A house resurfaced from a lake

A house resurfaced from a lake

Sometimes a place returns to us long before we decide to return to it

A few days ago, I started watching a new TV series called Sterling Point.

It is one of those delicious summer shows filled with beautiful young people, family secrets, old money, boats, docks, and an impossibly beautiful lake. There is a little bit of The O.C. in it, a little bit of Gossip Girl, except everything seems softened by Canada. Kinder, warmer, less sharp around the edges.

I was hooked almost immediately.

But I soon realized I was not only watching the story.

I was watching the lake.

Something about those little islands, the boats coming and going, the cottages sitting close to the water, the particular green of an Ontario summer kept giving me a strangely warm and fuzzy feeling.

At first I thought of the Thousand Islands. I used to drive the 401 between London, Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa all the time. That whole stretch of Ontario still lives somewhere deep inside me.

Then suddenly another place surfaced.

Midland.

Of course.

My father’s old friend Harvey and his wife Margaret lived there, in a house right beside Georgian Bay.

And just like that, a house I had not thought about for many years came back.

Harvey built that house himself. It was a stone house, sitting almost on the beach of the bay, not far from the marina in Midland. I brought my daughter there three times during the summers when she was young. We stayed with Harvey and Margaret, and twice Harvey took us sailing on Georgian Bay.

I can no longer remember every detail of those visits. Memory is funny that way. Whole years disappear, while one afternoon on a boat can somehow remain.

I remember the water.

I remember Harvey sailing.

I remember my daughter being there with me.

And I remember Margaret.

She was one of those people whose mind always seemed awake. Curious about things. Interested in the world. Someone with whom conversation never felt like small talk.

Harvey died in 2006.

In September 2013, I happened to fly to the University of Toronto for a campus recruiting trip. I suddenly realized how close I was to Midland and called Margaret.

I told her I could rent a car and drive up to see her.

She stopped me.

Harvey had already been gone for seven years, and she was living in a nursing home by then. She joked that she had passed the stage of life when she wanted friends to come and visit her.

So I didn’t go.

But we talked for a long time.

And strangely, despite everything that had changed, she sounded exactly like Margaret.

Still curious. Still intellectual. Still interested.

We talked almost like the old days.

That was the last time I spoke with her.

And then life moved on.

My daughter grew up.

She now lives in Brooklyn.

And here is the funny little trick that life sometimes plays.

The young woman at the center of Sterling Point is from Brooklyn.

So there I was, sitting in California, watching a fictional young woman leave Brooklyn and arrive in Ontario lake country, while somewhere inside my head another young girl was traveling in the opposite direction through time — my own daughter, many summers ago, standing beside me at Harvey and Margaret’s house on Georgian Bay.

Suddenly I could almost see the stone house again.

The beach.

The marina.

The sailboat.

Harvey.

Margaret.

My daughter when she was little.

And myself when I was much younger.

None of this was what the television series was about.

But somehow it was what the television series became about for me.

Six years ago I wrote an essay called A Lost and Found House Tour. It was about another house, in San Francisco, where my father had stayed for only three days in the summer of 1982.

Those three days changed something in him.

Almost forty years later, I went back to that house and tried to find the place where my father had once imagined another life for himself — and another life for me.

I ended that essay by writing that my father had left his heart in that house, and had asked his daughter to go fetch it.

Only now do I realize how many houses we carry with us.

Some we lived in.

Some we only visited.

Some belonged to people we loved.

And some disappear so completely from our daily thoughts that we believe we have forgotten them.

Until one evening, a fictional lake appears on a television screen.

A boat crosses the water.

Ontario summer light falls across a dock.

And suddenly, there it is.

A stone house on Georgian Bay.

Harvey is still there.

Margaret is still there.

My daughter is young again.

And we are going sailing.

I think I will go back to Midland.

Not to find the house exactly as it was. I know better now.

I just want to stand beside Georgian Bay again and look at the water, carrying everyone who once stood there with me.