Jun 6 2010
Finally, cottage season is here
If I came equipped with a pressure gauge you’d see the needle dropping almost immediately upon arrival at the cottage. Being there is like a really good drug. When I had kidney stones a few years ago they gave me Demerol and within seconds the pain was dissipating. That’s what being at the cottage is like. When we leave Moncton we’re wound up from our crazy week and don’t even know it and then we sit on the porch of the cottage and decompress. I’m surprised our eardrums don’t pop. We almost always say, with some surprise, “Wow, was I stressed.” Pressure tends to build imperceptibly.
Briefly we thought about moving to the cottage permanently but the real value of the cottage is in being somewhere else. A place isn’t somewhere else if you’re there all the time. Perspective is gained from seeing things from two slightly different angles — triangulation. Slipping out to the coast always provides that perspective and when we come back to the world we see things more vividly. If we moved there, we’d just have to find another place to help us maintain our sanity. We’d need some other refuge.
The cottage is now paid off
Besides, this year we have a bonus because the place will be paid off and then even the loan payments won’t be an added stressor.
An even bigger bonus this year is that the long haul of doing an internship at CFB Gagetown is over. I loved it, but it’s over and I’m home again and we can whip out to the cottage during the week and commute to Moncton, it’s so close. Eighteen months of seeing each other only on weekends was enough. More than enough, really. School’s over. Time to get on with life.
Jun 20 2010
Florina Beach, Cocagne Island, Carmel
Maybe it’s the first day of summer
It’s the 20th of June. Maybe it’s the first day or Summer, of maybe it’s tomorrow. We don’t have a calendar here that tells us. But the day starts out overcast and then the sun comes out, humidity building. Just before we set out for a beach excursion, it starts to sprinkle, so we decide not to go anywhere, but to stay home at Florina Beach. It’s our beach. It deserves some attention.
It took me two times looking at this place to see the possibilities. The first time that I saw the sign “Florina Beach”, I thought it said “Florida Beach”. How silly, I thought, comparing this place to Florida. But Florina is the woman’s name who used to own this land. She’s in her 80s now and still lives somewhere nearby.
Our beach
The beach here is a small triangle. It’s much nicer and there’s much more of it when the tide is out. The water is shallow and warm and the sand is fine. Little fingerlings jump at the water’s edge and flash in the sunlight. There are tiny hermit crabs here that live in snail shells and there are lots of clams, too. Tiny oyster shells from the oyster farming cages are scattered on the beach. It seems like a gentle place where baby sea creatures are given a chance to grow and get a foothold on life — a place of gestation. After a storm the beach is often piled high with seaweed that looks like shredded packing paper.
Is the island splitting in two?
From Florina Beach, looking across to Cocagne Island, we are noticing a curious thing. Until now, Cocagne Island has been two distinct forested clumps of land with a low, marshy neck connecting them. But this year we can see blue water and sailboats on the other side of the neck — like it’s thinned. Carved away by the action of the surf? Rising water levels? Eroded by the increasingly violent storm surges and changing currents?
Surette Island, nearby, didn’t used to be an island. My friend Jeanette told us that. She grew up here 70 years ago and at that time it was connected to the mainland. Could be that this whole coast is more dynamic than one would think. It’s taken us a while to notice.
So what if Cocagne Island is cut in two? Will we get bigger waves? A better beach? Or will the beach that we do have be washed away? Will the oyster fishery in these gentle waters be ruined?
At one time there was talk of “developing” Cocagne Island with high end homes, a golf course and a bridge. But the locals were against it. The island would be forever changed. So reports of vicious mosquitoes were circulated. Actually they are quite aggressive and bloodthirsty — so this was no lie.
The island is a living thing
To me it’s important that the island stays wild with its oak forests where the herons nest and with great, untouched beaches on the ocean side. I even want to keep the mosquitoes. They’re food for the fish. They’re part of the abundance of life here. We need a repository of wilderness as a balance to all that is developed and changed by human activity.
But the island seems to be a thing alive. Alive and changing. Not only is it thinning in the middle, dividing like a cell, but the sand spit on the north side seems to be coming closer to the main shore. Left to its self-determination, and going at an island’s pace, it may yet willingly connect to the mainland.
My friend Carmel died this week
My friend Carmel died this week at the too young age of 59. I was waiting for her to arrive in these parts for her summer residence any day now, as she does every year. Instead I got an email from her daughter, “Mom died today.”
Things seem like they will always be the same, until suddenly they are no longer the same at all, like an island cut in two. We often don’t notice the subtle changes, and the slow erosion until in one dramatic and startling moment everything is different.
Carmel, we spent time here together. You were a part of my life. You helped me give birth to my daughter. You were a good friend. Today I see that our lives, our souls, are built moment by moment, grain by grain. And all of the grains are moved by forces like the tides and the wind, pushed, gathered, eroded, divided, scattered and reconfigured. We can resist or ride the currents with grace, flow and generosity. We can welcome the reshaping. We can become something else. I think that you would understand. We can reach toward connection with another shore, familiar yet unknown.
By Elaine • Cocagne, First Page, New Brunswick