In another Chronicle, I took up details about having a home, which was difficult to finance and demanding for upkeep and maintenance. Nothing spectacular, but a substantial investment of time and energy. More than a decade ago, I received a note from my mortgage holder congratulating us on paying off the mortgage and enclosing the clear title. We went out to dinner and celebrated.
But all through my lifetime, I have been aware that many families have more than one home and delight in going from one to the other. Some of the more prosperous folks in my little home town had fishing shacks on nearby lakes and streams. Some of them had houses or apartments in Florida where they went after the hurricane season and returned in the springtime.
When I got to college in Missouri and Wisconsin, I met classmates whose families had summer houses on lakes. And, a few times, I was invited to spend a weekend swimming and relaxing. Particularly in Wisconsin, where the houses were closed up for the winter.
In Chicago, we met dozens of families who had cottages in Wisconsin or Michigan. The family would go for the summer when school ended and the husband commuted a hundred miles or more on weekends and holidays. One good friend had a family home in New Hampshire, where we spent a couple of weeks climbing small mountains and swimming in their pond. I met New York City dwellers who drove out onto Long Island or up the Hudson River Valley. They had summer theaters and concerts and some very fancy restaurants. The houses we visited had extra bedrooms for visitors. A few we visited were built for winter occupancy, but only once did we ever join anyone.
Our winter visit was to a radiologist friend from Toronto, who had an elegant cottage 150 miles north in the Muskoka lakes in Ontario. One year, when Diana and I attended the February meeting of the Canadian Association of Radiology, we drove up to Muskoka for a weekend. It was -30°F. The road into their lakefront cottage was not plowed out. We drove to their caretaker in his home across the lake. He put us on his snowmobiles and we zipped across the frozen lake. Then we got into the cottage, turned on the electric heaters, started a fire in the stove, turned on the pump to bring water out of the bottom of the lake, and plugged in electric blankets. The next morning we activated their snowmobile. We drove their car around the lake to the end of the plowed road a quarter mile up the hill. It warmed up 30°, to zero. In the afternoon, it began to sleet. The next day, we closed the house, drained the water, doused the fire in the stove, and hiked up to the car. It was a tough weekend and our hosts never went back in the winter.
When we moved to Washington, we found that some neighbors had summer places along the Atlantic coast in Delaware and Maryland. Others had cottages on the Chesapeake Bay. Others spent their weekends in the mountains west and north of our city. A growing number had houses or condos in Florida.
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