This summer was rapidly turning into the summer that never was and I have had a low grade seething rage as a result. Luckily, this past weekend offered a brief respite from my sulkiness and was filled with all things summery and delightful.

My generous cousin of the dust bunny chronicles very bravely invited her cousins for a weekend at her gorgeous cottage. If I ever own a cottage I think I’d have a secret cottage for fear of constantly needing to invite people. I suppose others are more generous with such things and perhaps that is why they are deserving of cottages while I have to make do with sympathy invites.

I had some trepidation about the cottage weekend. Family has a way of  making me revert back to my eleven year old self, complete with coke-bottle glasses and awkward shyness. Regardless of how often I have reinvented myself or how confident I may think I am, my family can see through any new incarnations and clearly remember the nerdy geek I used to be.

It may have been the copious bottles of wine, the overeating and midnight drunken skinny dipping. Perhaps I was delirious on corn and mosquito bites and martinis and bug spray. Maybe it was hypothermia setting in after a cold morning swim with zero sun and a biting breeze. Somehow despite my worries, the rain showers and relentless bugs, I felt warm and happy and as if we had all come together in a new way. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that as much as I may resist revisiting my nerdy self, it is grounding to be with people who have known me from the time I was born. We may not be day to day cousins but we have been together through weddings, births and deaths, and there is something about that shared history that is comforting.

This may turn out to be one of the coldest summers we’ve had in decades and the sun has been a miserable tease throughout, but somehow the weekend left me feeling warm and glowing nonetheless.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.