FROM THE HOME FRONT
Susan Martin: Nothing fancy, just plain old fun
It happens this time every year. My mind travels back to a place in Canada my family and assorted relatives visited, usually for a week in August.
It was a former fishing camp, with 10 or so cabins near a lake. We rented the whole place out.
When a bell gonged, we all trekked up a path to the lodge for meals, which often consisted of grilled cheese or sliced tomato sandwiches for lunch.
The cabins were basic, the weather rainy and the spiders the size of dinner plates – but we had a blast.
It not only became a tradition to go there, the goings-on also became routine.
We fished. We built fires. We played ping-pong. We swam. We collected tiny toads. We picked up the fallen strips of bark from the white birch trees and used them as stationery.
And, on the rainiest days, we drove into the nearby town of Bancroft and bought hand-stitched moccasins – and wore them all year.
And while there was the occasional emergency room visit for the torn-up knee that required stitches – one cousin had two visits in one week and has the scars to prove it! – I mostly remember laughter.
Each cabin came with its own little motor boat, but my cousins brought a bigger boat as well.
It’s where I learned to water-ski (barely). I can still remember the day I stood up for the first time.
As was the tradition, some cousin would somehow delay the first-time skier so that she (me, in this case) was the last to arrive at the lodge for a meal.
Upon entering, everyone would stand up and applaud wildly. What a feeling!
Now I could go on and on about how we didn’t have TVs, cell phones, handheld games, laptops, etc. But I won’t.
What I will say is that I recently overheard a parent saying that she was not sending her child back to some camp this summer because the child had become bored with it after a year or two.
Too bad. I loved the same-old, same-old experiences of those trips up north, car sickness aside (another tradition!).
And we still talk about them – even though the relatives are scattered now and our own kids are a wide range of ages, unlike the way we were back then.
We talk about how my mother – the Lysol Queen – would arrive with an arsenal of disinfecting products for the bathroom.
We talk about who came what year, and when the whole thing even began in the first place.
We talk about those sliced tomato sandwiches.
For years I tried to think of a way to re-create that memory for anyone who could come along – even just one or two families, if need be.
Still, I don’t believe the old place even exists anymore and, even if I found something comparable, it would be nearly impossible to coordinate vacations among relatives, some of whom live hundreds of miles apart.
Sure, our summers still are plenty of fun. I saw some of those cousins last weekend, and will see even more in a couple weeks. And my husband and I have rented a cottage for a week and are taking along my mother and aunt.
Maybe one day, just for fun, I’ll make sliced tomato sandwiches for lunch.
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