A Few Carats Less

We rented a cottage on an island in Maine for many years. It was called Gem Island.

It was a big old two-story cottage on a tiny island accessible only by a small motorboat. We had lovely views of the bay and could watch lobster boatmen at work. There was a covered porch with comfy rockers and although there were mosquitoes they were the inept kind that could be batted away.

It was plain, strong old house probably 100 years old. It was a no nonsense house with wooden floors and walls. There were four bedrooms but not much in the way of decoration except for book shelves and comfy chairs. It smelled clean and wind swept. Nothing musty or old about it. It was comfortable and also comforting to stay in.

Gem Island didn't ask much of the visitor. Reading and chatting and playing games were all you had to do. Maybe row over to the lobster pound and eat on the picnic benches a magnificent meal of lobster, biscuits, corn on the cob and blueberry pie. Or bring some home for lobster pie.

The cottage had a lovely old kitchen with an electric stove and refrigerator. There was electricity but no septic system so there was a composting toilet in the bathroom. We had to bring in our drinking water, but rainwater collected in a cistern for hot showers.  

It wasn't even expensive. Gem Island had been owned by the same family since World War II who weren’t interested in profit. They liked to rent to people who loved the place as much as they did.

It was pretty sweet. We felt we were lucky to have found it.

Some of our friends found the plumbing situation a bit too dicey for a visit. That was okay. It made me feel slightly adventurous – not an adjective I normally associate with myself.  But it gave us most of the time to ourselves.  We had two weeks in July every year alone and one terrific third week when Tony and Larissa and the boys came.

Jamie and Nicky loved it. They thought Gem Island was Maine. For them, the whole state existed on that tiny island.

Like many good things, our summers on Gem Island ended when Nancy, the last member of the family, died and left it to her sons who lived in California. They sold it for an enormous sum that was way way out of reach for us to buy.

After a long search, we’ve found anther cottage with lots of amenities and a killer view of the ocean and several lighthouses. Since it's a lot more expensive than Gem Island, we stay there for only one week with the kids. There is a small beach where they swim, quite happily, in the unbelievably cold water. We love it but everyone agrees it just isn’t Gem Island.

Jim and I have kept longing for something a little bit more like Gem Island. Last year I found an island for rent on a lake in central Maine. Accessible by canoe, without water or electricity, with a porch looking over the lake, it looked really charming.

And the name was Little Diamond Island.

So Jim and I rented it for four days to try it out.

After our usual week on the shore, we waved goodbye to the kids and headed inland to Lake Cobbosseecontee.

We found the spot where a canoe was waiting for us but somehow it took over an hour to figure out how to open the clever, extremely simple looking lock that held it fast.

We paddled the canoe easily enough and followed the directions to Little Diamond Island. The instructions said to go south past a big island and a smaller one would appear. Well, a really tiny spec did appear that looked like the online picture I had seen.  So we tried it, feeling a little like Goldilocks.  The keys opened the locks, so we were sure we had found the right place.

The island was even smaller than Gem Island. we were greeted by a mother osprey who had built a new in a very tall tree right above the deck.  the tiny deck was lovely as was the bedroom and the bitty living room. 
The kitchen, however, was another matter. It had windows but they didn't seem to offer much light. and it was already late afternoon. It was full of very old, rusty looking indefinable items. There were dark corners lurking everywhere and a certain odor of critters gone by.

We were searching for  lanterns without finding them when it occurred to us that something important was missing. Oh yes, where was the bathroom?

It just wasn’t there. The cottage was so small we couldn't have missed it. So we looked in the shed, under the cottage, banged on walls until the sun was setting before we found there was a false door at the back of the shed. And there it was: the composting toilet perched about three feet off the ground and surrounded by really smart mosquitoes.

I don't have a problem with composting toilets, but somehow I don’t deal well with one in an outhouse that can only be reached after sunset with a flashlight. Climbing up onto the darn thing with a flashlight in my mouth was also rather unappealing. If there was a light in that shed I didn't find it.  I mean it just didn't seem right to do that much work just to use a bathroom.

I could have dealt with the bathroom if the kitchen weren’t so creepy or vice versa. Anyway I guess I am just not that adventurous. I am fairly game about many things but that goes only so far. I am, after all, a scaredy cat just like my sister always said. I was too fearful to try to figure out the propane stove so we ate cold rolls for breakfast, canoed out for lunch and ate salads for supper. Wine doesn't need cooling. But doing dishes in lake water was sort of fun, and if we had found a sunny spot to heat the solar water shower thingy, bathing would have been fine. Even lake water is cold in Maine.

But come sundown the shed became ominous. I have seen too many 'murder in the remote woods' movies I guess. But between the icky kitchen and the scary shed, we said goodbye to Little Diamond Island with few regrets.

We have found another cottage on top of a hill, which gives the illusion of being far away from civilization. You can see the sea if you look sharp. But it has a nice little kitchen and a working bathroom right inside and has a screened in porch to help fight off the mosquitoes.

We are always on the lookout for another gem of a place to stay. But every single one is always a few carats less than our memories of Gem Island.