Fall Memories of the Summer of Our Innocence

As my hands tap out these words, I am smiling, thinking about Dan and Norma, Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man series of movies I watched as a child. Our little black dog Ruby took the place of their little white dog Asta. I loved the repartee. We were so much like them. Instead of tipsy on martinis, we were tipsy on wine.

What brought these memories back? It is fall, with pumpkins and gourds on doorsteps. Halloween costumes have been put away and the parents are busy picking through their children’s booty when the kids are in bed, having crashed from their sugar high. The leaves are spectacular this year. Cars fill the two-lane streets with families waiting in line to go apple picking.

Decades ago, we two would take drives north to see our youngest play football in New Hampshire on sunlit Saturdays in the crisp autumn air. Between home games, we would drive to Maine and stay in a little hotel in Ogunquit along the Marginal Way. We would walk to Perkins Cove, sometimes holding hands and debating, not bickering, debating whether the foliage had reached its peak or the best was yet to come. Then the frost would free the branches and blanket the ground with rust colored leaves.

Once, in the October chill, we boarded a boat from Perkins Cove to see the coastline and the lighthouse in York.

Years later, long after our son’s college years, we returned to New England on a summer vacation. We first attended our nephew’s wedding, then stopped at the University of New Hampshire. We had the good fortune to reminisce with Coach Mac about our son’s team, the team that had taken Mac to the playoffs for the first time as a head coach.

We rented a room for the week in a motel with a pool across from the beach in York. On our first night, we drove to a restaurant near the lighthouse we had seen years before from the Perkins Cove boat. Norma’s symptoms were becoming pronounced. She had been back and forth to her doctor’s office and they hadn’t found the cause of her stomach problems and her loss of weight.

As we walked to Nubble Lighthouse, I caught her before she fainted.

True to being the daughter of a Scottish soldier, she laughed at me. Nora, teasing Nick. She called me her knight in a shining New Hampshire Football T-shirt. We sat on the rocks on the coast, and I made her take sips of water until she felt strong enough to walk.

Despite her laughter, I knew she was shaken. I promised her that we would get to the bottom of it.

This was the last summer of our innocence, before we entered those different worlds: hers, living with a cancer diagnosis, and mine, peering from outside, loving and caring for her.