This is home.
We traveled to and from and had an apartment in New York and a house in the South of France, but this is what I always thought of when I thought of home.
My mom grew up here. While her parents were away having fun in the big city, this is the place where she lived with her nanny, the woman she always thought of as her real mother.
Mom employed some help, a housekeeper and a few others, a gardener, of course, someone to take care of the pool and the grounds, and we had babysitters when she needed to leave us, but we never had an official nanny. She was the one that was there until she wasn't.
I was seven when she announced that she was sending me away to boarding school.
As I walk through the rose garden leading up to the green door with the giant antique gold knocker, I have a flashback of standing right here and crying, begging her to let me stay.
I thought she was sending me away because I was bad. I thought that she no longer wanted to be my mom.
I was scared, terrified of going to this place with strangers taking care of me.
The first year was pretty rough, I'm not going to lie. But I got used to it and after a while I even enjoyed it and I didn't want to come home, and that made Mom mad.
“Hey, you’re here!” Mom runs in, draping her arms around my neck, dressed in a Chanel suit with her hair recently styled.
She looks at least twenty years younger than she actually is.
"Your brother isn't here yet, so we'll have some time to gossip and catch up."
She leads me to the recently remodeled farmhouse-style kitchen with blue cabinets on the bottom and white ones on top, with thick, antique style pulls in matte black.
"This place looks nice,” I say, walking around and feeling the quartz underneath my fingertips.
"Well, you know. I get sick of having the exact same thing all the time."
"Are you redoing everything?" I ask.
"No, not at all. Just the kitchen and one of the guest houses. I don't think I want to do anything with the upstairs quite yet.”
The house itself is a quintessential Cape Cod home. It has a broad frame with a moderately steep-pitched gable roof, a large central chimney, and very low on ornate extravagances.
I walk over to the sliding glass door in the living room and look out at the meadow out front. The Olympic-sized swimming pool is over to one side, covered up and winterized until Memorial Day. The meadow and the trees are out in the distance along with the cliffs and the roaring ocean reminding me of the life that I used to have here and all the games that my brother and I played.
"So, what's going on? What's new?” Mom asks, rubbing my hand.
"Nothing.” I shrug. "I mean, we just talked. How about you?"
"I'm working on a bag line: totes, purses.”
"Really?" I act like I'm surprised, but I'm not.
My mom has always had a number of entrepreneurial projects in the works at the same time. A lot of them have been quite successful.
Back in the nineties, she started a jeans line. Her fellow socialites were appalled and there was a lot of gossip, but when she made close to a hundred million dollars and promoted it on The Today Show and Good Morning America, they all jumped in on the idea and started their own clothing brands.
"So bags? Purses?” I ask.
"Yeah. Well, you know how much I love purses, and I still have all my contacts with the jean manufacturers since I still have a twenty percent stake in the business. I figured why not try to do something in textiles? Just a little bit different, since I can't compete with my own property, as you know."
I nod approvingly.
On the outside, my mom seems flighty and the type of person that goes wherever the wind takes her, but in reality, she's very focused, very serious, and if she has gone so far as to tell me about it, it's probably been in the works for months.
"Well, let me know, because anything I can do to help. I’d love to see some of your designs."
“I thought you’d never ask.” Her eyes light up.
Following her upstairs, I step on the riser, and I remember that this is the exact spot where Lincoln pushed me when we were kids.
We fought a lot, arguing about anything and everything but mostly competing for attention from our mom.
Of course, I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that he was in my life too much and she wasn't there at all.
I don't know exactly what precipitated that particular push, but I remember finding myself at the bottom of the stairs, a big gash in my forehead and right above my eye, followed by a trip to the emergency room for seven stitches.
Lincoln was grounded for a couple of weeks, but that hardly bothered him since he stayed in his room, watched television, and played hours and hours of video games anyway.
My mom's office is upstairs overlooking a beautiful sycamore tree with a bench curving around the trunk. Our old Golden retriever, Molly, is buried under that bench and we put it up in her memory. I still can't look at it without my heart closing up tightly.
The office has built-in bookshelves on both sides, filled with mementos and books, as well as boxes of craft projects and art supplies. Ten years ago, Mom started painting and has actually moved her studio to the other guest bedroom down the hall because the paintings were big and took up so much space.
I've always admired her ability to stay busy in one place. She will just toil around this house doing kitchen remodels, working on her paintings, designing clothes, gardening, swimming, throwing a few parties, but all in all, she's a huge homebody, at least at this point in her life.
I, on the other hand, have to be constantly on the move. I get on flights, I live in hotel rooms, I work too many hours all in an effort to stay busy, or maybe just occupied.
I exist on a treadmill, not going anywhere in particular but I press on because it’s really just the physical act of changing locations that’s important.
Mom has a large collection of sample bags ranging from simple tote bags with minimalist, elegant designs to high-end purses for a more elegant and dressed up feel.
"The only thing I would say besides the fact that they're all really well-made and have excellent craftsmanship is that they don't fit with each other."
"What do you mean?" She tilts her head to one side.
"They just sort of feel like they belong to two different brands.”
"Yeah, I had the same feeling. One feels like it's Saks Fifth Avenue, and the other is a little bit more casual, a cross between Free People and Target.”
“Exactly.” I nod. "I mean, both are great but you should figure out where you stand. Do you have a concept for the company as a whole?"
"No, that's what I'm working on. I wanted to make all the samples first, see how I felt about them and then decide which route to go."
"I'd really just pick one at first and stick to it. Build a good audience, a good mailing list, successful Facebook advertising campaign, Instagram, that whole thing prior to expanding. And if you want to go high-end, I mean, you definitely can charge more, but it's a different market, as you know. And then of course there's the sort of Nordstrom prices, high-end but not ridiculous."
She nods. "Yeah. Pricing and positioning the company will be the key thing here."
"Couldn't agree more," I say. "Once you have more ideas or maybe a layout for your website, I could take a look. I know that you don't necessarily need investment, but I've had my investors put money into Meg and we've been quite successful."