Tag: Jersey Shore

Grief & Loss · Nostalgic Posts

It’s Only Water

Beth DeFries4 Comments

One Wednesday night, this past February, my cousin sent a Telegram message in our family’s shore house management thread saying that the thermostat app was showing the furnace as on a constant run, an atypical readout, for sure. She asked if someone would be able to go by the house to check on the thermostat and see if anything looked “funny”. Mike and I offered to swing by.

On the drive to the house that evening, I felt unusually calm. It was cold. Freezing, really, though warmer than earlier in the week when lows dropped to as little as three degrees (F) in our area, after multiple weeks of consistent, below freezing temps. On the way to the house, the car was rattling so we pulled into a parking lot and found there to be ice thoroughly frozen into one of the tire spokes. We chipped the ice out with our bare fingers, too clunky in our gloves, and a windshield scraper and continued on in pursuit of ascertaining the root of our greater uncertainty.

We parked at the curb in line with the front porch steps, the ground still coated in long-frozen snow, remnants from January’s relentless winter storms. Once we reached the porch, I felt suddenly light-headed. My insides contracted. It was the sound of rain that caused this reaction, the sound of rain when it was dry outside.

I unlocked the door with the leopard print key copy that Arlene made for me a long time ago and we stepped into the entry hall. My heart started to beat light and fast.

“Where is it coming from?!” I said, or maybe I didn’t. From the volume, it could have been coming from everywhere. Panic was bombarding every fiber of my consciousness.

The first floor of the house can be walked in a circle, always a great feature as a kid running around with my cousins, or lately, running around with my cousin’s son. I can’t remember now if I went left toward the kitchen or right toward the dining room. It doesn’t really matter, I guess. It was raining in both directions, after all.

“We should turn the water off,” I said.

We went down to the basement where we found it raining as well. The water rose above the bottom step; we estimated it was about a foot high where we could see it. And here I once thought of indoor home swimming pools as the epitome of luxury.

Looking at the water accumulation, I could feel my pulse in my ears. My heart raced. All logic turned off and my adrenaline kicked into overdrive. I fully acknowledge my stupidity in this next action. Don’t try this at home, kids.

The water was icy cold and crystal clear as I stepped into it, not to mention mercifully un-electrified. Thank you, Nana. In the glow of my phone flashlight, I waded the twenty-five or so feet to the main water-shutoff in the corner, the water rising higher on my leather boots with the sloped grade of the floor (for proper drainage toward the sump pump). I reached for the shutoff handle and willed it to turn. I worried it wouldn’t for a moment. Then, thank all the gods and angels and spaghetti monsters in the universes, it did. I made it back to the steps, my jeans and wool socks completely soaked through inside my knee-high, squelching boots.

Once back upstairs, we wandered the dark rooms with our phone flashlights, sweeping the lights from corner to corner, like amateur ghost hunters. We waited as the downpour reduced to a drizzle and then to a drip, drip, drip. Dark streaks bled from the dining room ceiling and moldings, down the walls, agonized mascara tears- wood stain and over a century’s worth of rafter-buildup freed from their confines by water. The ceiling, the floor, the furniture- everything reflected the light with a slick sheen.

The rooms appeared to have been victims of a violent attack.

“We should take pictures,” I said.

The storm had raged worst in the dining room, which makes sense. That’s where the plumber ended up finding two burst pipes in the ceiling a couple of days later.

We called a few 24-hour emergency water remediation companies and plumbers that had exaggerated their hours and left a few frantic voicemails feeling increasingly less hopeful that we’d get someone out that night. There was a water remediation company’s van parked down the street addressing a neighbor’s water damage. I ran over to the van and asked the two workers if they knew what we could do in the meantime. One of the men pointed at the phone number on the side of the van and read it out to me. I called and left a voicemail. I never heard back.

Mike said he’d update the family. My gut reaction was to hold in the trauma, keep it to ourselves until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. My gut reaction was illogical and protective. It was frightened and guilty and unsure. Thank goodness for Mike who is impervious to stress and stupidity.

“It’s not great guys…” read the start of his message.

You can say that again.

I tried to mop up the water on the kitchen floor with paper towels, but it just kept refilling which led me to find some of the lower cabinets filled with water as well.

Ever since Mike and I helped to take on managing the house from my aunt and uncle during the spring of 2020, and then recruiting the help of my cousins and sister the following summer, the house and I have had our share of run-ins. My attachment to the place quickly devolved from seeing it as the haven I once did in childhood and when I lived in New York to seeing it as an increasingly unpredictable opponent. I always told myself I was doing it for my family, doing what I could to keep the place going for everyone. Somewhere along the way, I forgot to enjoy the place for myself.

A few weeks before discovering the water damage, Mike had asked me what I most enjoyed about spending time at the house. I answered that my favorite recent memories were playing Five Crowns in huge groups at the dining room table and when people are cooking in the kitchen like Nana and Arlene used to. Finding these two rooms assaulted by water felt personal.

When the house pulls a harrowing stunt, I get a craving for whiskey. Whether it’s 3:00pm on a sunny Friday afternoon and I’m drenched with spray from a hose with a faulty water shutoff as the renters are pulling up, or I’m sweeping remnants of storm seepage from the corners of the basement with thirty minutes till the next renter arrives because the previous ones left an hour late, the sump pump broke during a storm, and the miraculous emergency plumbing repair just finished up. As I stood in the emo version of my family’s house, I could almost taste that sweet, sharp elixir on my tongue.

We texted some of the pictures to Maureen and her husband, Chris. Chris texted back, “Dining room all like ‘I’m ok. Trust me,” along with multiple gifs of mascara-teared characters. I laughed in the hysterical way that precedes crying.

We decided we’d come back in the daylight to assess the damage and take more photos. I had my gym stuff in the car and changed out of my jeans, socks, and boots. We left the house to its dripping, to its settling.

We drove to a pub in Asbury Park. Maureen Venmo’d me $20 for a drink. I ordered an Old Fashioned. I remembered Danielle and Corey’s Old Fashioneds, plentiful and shared in the dining room at the house, just a few summers before. Would that happen again?

The idea that the house could be brought back to a livable state in three months, the repairs- covered by insurance, didn’t seem in the realm of possibility that night. The uncertainty was a big stressor. As we worked with my uncle to set up the insurance claim and adjuster walkthrough, I felt less alone along the path to the place’s resurrection.

My uncle brought a crowbar and a tin of sardines the day of the claims adjuster walkthrough. My sister and my cousins came. I braced myself as my uncle was the first to arrive, after me. I had brought tissues in anticipation of everyone’s arrival, their first in-person look at the damage. My uncle walked in and looked at a big, white recliner that sits in the dining room-side corner of the living room, a source of ongoing family debate.

He said something like, “It’s too bad that chair survived, huh?”

I laughed. He hugged me for a long time and said, “Thank you.”

We ordered pizza on the porch and didn’t eat the sardines. I showed everyone my pictures of the china cabinet with the glasses inside filled with water. We followed the adjuster around from room to room, listening, asking questions, confusing him with our matching dark hair, black coats, black pants, and snow boots.

“I’m the one with the glasses,” I said, trying to help him differentiate.

We formed a “Calamity Consortium”.

We settled in for the “marathon, not a sprint” that the insurance adjuster kept assuring us the process would be. The plumber came and tore apart the dining room wall and ceiling and fixed the burst pipes.

I continued to snap photos with each change of each scene over multiple return visits.

The water remediation company took days to come and even more to get started. It turned out that pipes had been bursting all over New Jersey due to the cold. When the remediators came, they demolished and dried. They dissected the rooms right down to their bones.

As the kitchen demolition was in progress, Nic and I were at the house and the demo team called us into the kitchen to show us some notes they had found on the wall behind where the cabinets had been mounted. Notes from the Keltys and the Kavanaghs, family and friends, looked back at me. Notes from when something similar happened back in 1978 or 1979.

“Academy of St. Aloysius Class of 1983,” read one.

“There’s Nothing Better than a Vetter. Grand Ma says,” read another.

There were declarations of love to “Alan” and “Derek” in rough handwriting, pencil on plaster.

As I read the notes, I felt the past community of the house building around us as though confirming we might actually come out of this ok. Theresa and Billy and Robert and Corine had documented their having been through this before with their signature dose of good humor. Maybe Grand Ma was right.

Since the damage happened, I think of times when someone has knocked over a glass and someone says, “It’s ok; it was only water.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever view that phrase the same way again.

Julia and Nic went to work at bringing the house back to life. Over the weeks, the floors transformed. The walls. The moldings. The window frames. Fresh paint covered the seams and the scars. New furniture was bought and delivered and assembled. We put Nana’s little houses and tchotchkes back on the reconstructed plate rail. Boats and birds and light houses.

It looked like our home again, but better.

We carried the old chandelier to the alley and set it on the grass by the trash. It looked like a cursed relic exorcised from a haunted house.

Fast forward to last week, which I spent at the house. I played with my cousin’s son at the new dining room table, getting crushed at Paw Patrol Uno and creating comic book and non-comic book drawings. We created “Ralph, the couch ghost” out of one of the white chair’s throw pillows, a beach towel, and my sunglasses. We watched fireworks on the beach. I enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evening with my cousins and my aunt, sipping rose and dodging the big dumb beetles that have a tendency to fly right at the window screens, drawn to the cozy glow, within.

I had moments of laughing in the way where it’s hard to stop, a common occurrence in the company of my cousins. I woke up to the birds and watched TV with Eric in the living room. I got a kick out of him immersing himself in his Sonic iPad game on the porch. “OH YEAH!”

Over the week, my relationship with the place started to transform back to its former state with each nostalgic little moment. I felt conscious that the house was for me too and that I enjoy it, that I can do it for me and that, dare I say it, I want to, I think. This place is good, I thought. Sure, it may throw a couple punches now and then, but what old house doesn’t?

Nostalgia is a curious beast. It cuddled up around my feet while I was sipping Wedgewood mugs of tea on the couch and the porch. It glowed reassuringly from the hall, beneath the door of the room my cousins and I always slept in, growing up. It chirped in the tree down the street in the mornings and blew through the whistles on the lifeguard stands. It transported and comforted and fed me. It fueled my relaxation.

Finding the water damage this winter was among the most stressful moments in my life. Enjoying the house again once it was fixed back up felt just as significant though. I know in my head it’s not a person, but I don’t know, it’s comfort and coziness and its gathering us together in a positive way felt pretty personal to me.

After all, I mean, it was only water, right?

Poetry

The Harbor Seals

Beth DeFries2 Comments

Have you read the myths of selkies come ashore?

Of seals that molt their skin and emerge in human form

To walk among men, in likeness?

Such creatures born of Celtic lore

And Norse oral tradition, bred through stories told and retold

Of their wanderings from the sea.

Their magic raiment, disguised as oiled, dark hair

Is their return fare to sparkling waters and though may be shed long

May not be lost, or ever shall they live on land, parted from the sea.

At winter’s end, the harbor seals return to the bay

And rest their bellies upon the timber pilings when the tide’s rise allows.

Crowds flock to the rocks along the bayfront to catch a glimpse,

Not bothering to look for pools of oiled, dark coats hidden in the crevices,

Their gazes fixed only upon the ripples in the water’s surface.

And so, the selkies wander freely here and walk about the land in day

And slip into their skin each night, returning home to the cool waters

When they’ve grown weary of the shore.

Cozy Posts · Nostalgic Posts

Good Bones

Beth DeFries1 Comment

The heart of the shore house beats with the influx of familiar faces after the renting geese who flocked here for a change of scenery migrate home. The stairs creak in welcome at the sound of our identifiable steps and the walls sigh with relief as we walk through the front door and exchange warm greetings amongst family. The smiles, raised glasses, wagging tails, and toddler hugs refuel our tired spirits and remind us that although we share this place with so many, it is ultimately ours and together, we are home.

The shore house, though never my primary residence, is the home that I remember best from my childhood. It is where I spent my summers with my Nana and my Aunt Arlene. It is where I learned to cook with way too much butter and salt which I’ve since learned to remediate. It is where I learned the manners of a lady and sometimes defied that lesson by channeling a hereditary instinct to be wild thanks to the generation before me (though it is now impossible to mislay the cup, napkin, knife, and fork in a table setting).

The shore house has seen me shattered, coming back to a gloom within its walls that seemed they’d never feel full again the day my Aunt Arlene lost her battle with pancreatic cancer. The shore house helped me to start the healing process in the days that followed. It is where I learned the benefits of solitude, self-reflection, and the great company and support that you can find on the pages of a book.

The shore house, along with my Nana and Aunt Arlene, is why I know my family so well, why my cousins are more like sisters to me and my sister, and why I feel a need to spend so much effort nurturing a building, these days, despite the fact that doing so can push me to my stress limits better than anything else can.

With the shore house, my Nana and her sister created a home for all of the family to feel is ours. Nurturing the space reciprocates a respect for the value that it adds and has added to our family’s shared experience. In our shared home, we strive for functionality and something that is easier to care for, for the benefit of our migrating guests, but we also make sure that there is an abundance of coziness for ourselves as well.

Coziness, to me, is a combination of functionality, minimalism, and personal identity. Sometimes coziness seems like something else entirely to other members of my family. We make it work, though I can’t fully say I understand how.

Conch shells, Bananagrams tiles, paintings of ships in storms, lighthouse figurines, and donation bags coexist.

Sisters, cousins, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, husbands, fiancées, Daisy (and Dixie), and friends coexist.

Someone always has to sleep in Room 6 and wake up with a head bruise or two, courtesy of the steeply sloped ceiling.

There are often more than twenty-five pairs of shoes by the front door. The TV volume always fuels debate for what is to be considered a reasonable volume, as my Nana used to say. It takes hours to settle on a movie to watch and then someone inevitably leaves the room just after we hit play.

At the shore house, we drink way too much whiskey, too much wine, and just enough beer. Cheese and See’s Candies are considered reasonable meals. We stay up too late talking and laughing on the porch. We wake up to Daisy sniffing at the bedroom door and come downstairs to the perfume of coffee, the sound of cartoons, and a chorus of good mornings in the living room with each new entrant.

There are porch people and couch people and beach people.

The showers are usually taken.

The showers are cold when it’s finally your turn.

The kitchen is stifling in the evening no matter what setting the ceiling fan is on.

Eggs, oatmeal, bacon, and Del Ponte’s treats nourish us in the mornings – and coffee, of course. “I could do another cup,” sings the chorus of porch people.

We smell like sunscreen and the ocean. We are fiercely competitive at Five Crowns and The Fishbowl Game. Our shoulders sparkle with dried, Atlantic salt. We find sand in unexpected places. We could write an encyclopedia of inside jokes at the end of each summer, but sometimes forget how they originated.

We welcome, we nurture, we work hard and together. We keep the dream going for another year and another year and another year, thinking it’s getting easier until something hard happens. And then we remind ourselves that despite occasional stress fractures, it’s possible to heal, and our house has good bones.

No Hurries, No Worries
Cozy Posts

No Hurries, No Worries

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

Fully breakfasted and armed with a steaming mug of chamomile and honey, I sit on our turquoise couch, which is turning more green than blue from soaking up the frequent eastern sunshine that streams through our living room windows. Outside those windows waits a perfectly clear fall day. The “Big Blue” suits its nickname this morning, sparkling dreamily up at me. Sailboats drift calmly in a gentle, southward wind and speed boats bounce excitedly on the surface of the water, trailing long, fluffy, white tails.

With only wisps of clouds on the distant horizon, sweeping glows of sunshine, and a cool, lazy breeze, today is simply beautiful and I feel lucky to be an audience to it, comp-ticketed for no reason other than that this is where we live.

We have only one errand to run today and the rest of the time is open and changeable as the Big Blue. Sometimes, having nothing much to do is exactly the right medicine for an overworked mind.

As an over-planner, these sorts of days can be confusing, sometimes even frustrating, to me. Sometimes, I’ll think, I should have planned something to do with all this time; what a waste. Sometimes, I chance upon these sorts of days after cancelled plans or changes in weather patterns and am bored, longing for an activity that I do not have to brainstorm and choose. This is not the case today and I’m excited to make the plan as we go, lagging behind the heels of the day as they race on ahead of us toward midnight. We are in no rush to catch up.

My usual wandering mind is calm and quiet this morning, patient and relaxed, just waiting to go with the flow of where the cool breeze takes us. I am grateful that my brain is not buzzing, as usual, with the need to tidy or plan, to start and complete work tasks, or to make decisions. This morning, it is just living in the moment and that is exactly what the rest of me needs.

I feel calm and rested for the first time in over a week, the anxiety drained out of me and replaced with pleasant, positive thoughts and soothing warm tea and honey to balm the wounds. Looking out at the ocean, twinkling reassuringly, I am reminded that I am in exactly the right place and that I want to go dip my toes in the Atlantic’s crisp, chilly shallows later on, just for a moment, before I chicken out and hide my feet in a blanket of cool sand.

The Hospitality of Cheese
Cozy Posts

The Hospitality of Cheese

Beth DeFries1 Comment

Any person who has been a guest in our home is likely familiar with being greeted with a hearty, “Welcome!” and a platter or cutting board full of sliced summer sausage, neat columns or concentric circles of Carr’s Table Water Crackers, and fresh-off-the-block slices of Kerry Gold Irish Cheddar. I learned the tried and true hospitality trick of providing immediately accessible snacks for guests by growing up as part of a large extended family who held frequent family gatherings.

Hosting guests is one of my all time favorite activities, likely because I grew up with the fond experiences of being a welcomed guest and learning how to be a host from the happy examples set by my immediate and extended family. These examples just always happened to involve appetizers and plentiful beverages.

When we lived in Williamsburg, we had the fortune of hosting guests frequently. We were not usually the main destination or reason to visit New York for most of our out of town guests. No, we were usually just a stopover for a night after a flight into JFK or Laguardia or a birthday dinner, Broadway show, or holiday party, but it always felt nice to be a stop on their list.

Our railroad style apartment on Union Avenue was full of cozy character and hosted countless guests over the years, some frequent visitors, and some one time only stays. When we first saw the apartment in March of 2015, I was sold immediately, standing in what would be our kitchen for the next five years, a warmth in my heart and a tingle on my skin, not yet knowing how many happy memories were waiting to be made within the confines of its red brick walls, and honey hardwood and rust tile floors.

The brick brownstone with six units was estimated built in 1895 and some of the accents would attest to that estimation. Our large, sunlit bedroom had an old, sealed-off brick fireplace growing up the wall like English ivy and our modern stove was nestled in what used to be a brick kitchen hearth. The light wooden cabinets and laminate-topped peninsula counter added practical function and a homely, cottage appearance to the atmosphere of our space and contradicted the metropolis environment of the bustling city that surrounded us.

Our Union Avenue apartment was a place where guests knew they were welcome to a hearty snack, warm meal, cold beer and red wine in the evening, clean sheets and blankets for a comfortable night’s rest on our turquoise couch, and fresh Brooklyn bagels with a mug of hot tea or coffee in the morning.

Writing about it now makes me miss our old home so much.

We pushed up our move by a week this past March when things started shutting down left and right in the city due to the pandemic. If the pandemic had not happened, we’d have been hosting some of my cousins from California that week and taking daily adventures from a meticulously planned itinerary full of truly New York and Brooklyn experiences, things that would give my cousins memories that were unique to our city while also providing Mike and me a chance to give a proper send-off to our regular neighborhood haunts.

But the pandemic did happen.

My cousins made the decision to cancel their trip after their airline offered them vouchers if they chose to cancel and after I let them know it was probably a good idea to cancel as bars, restaurants, theaters, and visiting with our Nana and our cousin’s months old son became either impossible or too risky.

We ended up moving four days after closing on our condo. We did not really get a chance to linger in our goodbyes with our home of five years before driving away in the Uhaul and car, but maybe that is a good thing. It would have made it so hard to allow that emotion to hit me, for my gaze to linger on the nail holes in the walls where our pictures used to hang, on the shiny rectangle on the floor where our warm, multi-colored, striped, shag area rug had been, and to hear the faint echo of laughter, late night chats, Friendsgiving gatherings, and regalings of recent travels from guests just arrived from the airport.

Five months after moving to our new home, the time has finally come to christen this place as a hub of hospitality. Our pictures hang on new walls now and our turquoise couch is still the same with new neighboring furniture to get to know. We no longer have our long, red brick living room wall and brick fireplace and kitchen hearth, but I’m not ever going to complain about our expansive view of the Atlantic that we get to look upon every day. My parents are coming to visit tomorrow and will be our first overnight guests. With much improved scenery, more space to move around, and an actual guest room with four walls and a door, I have high hopes that this place will live up to the cozy memories of gatherings past, conversations shared, trips planned and discussed, and memories made on Union Avenue.

But first, I must buy some cheese.