A Beacon on the Water | Joyce Maynard’s New Hampshire Lakeside Cottage

Joyce and Jim at their wedding in Harrisville, New Hampshire. It was a Fourth of July weekend, and right after they were pronounced husband and wife, fireworks displays in three nearby towns got under way.
Credit: courtesy of Joyce Maynard

The following summer we returned to New Hampshire, and once again we rented the little lake house where the two of us had enjoyed so many of our happiest times the year before—me in the water, Jim on the dock with his feet up, smoking a cigar. A fishing line in the water, maybe.

Not long after our return home to California—15 months after the wedding—Jim suffered an attack of back pain so bad it sent him to the hospital. The scans he got that day revealed a tumor in his pancreas. The doctor who delivered the news offered little hope.

By the next year, Jim had undergone seven rounds of chemotherapy and a 14-hour surgery, but within months it seemed pretty clear the cancer had come back. By the fall, my husband’s weight was down to 100 pounds and dropping daily. By winter, I knew he was unlikely to make it to another summer. We tried hard to locate moments of joy—and we did—but the knowledge of what lay ahead was sometimes almost too much to bear.

Late that fall, a year into our struggle, I did an odd thing. I created a Google search on my laptop. I typed in the words “lake house New Hampshire.”

It was a fantasy, my search for a lake house. I didn’t say this out loud, but I know where it came from: I was trying to summon an image of beauty, tranquility, and comfort, and the idea of a little cottage on the shore of some body of water I could dive into on a hot summer day. A place, 3,000 miles away, that whispered to me of what I loved, that would endure, and reminded me of the days when Jim was well and our time seemed endless.

A lake house is about as far removed from a hospital waiting room, or an infusion center, as a person can get. When I launched my quest for a lake property, our days were filled with doctor visits and frantic middle-of-the-night trips to the emergency room, and sometimes-weeklong hospital stays. In between there were surgeries and CT scans. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I could dream.

And my dreams always featured a lake. 

Within minutes of registering my search, I saw real estate listings begin to show up in my email. Every day a new one appeared—sometimes several. Because I had given no parameters of price to my search (who names the cost of her fantasy, anyway?), the listings I received included multimillion-dollar estates on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee (I could have been Mitt Romney’s neighbor!) and 4,000-square-foot mansions up north. Those places were so far beyond anything we could afford that even clicking on the listings seemed ridiculous, but there was something comforting in looking at the pictures. Maybe there was even something vaguely reassuring in knowing—when I did this—that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my summer in any of those places, anyway. The lake house of my dreams wouldn’t feature granite counter tops or air conditioning. Just an old kitchen table and a screened-in porch, with the breeze passing through.