Water calls us. For some, its waves roar at us from distant shores. For others, it calls gently with the trickle of a stream running over smooth stones: “Follow me, follow me, follow me … home.”
Water is our source, the source of life. And for many, it is a place where they have laughed and loved and learned about life; a place to be at one with nature, with the sound of the water’s motion lulling them to sleep. Some of us are lucky enough to own a little spot of land along the shores of our water. But we don’t own the water. The water owns us.
This lake has been my family’s home for five generations. Its rocky shores and golden beaches are as familiar to me as the faces that have inhabited them.
I was almost 50 when my husband and I purchased a little cabin located along the beach where my family had a summer cottage and where my mother still resides. My children had left home to attend university in Southern Ontario and I was looking to reconnect with my family home.
The cabin has had many incarnations over time. It was initially a rock-solid log structure, built as a meeting hall by the Finnish community that logged the area almost 100 years ago.
At some point, the logs that formed the walls were painted white with green tips. That’s the way I remember the cabin from my childhood, standing vacant on the lot next to our cottage. Since then, subsequent owners have built additions and covered the logs with vinyl siding, giving it an eclectic, ramshackle look.
The cabin was situated between two creeks that provided ample supplies of black flies and mosquitoes. My daughter dubbed it the Swamp.
“This will be our nexus,” my son told us and for many years it did keep us all connected. Fish were caught, marshmallows roasted and martinis sipped together. We were all keen to travel the six hours north to the site of our childhood summers.
Tiny new grandchildren arrived and castles were built on warm sand that tickled their toes.
But things get old, and we got older. The long drive became more exhausting and the annual repairs more extensive. Distant children with busy careers and children of their own were unable to assume the responsibility.
The decision to sell a family cottage is rarely easy. The repercussions can ripple through a family and change its course.
“You need to do what’s best for you,” our children reassured us, though there was a hint of regret in their voices.
We thought that we would have more time. We didn’t expect the glint in the realtor’s eyes the day she came to survey the property. “I think I have a buyer,” she told us. The offer arrived that same day.
We held the buyer off over the winter, wanting to come back in the spring to say goodbye and collect a few things we couldn’t leave behind.
The smell of pine lingers as I pack up the photographs that line the roughly hewn log walls inside the cabin. Here is one of my grandson, wading in sparkling water, hand in hand with his grandpa, and another of my baby granddaughter, tiny toes buried in warm sand.
“Did you really sell the cottage, Nana?”
“I’m sorry,” I think, recalling her soft, melancholy tone. I wonder if she will miss our boating adventures to the “far away island” across the lake as much as I will.
The lake is calm today, a sheet of sapphire blue satin gleaming in the noon sun. The last of the spring run-off trickles down the narrow creek that crosses the beach.
I push my small red canoe out from the shore, my bare feet aching in the icy June water. The boat rocks gently as I climb in.
I glide out into the bay, across the mouth of the creek, and past my mother’s home, which stands where my parents’ cottage used to be. My paddle creates ripples, disturbing the calm, as I float along the curve of the bay that harbors a wide stretch of flaxen sand. The beach is quiet and empty today, save for a pair of brown ducks waddling along the shore.
Paddling out beyond the bay, I glide past my grandparents’ white clapboard cottage with its blue shutters, perched atop a rocky outcrop. My grandfather moved large, sharp-edged stones by hand to clear the tiny beach below.
This was where my grandmother taught me how to build a fire in her iron cookstove. The smell of pine smoke would mingle with the scent of bread browning on the grill, burning just enough to give it that cottage flavour.
Straight, broad strokes circle the canoe back toward my own cabin.
A solo loon emerges alongside.
We float together toward the ancient pine clinging to the edge of the rocky point at the end of the bay, like kindred spirits moving through a Tom Thomson painting. The loon dives and I lose him, like so many others.
I pause and feel the ache in my back and arms. A final glimpse of my little cabin tucked away from the sandy shore, and I dip my paddle, sailing forward, free to choose a new course.
