Aunt Avon's Cottage - A place in my heart

Like most people, I guess, I tend to remember childhood in many different ways. I remember my own childhood mostly as a series of mental snapshots of myself and my family in different situations. Many of my memories involve my mother or brother, or family meals, or time spent with my grandparents or at school.

One of the most common themes in these mental snapshots are places. Places seem to have a strong hold on my memory. This is quite ironic, considering the fact that most of the places of my childhood have disappeared or changed so drastically that they're not really the places of my youth anymore. The hospital I was born in was torn down and an old folks home put in its place. My public school still stands, but it's no longer a public school, it's the Ottawa Islamic School, with a schoolyard filled with little girls in hijab and little boys in knitted skullcaps. My high school has been converted to the Ottawa Adult School. And, years after he sold it to someone else, my step-dad's store, the famous Parkwood Hills Foodland (better known as "Jack's"), was demolished and another store erected in its place across the parking lot from the original.

"Aunt Avon's Cottage" from long before I ever knew it.

One of most important places from my childhood, aside from the apartments where I lived and my grandmother's house (which still stands, thank goodness), is the cottage where my brother and I spent many happy days as children.

It's been many years since I went there regularly. But even so, over the years I liked to drive down there every few years, when the place was empty, just to walk around and peek in the window and drink up the wonderful atmosphere of the place. Situated at the end end of the lake that gets all the best summer breezes, there is no finer place to sit in the porch swing, generously padded with sun-smelling cushions, and daydream an afternoon away.

The land the cottage was built on was originally purchased by my father's parents. I don't recall if the building stood when they bought the land, or if they built it afterwards. When my grandparents passed away, the cottage went to my Aunt Avon and my father...and possibly to my dad's other two siblings as well. Due to circumstances with which I'm not familiar, the cottage eventually became the sole property of my aunt, and thereafter I always knew it as "Aunt Avon's Cottage," or just "the cottage." Even though my dad wasn't part owner any more, he still went there as often as he could, and my mother even spent the summer there while she was pregnant with me. I guess the place is in my blood! If not for those circumstances, the cottage, or a portion of it anyway, might have been handed down to me through my father. I think that's something my dad will always regret.

Aunt Avon and my dad, possibly 1998.

The building itself is a pale yellow, wood-sided structure with a large deck around two sides and big windows lining almost every inch of wall on the lake side. It's one big room for the living space, kitchen and the huge dinner table, plus two small bedrooms and a bathroom along the back. There's also a bunkhouse nearby where we kids used to sleep when there were a lot of us around. The decor was what you'd expect at a family cottage. Simple, comfortable furniture, lots of places to sit and lounge and read or play cards or board games. Fun, kitchy nick-nacks were everywhere, and the ceiling was festooned with hanging plants and a flying wooden Canada goose.

I have so many happy memories of that place, and not a single bad one (unless you include the time I jumped into the lake in an unlined white bathing suit, only to discover what happens to unlined white bathing suits when they get wet!!). Swimming off the dock. Learning to waterski (badly). Lazing away the hours in the hammock, fishing for sunfish, learning to drive my aunt's powerboat, paddling around the cove in my dad's hand-made kayak (he named it Gemini, in honour of my mother), sitting in the shallows picking sharp-edged clamshells out of the lake bed so they wouldn't cut people's feet, sunning on the float, wondering if I'd ever have the stamina to swim out to the "big rock" (I never did find out). It was an idyllic, peaceful, restorative place to be.

But the best thing about the cottage? The thing that stayed the same, no matter what else changed? The smell. It was an intoxicating blend of sun-soaked wood and fresh-baked bread that swished me back to childhood every time I walked through the doors of that place. It was the smell my Aunt made just by being there, opening the windows and baking her bread.

Aunt Avon passed away in 2008, and the cottage passed to her oldest son and his wife. I was able to visit them there last summer, and while it was wonderful to be back, it just isn't the same anymore. The smell of sunny wood and baked bread is gone. The panelled walls have all been painted white. Almost all the kitchy nick-nacks are gone. It's just not the same, you know??

But, as much as it has changed, no matter how much it ever changes, that place will always be, in my heart, "Aunt Avon's Cottage."