I was a teenager when I fell in love with my first pergola. Probably fifteen.
I worked at a hotel at the beach. Calling it a beach house would be more accurate. A hotel leads one to think of a staff wearing uniforms and coordinating colors. This was a beach house in a beach town. The beach town was the real deal. Weathered wood shingles grayed in the sun. There was a deli down the street with ceilings which hung so low that I recall the owner tilting his head a little when he served up the sub sandwiches.
There was nothing about this town which was ostentatious. If you wanted to gamble or see something exotic, Atlantic City was ten miles north. There were Miss America pageants there. The morning after the contest, the beauty queen would take a dip in the ocean, the same ocean where this beach town was. The beach town and Atlantic City shared the same ocean, but that was all.
Everything about this town urged people to be real. No sense in doing your hair. Between the wind and the humidity, your hair would choose its own path. You might come prepared for a day at the beach with seventeen books, five magazines, a picnic basket and a lawn chair, but given time you would learn to prune it down to your favorite beach towel and flip flops. The beach wooed people into simplicity.
I worked at the beach house during a batch of eleven summers, starting with the one when I was thirteen and awkward, wore too much eye makeup and pretended to care about nothing. A few years later and with a great deal of love and patience by the owners of the hotel, I grew to care more about the state of the hotel and the comfort of the guests more than how much hair spray I had left.
I started planting flowers and herbs. The hotel was kind of landlocked by concrete sidewalks, so I bought a family of terra planters and an extra large bag of soil to start the seedlings. After my work hours, I would sit on the back deck and plant the seeds in large grids with a seed starter kit. My friend Robby would come to visit me and we would talk about nothing in particular. He was the big brother I never had and way cooler than my younger, squawky siblings. He had long hair and surfed a lot.
It was there on that back deck that I would sit and look into the yards behind the hotel, where I saw my first pergola. The structure of the pergola had nothing to offer, really. It was a house with no walls. It looked like a half-thought. It was open and breezy and I inexplicably fell in love with it. But at fifteen-some years of age, I took out my camera–the kind with film, mind you–and took a shot.
One day when I was in my twenties, the owner of the hotel wanted to talk to me about buying the place. I was deeply in college and had no business buying a property, but I agreed to talk so we did. He was kind and generous and offered many different ways for me to purchase it. He never tried to push me, he just provided options. I knew the timing wasn't right and had to leave the offer. I think he knew the timing wasn't right either.
Those eleven summers are locked in the recesses of my mind as points on the horizon, as safe places to which I go when I need to be reminded of the "in-between" times in life. They serve as an anchor for my mind when I feel unmoored and drifting, like I've been sitting on a boat all afternoon and still can't get my sea legs.
I remember that place, the worn, weathered wood steps it offered me and the terra pots to substitute the lack of land. It gave me cheap flip-flops and a book and let me leave until evening when I'd return to find my people–all pergolas–offering structure and protection and loose, kind boundaries.
