Vacation memories become real again

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I thought I remembered it exactly: my father taking the ceramic dog-bank down from the chest where it sat every day of the year; my mother shaking quarters and dimes and nickels onto the chenille bedspread in their room; the three of us dividing and piling and counting.

Get a knife, they would tell me when the dog had expelled its final coin. I would run into the kitchen and return with a dull blade and poke it through the slit on the top of the dog's head and dig out dollars that were stuck inside, that could be felt more than heard. When the bank was empty, we held our breath and let our eyes savor the piles that stood like silver volcanos on the spread.

How much do you think is there, we whispered? Five, 10, 20, 100, 200. The sum always hovered around $260. It was a fortune back then. Popsicles cost a nickel, bread 28 cents. This was all, every penny of it, vacation money.

My father began saving when he quit smoking. He put away what he would have spent on cigarettes. Some days I would beg for a loan from his bank - when the ice cream man blew his whistle and I didn't have a nickel; when the carnival came to town and dollars dissolved like cotton candy.

But my father's bank was untouchable. Only once did he shake out the dimes and quarters for something practical. When the floods filled our cellar with water, he bankrupted the dog for a pump. But never after that did he take from it even a single penny.

For the dog was the genie that held my mother's dreams. In the fall and winter and spring we would pick it up and shake it and guess at how much money had been saved so far. But it wasn't until summer that we would shake it empty and know.

"Where do you want to go, Dot? What do you want to see this year?" my father always asked. And after my mother had seen Echo Lake, she never paused. Her wish was always the same.

We had been to the White House and Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. We'd once rented a cottage at Buzzard's Bay. We'd visited Adventureland and Storyland. But after my mother discovered Echo Lake, down the road from the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire, it was to this place she always chose to return.

What's so great about Echo Lake, I begged to know. It didn't have waves like Nantasket and crowds and kids and steady sun, and an amusement park across the street. It was silence and shadows, to me the most boring place in the world. But my mother loved it, and so we would return, if only on our way to or from another place, if only for a couple of hours a year.

I had no intention of going back there without her, no desire to seek out the secret of her joy. But last week I found myself driving past Echo Lake, on the way to visit a friend who lives in Lancaster, and the lake beckoned. My friend took me there. I was curious, I told her. I wanted to see if the lake were the same as I remembered.

I didn't expect to see it through my mother's eyes. I didn't expect to be bowled over by a body of fresh water. My mother loved New Hampshire with its mountains and woods and streams. But I love the coast. A place without surf and salt air might be beautiful, but it could never fill my soul.

And yet this time it did. I approached it from a wooded path, saw the mountains first, then the lake which lay between them like a giant, shimmering tear. And tears filled my eyes because I knew immediately why my mother had loved it here, and understood with an intensity that was like pain, what it was she had constantly sought.

She'd lived in the country when she was 12 and 13.

"It was the best time of my life," she'd told me so many times. There she'd had a yard and trees. There her best friend's family had owned a farm.

But then she'd been whisked back to the city and did the rest of her growing up on concrete and cement, then married and remained in the city while saving for a house in the country.

The "country" home she bought was in a suburb, not a farm. And though she'd had a yard and garden and trees, they came with fences and boundaries. The suburbs were domesticated, not wild, not open, not free.

A lake among the mountains was what she had dreamed. Beauty in the wild. Trees taller than people. Space without restraint. Unbridled, unfettered freedom.

In the shadows that had chilled me as a child, in the fragrance of woody pine, I stepped into my mother's dream, felt my mother's joy, and understood finally all Echo Lake had meant to her, and why.

In the shadows that had chilled me as a child, I stepped into my mother's dream and felt her joy