back from treasure island...

my grandmother Linda named our family cottage Treasure Island. She was well-read, and so, I'm sure intended to make allusions to the novel of the same name, but I'm thinking that the name was primarily rhetorical in nature.

Rhetorical mostly because Treasure Island isn't. An island, that is. The cottage itself is located on a peninsula of land that juts out from a vast woods and is surrounded by a marshy lagoon and a labyrinthian creek. So why name a non-island, "treasure island?"

My paternal grandmother grew up (as did my paternal grandfather) on an Island. Drummond Island, more specifically -- the largest fresh water Island in the North America. She was the daughter of two Finnish emigrees, but grew up in a house full of siblings, no mother in the deepest woods of drummond. She not only survived two house fires, the death of her mother at a young age, the loss of twin sibling sisters (who were adopted by other families on the island), a difficult stepmother (because of whom, she and her five siblings went to live in a seperate house where they would await visits from their over-worked father visiting his two families), but then went on to earn a high-school and college education by housecleaning and babysitting for mainlanders.

I didn't find out how difficult my grandmother's life was until late in adolesence. She was a master-story-teller who described in great detail the idyllic childhood she re-membered on Drummond Island. Running barefoot through vast open meadows, chasing cows with strange exotic finnish names, rolling in the snow after sitting in the Sauna, laughing garrulously with her siblings and father as they sat next to a cozy warm woodburner.

She may be one of the first bloggers to influence me. Even though she never once "connected" to the internet. Her weekly "Dearly Beloved" letters circulated to family, extended family, family friends, and missionaries around the world. They chronicled daily life, philosophical musings, aesthetic contemplation, and memorializing yesteryear.

But the greatest memorializing she did was the careful crafting of Treasure Island. More than just the name, the presence of she and my grandfather benevolently haunts every square inch of the land and cottage. Everything we did and do while we're there have been passed on to us by them and by my parents who learned it from them.

Building Fires,
Roasting Marshmellows,
Fishing from the boat,
Fishing from the dock,
Wading in the shallows,
Swimming through the bullrushes,
Building minnow traps out of huge stones,
Hunting for Geode treasures,
Discovering Crayfish and Clams
Hiking through woods,
Climbing rocks,
Building forts,
Climbing trees,
Reading in Hammocks...

All the time for stillness, meditation, reflection helps open me up to the psychogeography of the place....

And I always hope that as I return to my work and the rhythms and cycles of everyday that I can retain some of that wonder, that curiousity, that nostalgia, that hope that reverberate around being at Treasure Island...

peace~