There was one grapefruit spoon at our family cottage. Only one, and curiously enough, I don’t think anyone ever ate a grapefruit there. Kitchen things had arrived there through a variety of ways: castoffs from the full-time houses, things acquired in garage sales, things purchased in a pinch on a run into town, and everyone’s favourite: things that just appeared. The grapefruit spoon was one of the appearances. It sat in the drawer with the rest of the spoons, like we were going to use it to eat cereal or ice cream. It looked like a normal spoon, except the end came to a point, and it had little serrations on either side. It looked funny, to children who didn’t know what it was.
The family cottage was a shared property, between my father and his five living siblings, plus the four children of his deceased brother. It wasn’t a cottage, really. It was the house they grew up in. After my grandparents died, they tried to rent it out for a year, which ended poorly and with the loss of the practically brand-new washing machine my grandmother had bought shortly before she had to go into assisted living. When that experiment failed, with the damage to the house either removed or fixed we moved into phase two: we were going to use it as a cottage. This phase spanned from 1997 to 2015, when the house had to be torn down. The land is still in the family, waiting for us whenever we choose to go home.
When we talked about it, we called it the old house. “I can’t wait to go to the old house,” we’d say to one another, or we’d refer to going to Cape Breton, in the family, because there was only one place in Cape Breton any of us wanted to go, and that was to the old house. My ancestral lands are varied and far-reaching, but this is the piece of land I feel the most ties to. Because my father has such a large family, there were always heaps of cousins and aunts and uncles about; it was an incredibly jolly retreat in the summer for a few weeks, and it was the high point of the year for all of us.
We washed dishes in shifts. There was no dishwasher, but there were a lot of children, and we would be organized into dish partners, rotating by meal. Supper was the least coveted, because there were so many more dishes. Lunch was fine, usually, though it was hard to listen to everyone prepare for afternoon activities, either waiting for you to finish, or worse: going ahead without you and your dish partner. Breakfast was universally agreed to be the best dish shift, if you had to have one at all. Some years, we were lucky and there were so many of us we could do four or five pairings, especially as everyone got older.
My cousin Marie and I were washing dishes when we found the grapefruit spoon, which we found very silly. My aunt explained it to us, but we couldn’t fathom a reason to have such a specific spoon, and also who even liked grapefruits, anyway? We dried it, chucked it in the drawer, and joked about it for the rest of the week, before forgetting about it, though it sat there for years after.
When I feel anxious or upset, I imagine my insides being scraped out by that grapefruit spoon. The serrations were sharp, and that’s what my emotional pain can feel like sometimes.
We kept all of our non-kitchen things in a series of Rubbermaid bins. There was a pattern to putting away the items we stored there; kitchen stuff was placed in a high cupboard, nowhere near the shelves and drawers that they occupied while we were gone for most of the year. But everything else was packed somewhat haphazardly into the bins. There was one for linens, old towels brought carefully from our homes to stay there, sheets to cover the air mattresses we put our sleeping bags on, a few bins of air mattresses which would be dutifully checked and tossed as needed, replaced as the years went by; and two full of the most interesting and vital things: books, puzzles, games, and cards. Random bits of paper and chunks of notepads found their way in there too. We were never picky about the paper we had for keeping score or writing lists, or even if we were using a dull pencil crayon to write them - odd for a group of people who had specific pen preferences the rest of the year.
Much like the kitchen items, the contents of these bins appeared through varied means. I don’t ever remember buying a deck of cards, but there were several in there. A set of poker chips (we never played poker). A couple of puzzles, a copy of Monopoly. And the strangest assortment of books. Some were old ones from our parents’ childhood. Some were romance, picked up at a used bookstore one summer by a mother who never confessed but left them there (I think we all ended up reading them perhaps before we should have - I was ten on my first encounter). They were odd and delightful, and once you exhausted your stash of books, your cousins’ books, and if it hadn’t rained yet to allow for a trip into town to hit up the bookstore, you would dive into the bins to find something to read.
I don’t know what ever happened to the contents of those bins when the house was torn down. Someone did go up to empty the place, and get rid of everything that wasn’t worth passing on (almost everything there). These things were important to us, they formed the landscape of our summers, but they were objectively junk.
I used to wonder if I’d want to keep going to the old house every year, when I was as unbearably ancient as sixteen. Sixteen came and went, and I never wavered. I fractured my tailbone at nineteen down on the shore in front of the house, and still, I wanted to go back. In 2017, after the house had been torn down, my sibling and their-then girlfriend joined me on a trip there. We camped in the yard, and our beloved neighbours to the land insisted we make use of their house for anything we needed.
At thirty-one, I still feel that need to go and be home on that piece of land, to walk on the shore that populates my childhood memories, to walk to my grandparents’ gravestones, only a short walk up the road, with the same view. No, I never wavered. But I only have a few pieces of that time in my life: pictures, of course, and the notes in books I brought with me - a particularly silly post-it note is in the cover of a book I brought with me the summer I was fourteen. A cousin and I were writing increasingly ridiculous insults on post-its and sticking them to one another.
The most tangible thing I have is the big enamel soup pot.
When things were looking like the house was going to come down, we raided the kitchen on our way out, with the blessings of our parents. I was twenty-two, in the middle of library school, and my cousins were in various places and times in their degrees. One cousin was moving to his first apartment, and scooped up a good deal of kitchen stuff to take with him. But I insisted on the soup pot.
It’s large and black, with a steamer basket. It was probably purchased quickly and cheaply in order to make spaghetti or some other dish to feed the army of family there, but it has proven to be a durable pot. I remember it from the earliest summers, and it’s been in my kitchen since 2014, moving from Halifax to Miramichi with me. Cooking my weekly soups. Reminding me of some of the happiest days of my life, even now. I never took my sea glass with me, I left some of the mysterious books, I didn’t even snag one of the better air mattresses (which would have been useful too). I took the soup pot. I think about the other things we had there: these really great plastic cups, the grapefruit spoon, the books, the machete (we cut our own firewood from the trees on the land, building a great pile to dry out in the early years), my favourite beach towel, the sheets with the little red flowers on them. I think of the bed frames and the tables, including my grandmother’s kitchen table with its legs rusted from age. I think about the summer we had a very bad poetry writing contest and posted our poems on the wall around the house, where they stayed for years. I think about the hammock which we would haul out and hang between two trees, which were just a little too close together. My father admonished his older brother, who had planted the trees forty years before, “How did you not know I would some day want to hang a hammock here?” We laughed.
I think about the grapefruit spoon.
No, I have the soup pot. The last piece of this place which meant to much to me. It’s the link between me then and me now: older, more tired, a little more knocked around. And the happy past reaches through the soup pot, giving me the nourishment I need to hold onto those memories and keep them alive.
This is lovely!
Such a beautiful post, Alison - I feel I’ve just shared all of these precious memories with you as you talked about the grapefruit spoon, the washing up, the soup pot. Wonderful writing!