Last fall, I revisited Nauset Haven, the cottage colony in Eastham which my family owned and operated during my teen years (1957-64). The place where I knew and learned Cape Cod, before I ever knew about Craigville or met my future husband or the Buffingtons.  

That fresh September morning, I found that Nauset Haven existed almost as though in a time warp. Surprised to find nobody around, I wandered freely, and felt myself transported back almost as I’d simply adjusted my zoom lens. Remembering how I used to feel as though I owned every pine needle, every patch of moss, and every ripple on the water’s surface.  

Oh, yes, some things had changed, one of them invisible: the cottages themselves are now privately owned condos. And I soon saw that the scrub pines I remember have been crowded out by oaks and locusts, so the whole property looks greener and much leafier. Also, the shuffleboard court was unaccountably gone. And as so often happens when you return to place you knew in youth, Nauset Haven seemed much smaller, in fact downright intimate.  

But the fundamentals are the same. Just as they always did, eight small, not-fancy cottages hug the shoreline of Minister’s Pond; a nineth, closer to the highway, stands in trees behind the garage. Other than a much-improved set of steps down to the beach and those cheery blue Adirondack chairs, the place looks utterly familiar. Under foot, I found the same slightly grainy sand-soil with some leaves and a few pebbles. Where I used to go down on the Point, a basket-like thicket appeared more tangled than ever.  Most of my old paths in the woods looked overgrown except the one up from the beach to cottages #6, 7, and 8 which is open and moss-lined.  

As for the names associated with the place, “Nauset” is for the Indian tribe which first lived in what is now Eastham. And why “Minister’s Pond”? The Methodist Church is a prominent feature of the shoreline, so possibly a parsonage used to be located there, too. I’ve also seen maps on which the pond is labeled Spectacles Pond, for its two irregular segments connected by a little passage. As you row through, you go past a swampy thicket of an island, home to hundreds of red wing blackbirds, painted turtles, and an evening chorus of basses, frogs chug-a-rumming.

Our first Christmas card from Nauset Haven: my parents and me and our beloved Buster, a Golden Retriever who kept me company on all my wanderings, though he didn’t care for going out in rowboats.  

Our cottage guests came for an annual week or two of Cape Cod vacation; they were sociable, middle-class people much like us who arrived in station wagons jammed with kids, floaties, suitcases, whodunnits, and hopes of summer fun. Some drove from as far away as New Jersey and Ohio, but most hailed from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. The men were my father’s counterparts, that is, before he left GE and made his great move to independence and Nauset Haven. (He was very much envied, I think.)  We liked them all and they liked us. I had endless fun with their kids in the pond, and sometimes babysat for the little ones. 

Days and evenings (I liked evenings better), we’d join in games of shuffleboard. As bugs buzzed around under a couple of spotlights, we pushed the cues and aimed discs more or less skillfully, trying to dislodge each other’s prize shots. Scores of 7’s,8’s, and 10’s got totted up on the chalkboard. Perhaps Sheila and her dad against Daddy and me, or Billy Gray and his friendly, throaty-voiced dad vs. us. “Oh, nice shot!” or “Drat! You got me!” Red dots of cigarette ends in the dark, teams exchanging ends of the court between games.  

 Sheila’s dad, genial Les Handley, strode around, encouraging. “Why don’t you kids play us this time? Bet we can beat the socks off you!” My father was a good shot, but sometimes Billy or his dad would beat us. Talk involved days at the beach or fried clams or who had pushed who off the float. Oh, and the Red Sox vs. the Yankees.  

Below, I sit on the bench awaiting my turn. 

I think back on those games now . . . our shirts-and-shorts figures walking back and forth on the lighted rectangle of cement, parents and kids together, nobody trying hard, joking and just being together. It was as though we floated on a little island of summer.   

And we did. Nauset Haven was a little world with a once-a-year life of its own, ten weeks, July 4th through Labor Day, measured Saturday by Saturday.   

Guests checked out by ten, cars oozing stuff; new guests started checking in at three, cars similarly groaning though more neatly packed. In the hours between, we Cleaned. My jobs were stripping and making beds, trotting between cottages and the garage supply closet with sheets and towels, cleaning out magazines (I spent illicit moments dipping into the ones we didn’t subscribe to), emptying wastebaskets, and shaking rugs of their loads of sand. My parents and a helper did the rest. An easy Saturday was two or three cottages to clean; one epic Saturday, we had to make it through all nine. The rest of the week, things were easier though I took very seriously the job of keeping the lawn mowed and trimmed. I also took pride in staying around to show cottages when my parents had to go out; if we had a vacancy, we never left the place untended.  

Our property covered three acres of land, of which I considered the pond an integral part. I rowed across and around, swam in it, and one winter afternoon, fell through the ice while skating. In summer, my fingers endlessly cleaved the surface; I learned to angle my fingertips up almost right away after diving, rather than arrowing down into the chill, murky tangle of weeds at the bottom. I floated, too, as did my father late some afternoons, when he’d happily drift way out toward the center in an innertube, thinking over his day. 

 Basically, I absorbed that pond. I got splashed, cannonballed—and took a private ritual swallow of pond water early every summer. (It tasted sort of minerally and thick, not unpleasant.) However, I did escape coping with a guest’s Golden Retriever who’d swim out and place its paws on the owner’s shoulders, a licking, waggy, water-logged weight that made us all laugh.  

In our very first year at Nauset Haven I prevailed on my parents to let me row to school and back across the pond, though once was enough: I’d proved I could do it. Most years I used a swim as a marker of the first day of summer though one Memorial Day, the temperature was much too bracing. But I’d marched in the band in three parades that day (I attended a regional high school, so each constituent town got a performance) and I was determined to try.  

As for our home at Nauset Haven, the house was an undistinguished Greek revival style, much added onto by previous owners, and located all too close to busy Route 6. Roomy and rather graceless in spite of my mother’s valiant efforts to freshen it up, the place was comfortable. There I practiced flute and piano, did my homework, ironed my shirtwaist dresses, read many books, listened to LPs with my father, and reported on my school days over dinner. Yet I was constantly looking ahead. Where would I go, where would I find my place and vocation in the big world after high school?  

Nauset Haven fulfilled my social soul in the summer, my solitary one in the other nine-month “half” of the year. Only now do I fully realize what a wonderful place it was to grow up in through the back-and-forth slide of adolescence, when you’re a kid one moment and an adult in the next, and all the stages in between nearly every day. During that slice of my life, those seven years with my family before I went out into the world, I indeed lived in a haven of home and independence, of the natural world, of kindness and love, and being listened to.