SELLING THE COTTAGE
Jonathan Forani writes about saying goodbye to four generations of family memories,
This is part of a series revisiting the smells and sounds of summer — those unmistakable triggers that take you back to a fond memory of this fleeting season.
We didn’t need any “are-we-thereyet” groans on drives to my dad’s cottage.
We knew the landmarks. From the bright orange bridge over Hwy. 11, a beacon for the Webers hamburger restaurant, to the canoe-lined curb of the Muskoka Store.
The final signal came when my brothers, my sister and I had fallen asleep late on these Friday night drives: The muted crunch of gravel under minivan tires up the long driveway on High Rock Dr.
It’s just rubber crushing small stones and turning up dirt, but what it signalled was significant to us: a cacophony of cottage country and childhood summer sounds on Lake Bernard. Loon calls real and manmade. Revved speedboat engines and the slap of canoe paddles.
But before all that, we would wake up in the van, the crunch of gravel under the tires serving as our soft alarm that we had arrived. With dazed eyes, we’d lift our heads from pillows resting on van consoles and raise the centre bucket seats we had fought over three hours earlier.
With muttered yelps of pain, we’d walk barefoot down the path to the door, swatting a late night onslaught of mosquitoes from our hair. Rusty hinges would squeak as my grandmother Patricia, the Forani family matriarch, greeted us at the front steps.
We had our final visit last summer when the cottage was sold after 54 years. My grandfather Hank had passed away four years earlier, the man who’d built the cottage with his own hands in 1962, after purchasing the property near Sundridge, Ont., the year before.
The sale signalled an end to four generations of Foranis playing dressup in the boathouse. Decades of tennis tournaments on the uneven clay court with lawn chair webbing for lines; hundreds of jumps off the small cliffs of High Rock lookout; years of “playing house” on the big boulders that covered the shores. We all had different ideas of what rock at the cottage was what piece of furniture, what room, just as there were different versions of the “rock path,” our trail hopping from boulder to boulder around the cottage grounds.
It’s not an easy decision giving up a cottage. More than 80 per cent of Canadians have spent time at one, according to the 2016 Re/Max report on recreational property. Getting rid of your own is difficult and harder still when your dad’s family is made up of nine children (seven sisters and one brother) who all have kids of their own.
The sale of the cottage on High Rock Dr. was a loss.
On our final weekend last July, my sister and I went for a morning run with our parents, ending on the cottage sundeck with a dip in the fogcovered lake. My dad swam out to the raft he probably helped my grandfather build decades earlier. He stood up looking over at the cottage where he grew up, the same place he proposed to my mother in the early ’80s, and where my brothers, sister and I would grow up, too.
I knew in that moment that he and his siblings would be feeling this loss the most.
We drove away later that weekend for one last time.
A new family spends their summers at that cottage now. Different childhood memories are being formed on Lake Bernard. They won’t be exactly like ours.
The cottage might not even look much like the one we knew. How could it?
But I like to think after long Friday night drives, when the kids wake up to the soft crunch of minivan tires on gravel, that they tiptoe over stones to greet a grandparent like we did.
I like to think they’re playing dressup in the boathouse, that they’re hosting tennis tournaments on an uneven clay court, and they’re playing in the rock houses, jumping from boulder to boulder on some version of a “rock path.” Just like we did.
Next week, a Beatles hit takes reporter Andrea Gordon back to the summer of 1971.