Cottage sale evokes magic memories, fanciful fantasies

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This article was published 04/11/2024 (710 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

August into September is the time when many close their summer cottages for the winter. It is often a time of reflection and gratitude for the wild, the forests ripe with blossoms and berries, irresistible and revelatory in their variety.

This September, good friends sold their cottage. They have enjoyed it for the past 25 years, but the time has come when the maintenance, the driving back and forth, the packing and provisioning, outweigh the magic of summer storms, sunlit and sparkling vistas.

Some of my husband’s ashes rest there, as do the ashes of one of the owner’s fathers.

Side by side these friends and I have been together for almost as many years as they have lived lake lives. In light of the cottage sale, we talk of aging and find ourselves examining the diminishing that comes with the letting go of past joys, even as we discover alternate and compensatory pleasures. This is the balancing third-act aliveness requires.

I think of the cottage my parents had on the banks of St. Mary’s River about 20 kilometres outside Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. It had to be sold after their deaths; my husband’s illness curtailed our hope to take the cottage on ourselves.

I was bereft. Yet, the cottage continues in my memory as the place of mystery and mayhem, as treasured by the crone I have become as it was by the barefoot and curious little girl devoted to the forest, blueberries and the icy, emerald-green working river that brought freighters from around the world through the linchpin locks connecting lakes Superior and Huron.

Balancing longing and acceptance, my friends bring back to their city home the cottage keepsakes that recall past glories. The remainders will be managed by the new owners.

I did much the same with my family cottage, and so I possess pieces that hold positions of prominence, flying carpets, if you will, transporting me always to the cottage whose front porch seemed to touch the freighters passing in the channel.

My treasure chest includes a vintage metal Coca-Cola tray, a chipped serving piece my mother used for mashed potatoes and the small, curved-back periwinkle bench that once held well-aged beach towels.

I often dream that my family cottage is still accessible. Though bought by new owners who tore it down and built a permanent home, in my dream, my family and I arrive in July to the old cottage still intact.

Everything within remains as we left it. Run-down, unevenly patched patterned linoleum; curious tchotchkes my mother dusted by the fireplace; a couch that dipped in the middle like a fresh croissant, having borne the weight of many children crowded in front of an open fireplace roasting marshmallows; a bowl of plastic fruit on the dining table, home to a jumble of dead bugs and detritus never disinterred; dresser drawers that defied opening; mattresses on rusting bed frames; silly pictures of dogs playing poker; damp magazines from the 1950s.

Everything remains, but in my topsy-turvy dream time, more and more friends and family tumble through the back door, kitchen counters buckle under the weight of fantastic concoctions; the Seuss-like hot water tank is about to blow; there are bodies lying in makeshift beds throughout. And yet the cottage’s dimensions stay the same. We fit. Babies and cats, chicken bones and borscht, tea towels and toys, tantrums and playing cards.

I am desperate to create order, but completely aware that order is impossible and ironically out of place. My storied and dreamed summers thrive in sprawling, tangled times of disarray and surprise.

Dreaming, I worry the real owners will return. Dreaming, I don’t worry the real owners will return. Dreaming, I know the cottage can no longer be what it once was, yet, dreaming, I am sure the cottage is exactly as it once was, only more so. The dream space allows for contrasting realities to be equally and compellingly true. In this way, my family cottage and I are linked for my lifetime.

I think of my friends and the hard work they’ve done to give up their cottage life.

And then, I think of the new “cottage” memory and dream will co-create for them and the camaraderie we will share, our once-upon-a-time cottager identities informing purpose and play in our seasons to come.

arts@freepress.mb.ca