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 dont, 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 Im not playing at being a cottager from June through August. Im 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 artists 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 theres a lake, why arent those kids in it?
But the impulse for cottage life however brief the time spent in it might be is not only Canadian, its 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, Cultus 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 its 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.
