worth every mosquito bite

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so--and certainly if you've been reading for longer--then you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. It was a shack. It was a small, dirty, mouse-ridden shack with no running water, no toilet, no shower, built at least in the 1930s when a family lived there--with no heat, no insulation, no paved roads. I can't imagine it. There's nothing to do at the cottage except stick your feet in the creek and watch pinecones go over the falls. I loved it. To this day I can recall how it felt to put my hands or feet on the sandy, dry soil, all covered with pine needles and cones, and watch the ants scuttling over me. How the rocks nearest the shore were slimy and the water was always cold and you couldn't go out very far because the current was strong--it's a big creek--and you didn't want to get swept over the falls yourself.

Huh. I can't even begin to say anything about it without running off at the mouth. I'll start again:

If you've been reading along for even the past six months or so, you will already know that one of my favourite places on earth is my grandparents' cottage. Even if I haven't been there in almost twenty years.

So I was presented with something of a dilemma when Greg invited me to go up to his parents' cottage for the August long weekend to meet his parents and sister. Of course, phrasing it as a "dilemma" makes it seem as if there was ever any doubt of what I would do: the cottage is just down the street from my grandparents's. The cottage won. Any potential awkwardness would just have to be suffered through for the opportunity to see forests and trees and bugs and maybe even a few critters. (You might have noticed that I really like forests and trees and, yes, bugs and critters.)

Although as it turns out, there was no awkwardness. It was a lovely weekend all around. We played Settlers of Catan and Greg's superhero role-playing game (though I was more of an observer there, I did get to be the giant monster lobster, and I think I managed to clack and scuttle with the best of them) and brainstormed clues for a scavenger hunt and ate, and that, plus tromping around in the bush getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, pretty well sums up the weekend. The forest just behind the cottage is wet enough (either this year in particular or just in general) to support a wide variety of funky mushrooms and I dragged Greg through all of it getting shots of yellow translucent mushrooms like jellyfish and white mushrooms with red caps like elf homes in cartoons and irridescent mushrooms like the insides of seashells, and the local garter snake came out to say hello and asked me to take its picture too. I won't post them all today at least in part because I couldn't possibly, they wouldn't fit, but I'm sure you'll see them all eventually.

The cottage is on a fair-sized lake with a number of small-to-middling islands scattered through it (note: this describes much of Ontario thirty minutes north of Toronto and up), one of which is named the Peanut for its dimunitive size. Greg and I took the paddle boat out there and tromped around (as much as you can tromp over an island smaller than my living room) and I took photos of all the itty-bitty blueberry plants and trees that had somehow managed to grow on an island that is entirely an outcropping of clear and rose quartz (though it looks like granite, having been covered by fungi and mosses and lichens).

That's one of the things I love about the region: the bedrock is so close to the surface everywhere that it juts out, the bones of the earth right there to be touched, and still life thrives all over it. Everywhere you look is a green tangle of leaves; the tree seeds find cracks in the rock and somehow there's enough there to grow on. Life is tough.

Posted by Andrea at August 5, 2008 8:44 AM under The Green Family , Witch

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