I was raised in a blue-collar family in Michigan during the 1950s.
Unions were strong and it was a good time to be blue-collar. One wage supported a family. People owned a home, albeit a small one, a car and pets if they wished.
Families ate decent homemade meals and took annual vacations, generally renting a cabin on a lake in a rural area, or, like our family, traveling by car, stopping at different places every night.
No family with children still in elementary school owned a summer home, although some grandparents did. My own grandparents, beset by illness and early widowhood did not, although my father’s Uncle Barney owned a cabin on a lake north of Detroit.
Every Fourth of July, he celebrated the birthday of his father Jacob at his summer house. It was nothing my mother envied. I remember it as unplastered, unheated and unplumbed. I think the celebration involved a potluck lunch, eaten out of doors on the type of wooden tables still seen at parks. I also remember the only way to reach the cabin was by a dirt road and that wildlife had a casual attitude toward cars.
I married the son of a lawyer who had a year-round house on the commuter rail into Boston and a summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. My ex was the youngest of three and the children and his mother would decamp for the summer to the home on the outskirts of Wolfeboro, which bills itself as “The Oldest Summer Resort in America.”
He thought I would like to do the same. No, I would not. My declaration shocked him. I thought taking the children cross-country was the way to go, but he never understood being a tourist. For several years, we rented what looked like a suburban ranch on another New Hampshire lake until the kids begin asking to visit Prince Edward Island, or Washington, D.C. or, gasp, New York City.
To my mother, a summer house was an albatross and I felt the same way. My mother-in-law told me that families with children never travel, but ours did. I saw a summer house as a burden, a place one would feel obliged to use every summer as well as some spring and fall weekends.
Maybe I have mellowed somewhat with age. I no longer change my hairdo as much as I once did and, when I go out to lunch, more often than not, I will order a Reuben. Through my volunteer activity, I have met people who live in the Berkshires. And, I have stayed at the summer house of one.
She and her husband bought the property in the early ‘70s when their children were small. They were never rich; he was a high school teacher and she was a librarian. But they were able to buy a circa-1840 farmhouse on two acres.
The house is large and somewhat eccentric. The living room is very big with a massive fieldstone fireplace against the middle of the house wall. An extra long sofa, in the requisite faded floral print, faces the fireplace. The rest of the furniture is from secondhand shops or the exchange place at their town transfer station.
Largely machine-made Victorian with a few Federal pieces and an accent of two of moderne, it speaks of several generations sharing time, space, sun, volleyball and croquet.
Behind the living room is a guest room/family room which the grandkids claim as their own. Now 8 and 11, the room still features all the Sesame Street-themed, child-sized furniture their parents grew up with.
There is a small dining room, furnished with mismatched Victorian chairs, each more delightful than the other, an oval table, a built-in china cabinet and an American Empire server. The rest of the floor houses the kitchen, a laundry/storage room and one of the baths.
The second bath and four bedrooms are upstairs. The ceilings slope low and the stairway is just awkward enough to raise a smile but no discomfort. Best of all are the bookcases, filled with great old books. Not beach books, mind you, but real books, well-thumbed and with softly disintegrating dust jackets.
My friend has mastered the art of cooking ahead so that dinner only takes a little warming, giving her time to chat with friends until we feel ourselves nodding.
After instantly falling asleep, we wake the next morning to birdsong and the sight of an occasional deer or bear. We drink coffee in our jammies before rushing off to the sort of day one can only have in the Berkshires, surrounded by good friends.
That is what a summer house is about.
Susan Wozniak, of Easthampton, is a retired journalist and writing professor who writes a monthly column. She can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.