A Cottage By the Sea (Actually, the Bay)
I want it. I want all of it. But mostly maybe, I want to want.
Every time we travel, I look at real estate. Sometimes I wish I’d stop, but in seeing houses — most often the abandoned ones — I time travel and place travel. I dream of what was and what could be. And so I glance through a lot of listings daily. Most are bad taste new construction that make me ill, but every now and again I find some transportive, other worldly, and positively unliv-in-able places that I long for.
It’s those I get lost in.
Our week is so dang full. Walter and I have partaken in nighttime animation with Søren — helping him with a robust project he dreamt up with not enough time to finish. Silas has been playing soccer and running track (and I missed taking photographs, so caught in it — wah!) Peg and Awl is so full of ideas we are exploding. My dad and step mom are arriving today from Florida, as we are going to Italy for a bit, leaving tomorrow. So when the seaside (bayside, really) cottage appeared in my inbox, I should have let it go. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I called every realtor in the area until one answered.
The peace of the place was undeniable. It is right on the beach with only a few strangely planted pines betwixt house and water. It’s remained un-updated since 1924, though its interior is embedded with marks and wobbles and incantations from the humans who’ve inhabited it, along with impressions from the salt and the water. There are protected lands and marshes and birds and animals and fossils — living and dead — surrounding it. The inhabitants of the town are few. We met two of them — a man and a dog. And now what? I don’t know, but I haven’t slept as well as I did last night in ages.
I’ve always been like this. My best friend of twenty five years is like this too. And so many women photographers of the present and past. It is curious, the characteristics that run through humanity that precede the knowing.
Here are some glimpses of my past loves and obsessions:
The most regretted pass. This is/was a picnic park close to us and for sale when we moved here. We looked and loved and longed and lamented not buying it — even with it flooding shortly after our visit. I did, anyway. I love and long to long. I long.
Postcards o here:
Sometimes we buy them. This house was behind our house in Philadelphia. Our shop there too. When we looked at it there was a boat in the building. And a trailer in it too, with someone living in it. We’ve found some truly magical and mysterious places. And our place now! The barn was long abandoned. Not enough life to dig up all of the photographs.
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I have a running list of old houses that I’m sure I was truly meant for too. I never can stop looking for them and dreaming. They’ve wormed their way into who I am so that I could never forget them. When I can’t sleep I arrange our furniture into them in my head and garden their gardens. Surely the universe will deliver me to one of them someday?
I am right now lamenting a 1925 home I would love to reimagine and recreate in. One day…