The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home

Summary (from the publisher): Faced with the sale of the century-old family summer house on Cape Cod where he had spent forty-two summers, George Howe Colt returned for one last stay with his wife and children. This poignant tribute to the eleven-bedroom jumble of gables, bays, and dormers that watched over weddings, divorces, deaths, anniversaries, birthdays, breakdowns, and love affairs for five generations interweaves Colt's final visit with memories of a lifetime of summers.

Run-down yet romantic, The Big House stands not only as a cherished reminder of summer's ephemeral pleasures but also as a powerful symbol of a vanishing way of life.

 

Review: "Although I have spent only a month or two here each year for four decades, I have always thought of it as home, if home is the one place that will be in your bones forever."

 

In 1903, author George Howe Colt's great-grandfather Ned Atkinson first travelled by horse and carriage to his new summer home in Wings Neck on Cape Code. "It is an extraordinary structure, a massive, four-story, shingle-style house as contorted and fantastic as something a child might build with wooden blocks " (11). This home, eventually referred to within the family as "the Big House" became a central meeting place for five generations of the family: "It has been a gathering place for my family for five generations. The house has watched over five weddings, four divorces, three deaths, several nervous breakdowns, an untold number of conceptions, and countless birthday parties, anniversaries, and love affairs" (12).  Colt has spent several weeks of every summer of his 42 years at the house, which was inherited by his grandmother. After his grandparents' death, the fate of the sprawling house (that includes eleven bedrooms and seven fireplaces) became uncertain and Colt began writing this ode to the house as he makes what he fears may be his last visit to the house, accompanied by his own children.

 

Although the loss of a vacation home sounds like a privation familiar only to the privileged, Colt makes it clear that this is not about the loss of luxury but rather the loss of childhood memories and a connection to his past. This book is a love letter to the house but also to Colt's family and a time gone by. Through the course of the book, Colt centers the house within its social, historical, architectural, and cultural surroundings.  The house is a jumble of rooms, filled with clutter from five generations that has little altered or touched over the years. It is a living archive of his past, but also the largely past habit of American summer homes. Over time, the once vibrant house, filled with a dozen people for weeks at a time, has trickled down to a few visitors at a time. The clay tennis court is full of weeds, the house's rooms named for people long dead or even long forgotten. Three stoves fill the kitchen, two of which haven't worked in decades and were simply scooted over to make room for a new, working one. His grandfather's canes still sit in the foyer, although his grandfather has been dead for years. Colt is a master at conjuring up images and memories of the house so exactly that I felt as if I was there and felt physical pain for the potential loss of a house I've never laid eyes on. The author has somehow made me nostalgic for a time and place I've never experienced.

 

For Colt, the house is like a familiar smell from childhood, one that has the ability to instantly transport you to another time and place. His deep love and affection for the house, which represents home from him, was poignantly brought home by his sharing that sometimes in winter he would dial the house, even though no one was there to answer: "I just wanted to hear that ring, to invoke the pleasant dissonance between the hum of the city and the silence of the house, in which the ringing of the phone echoed so intimately that I almost felt I could walk into the pantry and answer it myself. In the dead of winter, it was the sound of summer" (306). The loss of the Big House represents a sort of death for the author and his family.

 

At times I did lose the thread of the family tree and history. The addition of a family tree could have assisted with this. Additionally, the story of the house is not told in a strictly chronological order but is organized loosely, interspersed with memories as they occur to him. Although this fits with the disorder and jumbled nature of the house itself, it made it more difficult for me to piece together the family history at times.

 

Although I won't spoil the conclusion of this book by revealing what becomes of the Big House, suffice it to say that while happy, it was still a bittersweet ending. I felt enthralled in the charm and spell of the Big House while reading this work of non-fiction - longed to make my halting way to the rocky sea shore, play Sardines in the attic, explore its many nooks and crannies, peer through its photo archives, and then get a 'Colt goodbye' as a I drove away. Colt has done a masterful job of preserving the history-filled house in a way that will far outlast its physical structure. This book is sure to appeal to any who enjoy history, particularly family and architectural ones, or any who have their own memories of a beloved family retreat.

 

Stars: 5