AUGUST 27, 2024 – (Cont.) My three sisters and I inherited the place from our elders, who’d inherited it from their elders, who’d inherited it from their elders. After succeeding in business back in New Jersey, our great-grandfather returned to our great-grandmother’s Connecticut roots to establish a veritable Shangri-la over-looking Upper Hamburg Cove just a few miles north of the mouth of the Connecticut River. From the boisterous demands of his business career, George B. Holman turned the reigns over to our grandfather, Griswold B. Holman and his younger brother, Henry W. Holman, and focused his retirement years—or summers, at least—on gardening, growing roses, and experimenting with flowering fruit trees. He could not have found a more beautiful patch of earth on which to build a personal paradise—the reward for his years of hard work as the consummate American entrepreneur.
Today, each of us has a different approach toward what in decades past was called The Escape Hatch to describe the function it served for our grandparents and great grandparents, and has since been renamed Lyme Light—to reflect its physical location (Lyme, CT) and the career path of certain members of my generation and the next: The Stage.
For the oldest of us sibs, Lyme Light is a place to entertain out-of-town guests—or rather, to accommodate them after a day filled with visits to Harkness Memorial State Park (her all-time favorite nature preserve, the former Eolia Estate of the Harknesses—old and big American monied class), the Florence Griswold Museum (a 15-minute drive away), a three-mile round-trip walk to Elys [no apostrophe] Ferry Landing, Ashlawn Farm Coffee in Old Saybrook, ice cream at the Dairy Queen in Old Saybrook, dinner at Fresh Salt next to the marina at Saybrook Point, and unfailingly, a production at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, a few miles up the Connecticut River from Lyme Light. For this sister, the main activities at Lyme Light itself are crossword puzzles, high-powered late-night Scrabble games, and frequent deployment of the rechargeable Dust Buster, lest a cookie crumb or blade of grass off the bottom of an errant shoe fall to the floor.
For the youngest sibling, Lyme Light is a place to identify and implement an unlimited list of upgrade possibilities to enhance the family’s enjoyment of this place. Her main activities are lively conversations filled with humor, preparing dinners involving lots of olive oil, big salads and wild salmon, reading in bed long after everyone else has drifted off to dreamland, and sweeping the front verandah. (For her husband, it’s a place where he can get out of bed at 4:00 a.m., tip-toe downstairs to the dining room or the front porch and work on his latest novel until around 7:30, when the rest of the house starts waking up. Just as routinely, he then joins and helps propel our Java-juiced morning yackety-yak sessions out on the front verandah overlooking the cove.)
For the next to the oldest sister, Lyme Light is where she climbs in and out of the hammock very carefully. She and her husband usually make a brief annual pilgrimage here when the other sisters are on hand. One such occasion a few years back was marred by an unfortunate and unanticipated ejection from the hammock, resulting in a painful injury. To her credit she doesn’t hold the mishap against anyone—least of all our ancestors who planted the hemlocks between which the hammock swings. In fact, she has taken it upon herself to learn more about them and their ancestors and their ancestors’ ancestors than any of them knew about one another. I’m less focused: after three generations, ancestry becomes sufficiently diluted to merge with general history. When I pay my annual respects to our Revolutionary great-great-great-great [or so] grandfather who is buried alongside other Revolutionaries in an old country cemetery a robust walk from Lyme Light, I invariably think as much about the American Revolution as I do about our ancestor who soldiered under George Washington’s command.
Me? My relationship with the place comes down to three activities: 1. Following most of time, most of the house rules, 2. Taking a million photographs of the same scene (our view of the cove under an infinite variety of light and atmospheric conditions), and . . . to lead the reader back to the theme established in yesterday’s post . . . 3. Landscaping. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
