Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Read Free Book Online Page A

though the tract Samson obtained was only fifteen miles from town—practically next door, in our car-choked era—in his day, getting there required a migration. White winters were passed in the banks of Burlington and Boston, tranquil summers on sailboats that skimmed the depths. And in between, a twice-yearly trek, first in buggies, then in Model Ts, of wives, sons, daughters, dogs, dresses, chairs, apples, potatoes, novels, tennis rackets. And a twice-weekly delivery of groceries.
    Samson envisaged a village peopled with Winslows in the land he named Winloch. He had hundreds of meadowed and forested acres to work with, and set out to build the Dining Hall with his own two hands (he was helped by those same workingmen who braved the roofline and replaced burst pipes, but to mention them was to lessen the Winloch mythology). The cottages sprouted up, in turn, around the great hall, like the plants they were named for—Trillium and Queen Anne’s Lace and Bittersweet and Goldenrod and Chicory—and were soon peopled with Samson’s descendants and their companions: a parade of loyal, soggy Labradors, Newfoundlands, Jack Russells, and a few memorably morose basset hounds, ears permanently sodden from their daily wades.
    Soon, dinghies littered the low-lying sandstone outcroppings and the rocky beaches of the shoreline. As more land became available, Winloch acquired it, so that, by the time Samson’s great-great-great-grandchildren were learning how to swim off the docks that stretched like fingers from the thirty-some-odd cottages into the water, the compound occupied two miles of the shore of Lake Champlain insheltered Winslow Bay, a favorite of the mooring yachts down from Canada.
    I had gathered a few of these snippets from Ev and her nonchalant boarding school friends who’d visited us during the spring, but those conversations had mostly centered on which of Ev’s cousins was cutest or the nearest place you could drive for underage booze. Once I felt sure Ev’s invitation was airtight, I conducted my own research, a stealthy interlibrary loan with the help of my friend Janice the librarian, and
Samson Winslow: The Man, the Dream, the Vision
and
The Burlington Winslows
both found their ways from northern libraries into my hands. I’d spent one damp March weekend in the gothic Reserve Room of the college library, poring over photographs of Winloch in the early part of the twentieth century, as rain lashed the windows in a satisfying thrum. Samson had been aptly named—his hair was so positively mane-like toward the end of his life that one couldn’t help wonder if his idyll would have crumbled had his locks been cut. He seemed to my imagination to be the sort of man who’d loom large in family stories, but the few times I dared prompt Ev for a really great Samson tale she’d rolled her eyes and muttered a “You’re so weird.”
    It had stopped raining, but I slipped on Ev’s muddy rubber boots at the back door and made my way down the narrow path that led to Bittersweet Cove, our private bit of lake. It was a small cove, hugged on three sides by wooded, rocky land. A stairway cut down to the small beach directly below the kitchen, or one could take a more precarious route—continuing along the left arm of the hug on slippery pine needles (and, after a rainstorm, diminutive mudslides) and, finally, out onto a low, flat rock just above the waterline that offered one a magnificent view of the outer bay. That was my intended destination, but, as I slid and cursed, the rubber boots offering notraction, I was startled at the sight of a slender, magnificent creature skimming along the surface of the larger lake, then alighting, soundlessly, upon the very spot I’d been aiming for.
    The bird stood perfectly still. A great blue heron. We’d had them at the river back in Oregon, but they’d always looked so scrappy. This one belonged here. Long lines, calm face, elegant—a Winslow. The heron regarded me coldly,