My mother was named “Fay” for her mother’s first name and “Gordon” for her father. Born in 1925, she died in 2007. She and her sister spent all the summers of their childhood at the beach house, which my grandfather rebuilt and retired to in the 40s. Mom said she and her sister cried when electricity reached the beach house. 

In later years, my mother Fay Gordon would not recall carrying water for the cabin as a child, though surely she must have done this. The beach house had no utilities at all. Her mother, my grandmother Fay, cooked on a wood stove and heated water for weekly baths. The outhouse hung over the swampy next-door lot, and light for reading after the sun went down came from oil lamps. A marvelous, imperfect vacation all summer long. Paradise for children. 

Fay Gordon and her sister cleaned sooty glass oil lamp chimneys on Tuesdays. That was the only chore she spoke of. Perhaps the chore was lightened because the girls did it together as they did so many things together in the summers on the Pacific shore. They dug clams and used a long-handled rake to gather crabs for supper, but never ate the mussels. She had never eaten the wild salal berries either, fearing they were poisonous. Never gathered salmon berries or thimbleberries. Their choices were simple ones. Children pretended the sand was poison, arms held out, balancing barefoot on drift logs. The daily milk wagon, long walks to Neahkahnie Mountain for picnics and to pick huckleberries or a ride north for roller skating in Cannon Beach. She and her sister played all day, sometimes in company of cousins, and their mother cleaned and cooked. 

Her mother never complained about being stuck miles beyond the nearest road for three months each year. Cousins filled the upstairs dorm for weeks at a time. She sighed over her in-laws’ reimbursement for toilet paper, but dutifully collected the supplies they would need between Memorial Day and Labor Day. All carted from Portland to the beach house in June. She and the children first arrived by car or on the train as far as Seaside and then the long ride along the shore at low tide, the tight squeeze around Hug Point, the house opened from a long off-season. Mice had nested in the attic. Fay Gordon remembered painting the trim each year, or that it was painted each year a color she called “Chinese red,” bright red-orange. Surely she was not trusted at four years of age or seven or even twelve years with a bristle brush and oil-based enamel paint.

My grandmother baked and canned, cleaned, and did laundry in tubs by hand, even in the city. No servant like in the movies, just Fay, barely five feet tall, who was compelled at sixteen to decline the Reed College scholarship in order to help support her family. She had always worked hard. Once learning Latin and poetry and piano, then in a shipping office, and finally women’s work as a wife. 

It was only much later in her life that it occurred to Fay Gordon how these summers might have been difficult for my grandmother. Perhaps my mother’s idyllic barely-supervised summers were not easy for her own mother. Salt-stained clothing and baths and cooking and dishes for just herself and her daughters and often for another three or seven children, without running water or electricity.

“My poor mother,” my mother would say when she was old herself. “What a lot of work.”

But I wonder. Children off playing outdoors was likely a relief. Fay Gordon and her sister were stuck on a seastack when they failed to notice the rising water and had to wait out the tide. They came to no harm. Their dog chased up and down the beach until it caught the seagull and promptly let it go. No poisonous snakes or insects. No broken bones. No recollections of illness. Sand castles. Beach fires. The ocean’s roar. Freedom for their mother too?

My grandmother had summer to herself as well. Despite the labor, perhaps she spent hours each day beach combing, lying back on the sand under a canvas shade, reading. 

I like to think of my grandmother Fay enjoying her summer free of social duties and husbandly demands. My grandfather was known to be demanding. My grandmother was known to be kind. I like to think of her kneading her four loaves of Thursday bread as later would my mother when I was small, baking a pie with wild huckleberries, soaking clothing and hanging it to dry. Maybe even the work was pleasant when there was no one to insist it be perfect. Maybe the work was simple, satisfying, and like the weather, sweet. Lovely summers.

Even so, someone carried water from the creek.