Julie felt the air change as soon as she drove over the fill—the land bridge that separated the mainland from the island. There were the fisherman, casting off its rocky sides. As if she’d gone away all this time and they’d just stayed here fishing.
She made the familiar turns, off the wider unmarked gravel road on to the dirt road where the pines crowded in. There was just enough traffic here to keep the track from growing over. She remembered plenty of times as a child where her father would have to stop the car and drag a fallen tree limb out of the way before they could make their way through. Finally, she turned the car down the long driveway that ended at the cottage. It appeared before she was quite ready—she remembered it taking so much longer.
As she parked the car and turned off the ignition, she found her heart pounding. She was here again, finally. And though she’d tried to prepare herself during long drive for the way things might have changed, she was unnerved to see it largely the same as ever.
The line of trees that used to separate the cottage from the river had been cleared, but other than that, there was the small wooden stoop where she used to leave peanuts for the chipmunks, the outhouse about 20 paces from the back door where the clearing met the woods. Here was the silty earth that absorbed her step underneath her feet.
Julie smoothed her dirty blond hair with her hand.
“Grandma?” she called through the screen door. She knocked softly, which felt a little odd. As a girl, she would have flung it open and run inside to find her grandparents, no matter whether they were in the bedroom or kitchen.
She saw the woman emerge from around the corner. Her gray hair was still cropped close, she still wore the elegant pendant earrings that most women would wear only on a special occasion.
Julie had to lean down to embrace her. The last time she’d seen her grandmother, she barely reached her shoulder. Now she towered over the woman.
“I move a little slower now, you can see,” her grandmother laughed, her warm voice a little rougher than she recalled.
“It’s been a long time,” Julie said. “But you know, this place looks almost the same.”
Her grandmother showed her around the tiny cottage, pointing out what was new. The floor had been replaced with new, shiny linoleum. There was a new sofa in the sitting room and a different table and chairs, but that was it.
“You can sleep here,” her grandmother said when they entered the bedroom.
“Oh, I wouldn’t feel right about that.”
“No, no.” The woman countered. “Half the time, I just fall asleep on the sofa anyway. It’s pretty comfortable, you know.”
Julie remembered her doing the same for her parents. Her grandma and grandpa would sleep on the pull out couch in the sitting room, which meant that she got to sleep on the floor next to them. She’d often fall asleep to the sound of her grandfather snoring, mixed in with the calling of the frogs outside.
Her grandmother left her alone to unpack. Julie could hear her fixing lunch through the thin curtain that served as a door. She sat on the bed and looked out the window toward the river. As a girl, the first thing she would do was head down to the dock with a crust of bread to feed the seagulls and dip her feet in the water. She’d wait until the second day to swim—like getting reacquainted with river required a slow approach.
She loved that river, and now instead of a vision in her head, it was real and right before her eyes. She realized how many times she’s relied on her memory of it over the years she’d been away. This is the place she’d some in her mind, when she needed to feel calm.
She would often say the names of the places and things here, like a sort of noun therapy. Swimming rock. Puddingstone. Bruce Mines. This was her place, her heritage—the cottage was built by her great grandfather, it was the place where her father had spent his summer boyhood, jumping into the lake, climbing the rocks. It was the place where her parents had honeymooned where they were young and penniless.
It has all been taken from her. She’d spent these past years like an exile from her homeland, thinking of the place, going over the landscape in her memory, daydreaming of the sound of the gulls, the slap of the water against the hull of a boat, the feel of the worn dock underneath her bare feet. In the absence of her parents, this place would have provided a connection, a link.
Julie shook her head. She’d never even been invited. A flicker of anger lept up in her.
As a teenager, her grandmother was prompt with birthday cards and Christmas gifts. She sent the occasional letter. But Julie had learned to stop expecting an invitation to visit here.
Finally, all grown up and out on her own, she stopped waiting and resolved to take matters into her own hands. She smiled to herself, wondering how her grandmother must have reacted to her letter. It was bold, she knew that. But she was tired of waiting for the woman’s permission.
She’d just quit her job—a 70 to 80-hour a week sales job that kept her on the road, away from her fiancé, James. She’d just walked in one day, handed her resignation to her boss, and walked back out, high on the adrenaline she’d needed to be so daring.
That night, she and James cooked a big dinner and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate her new-found freedom. Never mind she was going to be eating away they the money she’d saved for their honeymoon.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asked her.
Before she could even stop herself, the words came falling out.
“What I really want to do is go to Pine Island.” And there it was. So Julie had written her grandmother the next day.
