The Cottage on the Lake

A note: Not all posts on Cycotherapy are about “cycling.” Cycotherapy can be anything that stirs you to do that thing you’ve wanted to do. Ride a bike again. Go on vacation. Go back to school. Accept that job offer. Today’s post is one of those not directly about riding a bike. But hopefully it stirs you to ride, whether it be on a metaphorical or literal bike.

Around half a century ago, a man scraped up the funds to buy that property. The one his wife talked about. It was a smallish, rugged parcel, but it was on a lake — its water tinted with vitality. Its sand infinitesimal, a foreshadowing of the amount of memories to be made there.

Secluded. Quiet. Away. Natural.

On the weekends, the man and his wife loaded up the kids and drove the hour or so northwest from the city into the woods, toting camping gear and the family dog.

The kids played in the sand while the adults sat, hand-in-hand, watching them play as the sun set behind the towering spruces. 

Eventually, the man built an outhouse with a toilet seat. 

Then, a one-room cabin. It had a big bed, for the kids. Then he built a wooden deck around it, for the sunsets. Up the hill, he cleared some trees and saved the wood. Dug a basement, laid a foundation. The house had a main floor with a bathroom, a bedroom, a kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows facing the lake. Upstairs there was a loft, with a pull-out couch and a bedroom with its own bathroom attached.

The walls became decorated with pictures and art.

Soon the kids started having their own kids. Weekend trips extended into long weekends, and long weekends into extended holidays. The grandkids caught frogs. Built sandcastles. Learned to steer a canoe. Swam in the lily-padded water and fished for bluegill. The adults read books on the beach, sunbathed. Breathed deeply.

Scrapbooks filled with sepia-toned photographs of sun-kissed moms in one-piece suits, barefoot kids with white sun-screened noses and shirtless, bucket-hatted dads.

Grandkids got more involved in sports and malls and handheld digital devices. Parents grew busier.

The man and the woman grew older and less busy. They moved into the cottage, added to the walls. The woman painted the sunsets from the wooden deck and gifted them to family members on Christmas.

The man and the woman caught glimpses of their family’s pretty lives in pictures posted occasionally on this so-called social media internet site. They smiled at the photos and printed them out to make them seem real. A couple times a year, they would drive to see their kids and grandkids.

The man and the woman, now with heads of silver, put the little piece of waterfront property up on the market. 

It sold and, together, hand-in-hand, watched one last sunset from their wooden deck. The familiar, somnolent purr of dusk drew salty tears to their squinted eyes.

At dark, they walked inside and picked up the phone to inform their grown kids. 

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That was a long time ago. I remember the moment my mom received that call from her parents. It was a bit of news the family had expected for a while. It still surprised us.

My mom answered the wall-attached phone in our kitchen. Her gaze dropped to the floor and her body seemed to sigh. Her lip quivered as she wiped a tear away and smiled into the phone, conveying support for her aging parents’ decision.

Grandma and grandpa moved out of their Quebecois home, into a smaller house closer to the highway in Ontario. It was closer to nearly everything, they said. The grocery store, church, the doctor’s office.

We drove up there one weekend to see the new house and to help them move furniture. I remember taking a walk with my mom around the block. A new development, there were no trees. No grass. No sandcastles. No echoing bird songs. She cried, this time letting herself feel the wave of sadness she’d repressed hundreds of miles away in her Ohio home. I wanted to cry too, but it was my turn to console.

Together, silently, we remembered the hues of the sky at dusk. The feeling of sand between our toes and the cold shock of the water in the bucket by the door that washed it all off before walking inside. The haunting beauty of the loon’s song. The layer of mist hanging above the water in the morning. The tomato sandwiches. Her childhood pet dog buried in the backyard. The frogs and wiggly tadpoles. 

I thought back to the time I decided to fish alone from the shore. I cast my line just beyond the lily pads and felt a familiar jolt. The family ran down to the beach, my mom with a camera. Dad hollered advice as I worked to land the bass.

It was the first fish I caught totally on my own. I was so proud as I held it up for a picture, the lure still snagged inside its gasping mouth. I remember struggling to remove the barbed hook. Dad walked over to help, eventually taking over. The hook was really stuck.

“Poor little fella,” he said, reaching for the hook with a pair of red-handled needle nose pliers.

In a moment of perfect alignment, the fish jerked — causing us both to flinch. Somehow, the hook, now dislodged from the fish’s mouth for a hair-split moment, dug its way into my left index finger. I felt a numbing pain as I lifted my finger to my eyes.

Mom shrieked. Dad said, “let me see that.” He tried pulling it out. The barb, now lodged into my finger’s flesh, didn’t budge.

“We need to take him to the hospital,” mom said.

It was a long drive. I still remember the shiny lure, hanging from my finger while my dad sped to the hospital. Once there, the ER doc snipped the lure off and pushed the hook through the other side of my finger. We topped off the visit with a tetanus shot.

I recently talked with my mom about the cottage. She described a memory that sticks out. On the weekends when her parents and siblings packed into the car, she knew they were close when the roads turned to dirt and it became harder to see the horizon, because of the dense evergreen forests. When they were really close, they’d let out the family pet, Ralph, to run behind the car. Apparently he knew his way to the cottage. She remembers watching the tiny legs of Ralph, a little black and golden brown Dachshund, motor excitedly behind.

“Oh, and mom used to keep that outhouse spick and span,” she said, adding, in her best impression of her mom’s voice, ‘don’t forget to sprinkle the lime over your poop.’

Our family cherishes memories of the cottage at the lake. We all have personal remembrances, images of sunsets and sunrises we recall during introspective moments.

When I sat to write this micro memoir, I didn’t know why.

I thought maybe it could be an essay on climate change. The 98-acre moose-hoof shaped lake, named Lac Toote, is up near Ottawa in Quebec. It sits precariously south of all the wildfires. Could our cherished memories become charred as the fires threaten to creep south?

But the draft seemed to spiteful. It read like a Greta Thunberg journal entry about how horrible the rest of the world is for not caring enough about saving nature.

Maybe, instead, it’s a piece about the grief of letting material things go. Moving on. Like my mom, I never got the chance to say goodbye to Toote Lake.

What is it about our things that grip us so?

It’s just a cottage, right? There’s a house with walls and doors, inanimate as the rest. There’s a lake with water and a beach with sand and trees with bark. Just stuff that, when I’m gone, will eventually also turn to dust. Maybe it’s the smell of things. With time, our things develop an aroma that, when sniffed decades later, recall all the memories and feelings associated with the thing.

Every once in a while my olfactory sensors receive a smell that takes me back to those days and nights at the cottage at the lake. Pine needles. Wood floors. Cedar paneling. My grandparents’ clothes. A cabin in the woods with its windows open.

How do you move on from a thing when, every once in a random while, your senses pick up a fragrance that recalls such memories?

Maybe it’s a piece about what makes a home.

Maybe it’s about the difficult task of saying goodbye to something and somewhere and someone you love.

Or a piece about the similarity between sand and memory, how sticky they are. Or a piece about the meaning of the word somnolent. Or smells.

Or perhaps this is a piece about sunsets — their indelibility — and the loved ones with whom we choose to enjoy them.

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Thanks for reading today, everyone. Here’s to summer vacation spots and cottages and memories.

With summer vacation time winding down, anyone else have a favorite spot?

Me and my sister one summer day at the cottage on the lake.