29 September 2010

I felt such relief as I drove up the long gravel driveway with my car sitting lower than usual, put out the Apples and Cider sign one last time, and drove away from the orchard in the early morning fog. Working here hasn’t been a completely terrible experience, but it isn’t an experience I care to repeat. Once I mull on it for a bit, I’ll write a post about what I’ve learned since I’ve been here.

My dear friend Sally has been kind enough to open her seaside cottage to me for the coming week before Dad flies up to drive back with me. As I stepped out of my car in her drive, I was met with the smell of spruce and cedar and sea. It’s a glorious combination that I wish I could capture for you, but I fear I’m not eloquent enough. The best I can do is tell you that it smells of Christmas and the cold Atlantic on a crisp morning.

When I arrived at the cottage, Sally wanted to cook breakfast for me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already had toast with almond butter earlier in the morning. She scrambled eggs—her secret ingredient is cottage cheese, which makes the eggs fluffier—and toasted English muffins, and then we sat down together to eat and ended up talking for two hours. How I’ve missed the simple pleasure of conversation over a meal! Afterwards, we went for a strolling walk around Flye Point, and I listened to her stories about what the area was like when she was growing up—she’s been coming here in the summers for sixty-five years.

As we stood on the wind-whipped precipice of the peninsula, gazing out over the cresting, incoming tide and Goose and Gander Islands, I realized how much I will miss the sea when I leave here. The crash of it over the rocky shore; the way it changes from gray to blue to green to black as the sky alters; the movement of the tides; the way it catches and shatters the sun- and moonlight…

I spent most of the afternoon and evening studying for the GRE Literature in English subject test, and then after a dinner of homemade macaroni and cheese, carrots, and salad, Sally and I played a game of Scrabble. She beat me quite soundly. She claimed that it’s only because she’s been playing for sixty years and this was only my first time. I think she’s just good.

I had my choice of five rooms to choose from, and I picked the only one on the second floor. My room is directly over the deep back porch, and I can peer between the cracks in the wooden boards that make up the floor and see the porch below. Three of the walls are made up almost entirely of windows, and the glass panes, after all these years, are ill fitted in their sills, so the air creeps between the cracks. The ocean is only feet away, and my lullaby tonight is the shush, shush of the waves, the creak of the old cottage as it settles down for the night around us, and the melodic alto song of the wind-chime on the porch in the breeze.