The joy—and responsibility—of belonging to a place
I just returned from two weeks at our cottage on the St. John River, just northeast of the city of Saint John in the Eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick. The cottage is situated on the grounds of a denominational camp ground, established in 1894, and, like many such retreat centers of that era, intended to facilitate spiritual renewal through animated preaching, the fellowship of family and friends, and the beauty of nature.
I feel more rooted there and at home than anywhere else in the universe. All four of my grandparents started coming to this campground prior to World War I. My parents, both children of pastors in our small denomination, first met here in the late 1930s in the context of the camp’s programming for children. This is the one place I can go and still meet people who remember my grandparents. Even my cottage is part of this rich history. It was originally transported to the grounds in the 1940s as two chicken coops and joined together to make a summer home for a young missionary nurse preparing to go to South Africa. My favorite aunt and uncle lived in the cottage and took care of it during our family friend’s terms on the mission field. While no one else would guess the humble origins of the current cottage structure, well camouflaged as they are by recent improvements, I still feel the welcoming and sustaining presence of the former occupants whenever I open the cottage door. Here, as elsewhere on the grounds, I hear traces of sixty years of conversations with several generations of family and friends, encouraging me, challenging me, and helping me to know—and remember—the kind of person I want to be.
It is here that I feel most keenly the universal human reality of being caught in time—a truth that so often stays unspoken, though lurking always in the back of our minds. We are mortal and finite—here today and gone tomorrow. It was seemingly such a short time ago when I was a teenager walking jauntily with my friends and first loves along the main thoroughfares of the grounds, only vaguely aware of the senior citizens watching from the vantage point of their porch rocking chairs. This summer my husband and I were the ones in the rocking chairs. (Surely, we are not as old as the “old people” of earlier times!)
This year’s visit was like all the other years in many respects. Some of the people we had seen last year were no longer with us. They had crossed that mysterious boundary we had often sung about in the Tabernacle services but had always viewed as abstract and in the far distant future. It comes closer and becomes even more mysterious when those we used to see are on the other side. As in other years, and especially after the pandemic, some of the familiar businesses had closed. This year it was our favorite nearby bakery where we had bought the world’s best sugar-coated fried cakes, date squares, and that rare commodity molasses “war cake” that duplicated the recipe used during the rationing years of World War II.
This year also brought several firsts. It was the first year my three siblings and I were on the grounds at one time without my ninety-five-year-old parents. (Mother had been here every year of her life with the exception of the COVID year.) The four of us each have our own cottages—fortunately. Only one of us inherited the family cottage, which is a story of its own. My parents occupied a large place in the intergenerational family dynamic that includes a host of relatives extending over four generations. We all felt Mum and Dad’s absence—and that vacuum, like all vacuums, begged to be filled. It was interesting—to use the most innocuous word available—to watch the jockeying for place. Outsiders might have missed the clues. It took the subtle form of who got to park in certain spaces, who sat in which chairs at our parents’ cottage, which was immediately dubbed the “classic cottage,” and who earned the privilege of hosting the most lavish evening family feasts. (That one—as real as it is—would be impossible to explain to anyone outside the family!)
This was also the first year I was formally involved in the family camp programming. For about ten days each summer the campground is overflowing with over 1000 people crowded into cottages, mobile homes, tents, and dormitories. There is a full calendar of programming, both inspirational and recreational, for all ages. My formal responsibility started when my father asked if I would host the annual “Heritage Walk” welcoming newcomers to the Camp’s long and multi-faceted story. (As the eldest child and one of two historians among the siblings, I was the obvious heir to this traditional task of my father’s. Even though it was a relatively easy assignment since the script was already there, I have already asked one of my brothers—the other historian—to take it over next year. He is the much better storyteller of the two of us!)
Much more demanding and complicated was assuming leadership for the small archives and heritage center that my parents had established in partnership with the denominational leaders. Mother and Dad had both been raised in the small denomination that birthed the campground and conference center; they felt a calling to keep alive the story of that small group that had existed from 1888 to 1966, when they merged with a much larger denomination. Both had collected artifacts and documents over the course of their lifetime and had become the informal—but well-accepted—“keepers of the story” among their peers. While I feel a loyalty to my parents, I also know that their passion for preserving the story has taken up more space in their lives than I am ready to devote in my own. Fortunately, one of my brothers—the other historian in the family—quite unexpectedly and graciously brought his enthusiasm and creativity to the work that needed to be done for this summer’s programming. Along with interested friends, we will be sorting out this winter how to keep the telling of the story compelling and engaging, rather than merely sentimental—especially for the younger generation. Thanks to my brother’s investment, we had dozens of children and young teenagers visit the archives to do the scavenger and treasure hunts, crossword puzzles, and trivia games he had so thoughtfully prepared.
While exploring the materials my parents collected, I came upon a set of original diaries kept by a young woman who eventually became the first woman to be ordained in all of Canada, and who traveled with her physician husband and young family in 1901 to South Africa to represent our denomination in setting up a clinic, school, and church among the Zulu people. She kept a diary faithfully from the late 1880s into the 1940s. I pored over the diaries spanning the years 1889-1904 that took Ella from her Nova Scotia fishing village to New York City for training and finally to Durban, in what would shortly become the country of South Africa, where she and her family landed after seven weeks on a freighter and in the middle of the turmoil following the recent Boer War. It felt selfish to keep this amazing story to myself—so I agreed to dress up like Rev. Ella Hadassah Kinney Sanders and be interviewed one evening in an open air program. (It was somewhat surreal to realize that she herself had been on this same grounds in 1897, the first year the Tabernacle was built, sharing her travel plans to the assembled audience and hoping for their support.) As a private person, I will certainly not be including more “one-person shows” in my retirement portfolio, but it seemed to go well, or so I was told. The story truly carried itself! I hope it will inspire some of the young Maritime teenagers to their own life-changing adventures.
Finally, along with a small group of my peers, I have accepted an invitation to help write a strategic plan for the future of the camp and conference center. (I thought my days of writing “strategic plans” were over when I retired.) It is not that any of us is looking for more to do! But as retired professionals, all of whom have been shaped powerfully by the mentoring community of this place, we felt an urgency to arrest the seeming randomness of inexorable change that is already turning the grounds into a very different kind of place. What has been primarily a place of peace, predictability, and recreation in recent years has presented a series of invigorating and challenging questions. Like so much I have received from this place over the various stages of my lifetime, the impact of working on this plan has overflowed into the rest of my life.
So much that we confronted in writing the strategic plan is part of this entire season of our lives. How do we as the “elders” in our respective communities pass along stories that have shaped our identities, vocational callings, longstanding relationships, and opportunities for service, to the next generation in a way that inspires them to enter these stories and make them their own? How do we tell the stories in a way that supplies identity and rootedness, in which children are empowered with the courage and creativity to extend each story with their own adventures—rather than to see the past as merely a burden? How do we separate the merely sentimental or the idolatrous and fear-laden worship of tradition from a responsible stewardship of memory that provides perspective and hope in the midst of these turbulent times of uncertainty and change? What is worth hanging onto—even at some cost—and what must we let go of for the sake of even our own freedom—let alone the freedom of the next generation? Where do we draw the line between the efforts of intentionality and agency to shape the future—and the humble submission to aspects of reality that we must simply accept—preferably with gratitude, courage, and creativity rather than resentment, fear, or mere resignation?
I have traveled far and wide over the course of my lifetime across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I never tire of new sights and first-time adventures—and am planning some of those even now. But this summer’s return to our St. John River cottage reminds me that I have not exhausted the riches of joy, learning, and adventure of the people and place where my story began.
Shirley A. Mullen (PhD) is President Emerita of Houghton College and longtime history professor.
Image Credit: the author