The Cottage on Lake Simcoe

This is how the cottage looks today. A new family owns it.


The entry was enclosed when I was a girl; it was my grandparent's bedroom. Off and on over the years I've written about my cottage. Here's some of my latest musings about it:

From 1943 when I was a baby of seven months until I was a teenager in the late fifties, I spent the summer months at our family's cottage on Lake Simcoe, Brechin Beach, Ontario, Canada.


Each summer, as I grew, I loved the cottage more. I was always a place of freedom and fun. When the sun was shining and the lake was calm and the water reflected the sky, my friends from neighboring cottages and I, would swim and play like river otters. Some of my friends tanned brown as stained wood but my fair skin, especially shoulders, forehead, nose, and tops of ears, would burn, blister, peel, then start the process over. One year, Grandfather built this barrel raft for us. We anchored the raft with a rope tied to a big rock just beyond the sandbar where we could stand up. Beyond this point, the bottom drops off rather steeply into what we called, "the deep beyond." We would dive off this side for 'pearls', which in fact were white stones I collected from the shore. I am still a complusive white stone picker-upper. On the sandbar side, toward the beach, we played tag and other water gymnastics. We often had days and days of this good swimming weather. We came out of the water when we were called in for meals and on parental orders had to wait an hour before we could go back in.



However, Lake Simcoe is large and has many moods. Winds comes up quickly and calm water rises into impressive white caps. Trees bend, shiver, and sway. Clouds scurry by or they bunch up in dark gray ceilings. Storms pour in and drive us indoors.
One summer we had a hurricane pass over. I'll never forget the still center of that storm. The wind had blown furiously, breaking tree limbs fell on our boathouse and cottage. Waves soared up and over the well. Suddenly it stopped. The light was greenish then turned golden. It was so still. Finally, we heard the wind coming again. The sky grew dark and the fury returned for another hour before the whole thing passed.