Environmental Autobiography, Part IV

By 2004 both of my parents had retired, and it was time to start thinking about plans for the future. They knew they would always retire out to Whitewater Lake, and it had been clear for a very long time that the cottage wouldn’t be nearly large enough for all of their things. At first, my dad was pretty married to the idea of keeping the house intact, but adding onto it – an idea from which the builder he’d hired immediately tried to talk him down. While the builder knew that the house had great sentimental value for my dad, he also (correctly) recognized that my parents would need something far more stable and efficient, since they would be spending hopefully many more years there. In the end the builder won out, and my dad doesn’t regret this decision at all. Why not? Well, I’ll venture a guess: because one’s sense of place, while certainly informed and influenced by material objects, is never surpassed by them.

So my parents built a house which looks like a lot of the other houses on the lake. It’s beige, has a stone façade at the front door and a two car garage. It’s wired for satellite television, and they’re waiting for prices to drop a little before they buy their third high definition set. Although much larger than Aunt Lee’s place, it’s also more energy-efficient and takes better advantage of natural east-west cross ventilation. Meanwhile, each summer the lake itself gets a little more crowded, with bigger and faster speedboats pulling larger numbers of waterskiers. When I visit in the summertime, we wait until dusk to take out the pontoon boat where I’m regaled with stories of the latest homes for sale and what’s being built where. My mother gets to garden, my dad gets to tinker, and all in all they’re doing just fine.

Living in a hyper-urban environment for over fifteen years now – Manhattan, my sixth and current home – you might question what part of Whitewater Lake remains with me now. Since my parents still live there, and I visit at least twice a year, my question would be: what part of it doesn’t? In a lot of ways, I don’t think I’d be in graduate school studying sustainability if it weren’t for the experiences I had growing up in both the city and the country. Aunt Lee was living nearly carbon-neutrally for a very long time, well before there was a term for it. I might not have known it then, but I can certainly recognize it now.

What do I think of my parents’ decision to tear down the cottage and start over? In the end, Aunt Lee's house was from a different time and, in fact, a remarkably different place. But if I walk out onto the pier and sit down, I still hear the same water lapping at the stones on the shoreline, hear the same birds calling out. I still see the same trees, the same vista, the same horizon. Do I miss the old house? Not really. If I close my eyes, I can still imagine sitting in Aunt Lee’s kitchen – like it was yesterday, in fact. The places we love live on, long after they’re gone.