Continuation of….A Picnic Became A Lifetime

It was during the war and the soldiers were stationed in camps not far from our cottage.  The Army had taken over a prestigious Inn known as Homeward Inn, at Princess Point, a place where the élite came to spend their summer vacations.  Along with the Inn there were small cabins located on the banks over looking the ocean, the Army was station there as lookouts and guarded the ocean passages.  After the war ended Homeward Inn got back to being a place for the elite to go, Bette Davis and Gary Merrill lived there for several years.

  At the time that the soldiers were there I had an aunt Lydia and several cousins that were of the dating age, as a result the soldiers became frequent visitors to our cottage.  They used to come on horseback on a bridle path that ran through the woods.  At night they would shine the search lights on our cottage.  I remember a bunch of giggling girls.  On weekends they joined us when my father and my uncles would dig clams and we would have big clam bakes and barbecues.  I remember one weekend when the beer was flowing quite freely and all the men were having a grand old time, when the time came for the soldiers to leave my father insisted on taking them back to their camp. This meant that he would have to go several miles; the roadway circled the point of land where Whites Cove was located.  It seemed that his driving ability was not quite what it should have been on that night, and when he came home he had a very large bouquet of garden flowers attached to the rear bumper of his car, your right, he had gone through the Inn’s flower bed.  Needless to say my mother was not pleased, even though the flowers were in fairly good condition and made her a great bouquet.

Yes, even though I had not been to Whites Cove in well over twenty five years it was still a place I fondly remembered. I remembered how my cousin Rita and I would gather hazel nuts along the roadside that lead to the cottages.  Did you know that Hazel nuts look like Hersey kisses and they have  what appears to be spun glass all over them, you have to be very careful when you gather them or you will feel like your hands  have splinters  of spun glass sticking all through them.   My dad would dig a hole in the ground and bury them in a paper bag for about three weeks, and then he would dig them up and shake the skins off.   We would have a grand time swinging in an old hammock and having a great feast on the nuts. We would swing for hours singing “Oh Give Me Land Lots of Land Neath the Starry Stars Above, Don’t Fence Me In” This was a song that was popular back in the Forties. I wonder if she remembers this. What great fun we had digging clams, playing in the tidal pools and wandering through the woods gathering wild flowers, especially lady slippers.

to be continued…..