I’ve been coming to the Cape every summer of my life. My parents, my brother and sister, and I would pile into the same small rental cottage year after year — one bedroom, cheap, never fixed up. At night, while everyone wound down before bed, my mom would pull out a stack of free real estate magazines and disappear into them. Other people read novels. She read listings. She dreamed of finding a place of her own on the Cape, fixing it up, making it ours. We talked about it for decades — what we’d change, what we’d keep, what color we’d paint the door. The conversation was the dream.
Her name was Jean. Long before any grandkids came along, my sister had taken to calling her Bean — a nickname born from the very questionable observation that Jean was as tall as a beanstalk. (She wasn’t. My sister is just very short.) The name stuck for years.
Then the grandkids arrived. The other grandma also wanted to be called Nana, and the kids needed a way to tell them apart. Bean slid into place beside Nana like it had been waiting there all along. Nana Bean.
Shortly after she passed away, we found this cottage on Kelley’s Pond and bought it. We named it Nana Bean’s Dream because that’s what it was — hers, finally come true. Heartbreakingly too late for her to see it, but hers. We also named it for my daughter Nara, who was born a year after Nana Bean died and never got the chance to meet her. Every guest who walks through this door is, in some small way, walking into my mom’s dream. And Nara will grow up knowing it.