Fingerprints on the Ceiling

"It does not matter what the outside of a boy or girl looks like, any more than it matters what the outside of a house looks like. It's what goes on inside that counts.

The grandest mansion in the country can be a very unhappy home, while the simplest cottage can be the happiest place in the world."

- Margaret Fishback Powers

I spent some time at my family’s summer cottage on an island in the St. Lawrence River over the May holiday weekends. Every summer since I was three years old I’ve come home to this place. It is a “due north” in the compass of my life, something reliable, known and comfortable beyond description, sort of like a pair of friendly, well-worn jeans. I know every tree and rock, every bump along the path from the dock to the house.

Victoria Day weekend at the end of May we opened it up, dusted cobwebs, made beds, and removed the tokens of affection left behind by grateful winter rodent renters. The opening and closing process has its own inherent rhythm, an order to things and a pacing: dust before sweeping, sweep off shelves before putting staples away, make beds while it’s still light. It’s a cottage thing; there are certain rituals and traditions, as anyone who has a cottage will tell you.

My Dad built this place, with the questionable assistance of some of his six offspring, room by room, year after year. Splinters were a way of life, carrying pine boards from the dock up to whatever project my father had in store for us that summer. We could all swing a hammer, though with varying degrees of accuracy. Few escaped without at least one blackened thumbnail each season.

One summer my father decided to add a large (by cottage standards) master bed and bath with a sliding glass door opening onto the deck overlooking the water just a few feet away. We all helped. It’s the most private bedroom, has a primo view and best of all it has its own small bathroom. When my Mom is not there her room is prime pickings. She wasn’t there this trip. I snagged it.

The ceiling above her bed (my father having gone to the great lumberyard in the sky twelve years ago) is now dotted with the aged stains of varying fingerprints, evidence of the many family members through whose hands the wood passed on its final journey. When first placed side by side the individual planks showed none of these remnants of human contact. The passage of time combined with the residue of human skin oils and fresh-cut pine boards has produced an increasing emergence of distinct, darkened imprints. One can distinguish at a glance a child’s smaller, paler imprint or an adult’s firmer hold. As well, there are several sets over top of one another, blending together, primarily a small child’s, indicating several attempts at fitting the tongue in groove on the roof’s sloped surface.

Lying in my mother’s bed, alone in the silence of wind and rain overhead, I gaze at the ceiling. Memories of the many summers I have spent here wander across my mind. Traditions, myths, and messages – the once invisible fingerprints of my life made visible by time. I think about the fingerprints on the boards above and the stories they tell. I think about the prints I don’t see, not only above me but within me. And I think about the invisible fingerprints left in the lives of my children. They require time to become visible to the eye. But they reside already in the heart and mind.

Last weekend was the Memorial Day holiday so my younger son and his girlfriend drove up from the States, arriving in time for a glorious sunset. I sat on the deck outside my mother’s room with its panoramic view of the majestic river and watched my almost seventeen-year-old boy-man-son show his first love something he loves. “Over here’s where we swim, you just gotta’ watch out for the Zebra mussels. Up there’s where we hang out in the sun and play Scrabble. Over here is where we carved a heart in the tree for Uncle Halsey’s wedding. There’s this huge pike that hangs out by the front dock. We call him Walter. He’s here every year, and every year I try to catch him…”
Watching them walk around this special place, I could see the residue of the countless people who have touched my son in his life: his deceased grandfather, his aunts and uncles, his cousins, his father, and me. There are invisible fingerprints all over him. I trust they will continue to evidence themselves in constructive ways as he matures.

Human beings need traditions. We need stories. We long to define and make sense of the invisible imprints still naked to the eye but known to the heart. We attempt to reassure ourselves with proof of what we know instinctually: that in this tapestry we call life, none of us weaves alone - indeed, we weave side by side - and that there is no separate loom per life, only the universal one on which we weave our own small scene in our own small space.

It can be as beautiful and as intricate as fingerprints on a ceiling.

Cynthia Barlow
May 2006