Summer is a-comin' in and all the home and garden magazines are telling us how to turn our houses into cottages. White wicker furniture is de rigueur as is everything white. (These would-be cottagers don't, obviously, have kids or dogs.) And then you simply have to add all the little cottage-y touches: smooth, round stones on windowsills; dried starfish on the bathroom vanity; dried-flower wreaths on the patio door.
Well, let me tell you, white wicker and dried starfish do not a cottage make. I live in an eight hundred square foot, 80-year-
old former summer cottage on Indian Arm and I'm not playing at being a cottager from June through August. I'm a cottager year-round. The woodstove is for real, as is the woodshed with the necessary four cords of seasoned firewood that has to be bucked, split and stacked in April if I want to be warm in November. Without central heating how do you stay cozy in winter? Put on another sweater and move closer to the stove.
A recent full-page newspaper ad for "cottages" on a lake in the Okanagan caught my eye. There was an artist's rendition: a row of tightly-packed, identical two-story houses in front of which is a turquoise, chlorine-treated pool full of kids. Good grief.
Where do they build forts? Have a bonfire? Eat smores? Look for bears? And if there's a lake, why aren't those kids in it?
But the impulse for cottage life - however brief the time spent in it might be - is not only Canadian, it's probably universal. In all the hurly-burley of our urban lives, deep down we long for a slower pace and time to sit around a fire and tell tall tales.
These days, almost all the original cottages that middle-class Lower Mainlanders fled to in the summer are gone or so completely renovated that they no longer qualify as cottages: White Rock, Crescent Beach, Cul-tus Lake, Beach Grove, Boundary Bay, Bowen Island and all up and down the Sunshine Coast. Now you have to be a millionaire- make that a billionaire - to buy waterfrontage.
I was so lucky that my working-class parents had a place up Indian Arm in the '40s. I learned almost everything I needed to know in those blessed summers in North Sunshine - where the sun seldom actually shone: how to catch cod and crabs, swim, row a boat, scrub my clothes on a washboard and play poker. All the really important stuff.
The bad news is that my folks sold the place in the '60s when we kids all got summer jobs.
I lament those golden, olden days and view with skepticism what realtors gushingly advertise as "cottages." One could be yours for anywhere from a quarter of a million dollars to many, many more.
But it's just not the same. Courier theatre critic Jo Ledingham lives in a cottage she has leased since 1964. She is currently working with her landlord to keep the bulldozer from the door.
