Summer is a wonderful time for remembering. For some of us senior citizens lucky enough to have grown up in Maine, our childhood summers are particularly evocative.

Back in the 1940s, it seemed like a long way from Windham to Boothbay Harbor, especially if you were a kid. But for many years, my family traveled to Boothbay Harbor on a regular basis. We didn’t view it as a resort or know it was famous for anything. We took for granted the post card views of a harbor filled with ships and lobster boats.

The first trip of the summer happened every Memorial Day, or the Sunday before. This was when Memorial Day was May 30. What seems like such a terrific memory now was viewed quite differently back then.

Reluctantly, we four children squeezed in the back seat of the car, with the youngest in the front with my parents. We fidgeted and argued about who would sit by the window, but once under way, we were silent for the rest of the trip down old Route 1. An occasional comment from my father to look at something, like the hulking rotting ship bones sticking out of the water, or seal pups laying around on rocks in a cove, was all that broke the silence.

We didn’t realize we were part of a Memorial Day tradition, that of going back to hometowns to pay respect to those who had passed away.

My father was born in Boothbay Harbor. His father was a fisherman and his mother sold the catch, door to door. She, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, caught the flu in 1918 and died that year when my father was only 3 years old. Even though he had no recollection of his mother, most years around Memorial Day, he went to Boothbay Harbor to visit her grave and those of other relatives from the Brewer and Kelley families.

We children did not visit the cemetery. Our mother had a rule – kids didn’t go to funerals or cemeteries. “Plenty of time for that later,” she’d say, so while the grownups went to the graveyards, we stayed with our father’s grandparents, Emerson and Annie Brewer, at their house in the area called Spruce Point. They lived right on the ocean, as did most of the fishermen. Today, this whole area is off limits.

The Brewers were all fishermen. On Memorial Day, after the adults had come back from the cemetery, we had a big dinner of lobsters, clams, corn on the cob and potato salad. We watched the tide come in and baby seals playing, the seagulls shrieking about, and played croquet and wondered how much longer we had to stay.

While we were there, we visited several older relatives who all lived in the harbor or nearby Newcastle. Their old fashioned names – Aunt Grace, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Luther, twin uncles named Collis and Hollis – remind me today of their life in tidy little houses next to the ocean, with a short lawn dropping off to the sea and a dock where a boat was always tied up. Piles of lobster traps and bright colored buoys were great places to clamber around and play and the smell of salt and the ocean pervaded everything.

When we went inside the houses, were treated to cool glasses of lemonade in dark rooms, long tables covered with lacy or embroidered tablecloths. The elderly relatives talked quietly about those who had “passed” and the influx of the summer folks.

Here in Windham, we had two or three parades every Memorial Day. There were gatherings in North Windham, in the center and in the village of South Windham. We decorated our doll carriages, getting ready for the parade.

Neighbors and relatives visited. Gardens had to be planted. There were cookouts and picnics to attend to, and each year, more graves in nearby cemeteries to get ready for Memorial Day. And as they still do, the adults pestered “the town” about getting the cemeteries mowed. The kids didn’t know what the fuss was all about.

As we got older, my mother eased the ban on children going to cemeteries, and soon, we were enthusiastically picking bunches of lilacs, long stems of pussywillows, branches of forsythia and crumpled up bunches of violets, and taking them to the old Chase Cemetery. We piled them up against our grandmother’s gravestone, and our grandfather Sawyer’s, and even by the tiny little stone where our mother’s baby brother was buried. Trips to the cemetery were lessons in family history. Little did we know then that, no matter what else life brought us, we’d be doing this every year, at many other gravestones and in other cemeteries, remembering other people.

After the initial trip Down East on Memorial Day, the rest of the summer was spent doing chores around the house, feeding the chickens and playing outdoors. We picked berries and watched our grandfather prepare the garden with his old team of horses. Later, when everything was “up,” we spent hours pulling weeds or picking off potato bugs or tomato worms.

About once a month we’d go Down East. Our relatives would be complaining about the traffic and the summer people, who changed the small coastal town into a hub of sun-burned tourists wearing sunglasses and shorts. We would silently listen, anxious to get in the car and come home to Windham, where we had cousins to play with and adventures waiting in the nearby woods surrounding our house.

This summer, as you enjoy the better weather and visiting with friends and relatives, take a few minutes some day and jot down your memories from your childhood summers. I’ll bet you’ll remember things long forgotten.

Copy the Story Link