We were different from everyone else in the neighborhood because we had a summer home--a cottage on a lake in a town known as the Blue Collar Riviera for Chicago's working class. Wauconda, then a farm community on a lake with cheap summer rentals--and my grandmother owned property on which a house was built by my dad (an in-law), uncles and various extended family members. We spent our summers there, although I often dreamed of going to a sleep-away camp, which we could never afford. Our summers were perfect, spent in the company of various cousins, watched over by various adult relations, in a then idyllic setting outside the city. I always knew when we reached Chicago city limits, the air pollution made us ill.
The house and land remain but my mother was not included as one of the owners in the will. Instead, she was left some property in the city, which was lost in a harbinger of what would happen to the summer home when all the uncles were dead. The property fight for the remaining city building was ugly. One cousin wanted to buy it and live in it, another, wealthier cousin wanted to buy it as an investment and eventually sell it outside of the family at a profit. Regardless of what the majority wanted, the wealthy cousin won the property and I knew then that unless I won the lottery, the Wauconda property was doomed once the last uncle died. And that has happened.
So what does this mean? Do I hang on to the past because I have no future? Do I need the cottage because it gives me a sense of my place in this world? Do I simply love it because I was once so happy there? Yes, the property will be sold and others will profit and that is the way of the world. But I feel poorer for it. My full name was inscribed in the concrete cover of the cistern for god's sake! The ramshackle place with it's many expensive peculiarities is part of my life. And I had hoped to be dead when it was sold. I feel again my dad's disappointment and hurt when he discovered that regardless of all the work he did on that place, he was not considered enough a part of the family to participate in ownership. I remember once when he had an opportunity to buy a smaller property nearby and turned it down saying, "Why do we need that when we have the big house?" Little did he know.
Someone once said of me that I'd be poor within a year of winning the lottery because I would give it all away. Yes, but I would have done what I can to ensure that that stupid house with its iffy plumbing would be kept together until there was no one left who cared--and that is only one generation away. People who claim that money does not buy happiness have enough money to make sure that their dreams and hopes become real.
I hate that they are selling that property. I hate that I cannot save it. I feel raped and robbed and left bleeding by the side of the road. This is progress and what happens when it steam rolls over the majority.
