude and Marie-Christine met, there at the beach seeing has his parents resided outside of Paris and her's in Fougerolles. I suppose by now that they have inherited the properties and still travel there for vacations with their children and grandchildren. That was one of the difficulties that Wallace encountered in his life in France - that properties pass down through the family and many are eagerly awaiting their inheritance.

My dream of a second house doesn't take me to France or Tuscany (Frances Mayes memoirs are another favorite of mine). I like to read about other's experiences in foreign lands but I'd like to stay closer to my own backyard so to speak. As a New Englander, I can't image living anywhere else. My dream home is one on the water somewhere - lake, river, or even an estuary. As I get closer in age to retirement, I spend more time thinking about my future second home. I dream of the day when the tuition payments are done so that I can put my income to better use. In the meantime, my husband and I can travel about the region, staying in B&Bs and researching the area where we would like to own our vacation home.

Memoir - Under Magnolia

My baby picture

Growing up in New England, I had a different experience than that of Frances Mayes as described in her newest memoir Under Magnolia. I'm always a bit fascinated by stories that take place in the South, it seems almost like a foreign country to me, points of reference can be so different. Sometimes I can relate and other times I can't.

Mayes' has a few years on me as well, she was in college when I was born, so my experience of growing up female is much different than hers. I certainly wasn't a tomboy, but my father taught me to fish, mow the lawn, shingle a roof, build a campfire, and that an education was essential and that I most certainly was going off to college to earn my degree. Mom taught me how to keep house, cook (baking wasn't her favorite so when I got adept at it I was the chief dessert maker), sew, knit, do needlepoint, garden, and encouraged me to get that education while I was young. My mother's family couldn't afford to send her to college, but she did earn her degree in her late thirties.

Mayes relates her first experience with visiting a funeral home and I was immediately transported to the funeral parlor (as we called it) in Rhode Island from which all my relatives were buried. There is a smell to funeral homes, some might call it death, but that's not it. There is no smell of decay. It is a smell which I cannot describe. It looks more like death; the woodwork stained dark, the velvet curtains which covered the windows which kept the outside light from making its way in, or the pedestrians from looking in at the bereaved. The embossed wall paper that was popular during the time the place was decorated, made the place depressing. Unfortunately during my childhood so many of my relatives passed away that the funeral parlor was a familiar place. There were few happy occasions for gathering together.

Vacations at the beach were a happy time for Mayes. There is a real sense of freedom at the beach. I too had many happy times at the beach. They were solitary times as my parents worked to maintain the cottages that my father and his friend had bought as investments. After helping out where I could, I was free to go to the beach where I would walk for miles or go for a swim. I scoured the line of pebbles that split the beach from the sandy bottom further out in the water, for shells and sea glass. My territory was marked by a white house with blue shutters at one end and a pink beach house at the other with no others in between. Very few people came down this way, the public beach was well up the road.

One last thing, Mayes, wrote about the suicides that took place in town while she was growing up. She and her family didn't talk much about them, but they did wonder and look at those families differently. I was a member of one of those families that folks look at and talk about. I wonder what they said about us. It's hard to grow up with that pain in your household, for even there we did not talk about those that we loved who chose to leave us behind.