You arrive at the cottage by way of a number of small winding highways, followed by dirt roads that get smaller and smaller... and hillier and twistier... if you hit some of the hills just right, you leave a little of your stomach there... but not for long...
As you get closer to the cottage the forest starts to envelop you, with occasional breaks for sparkling sunshine... There's no glimpse of the lake after you leave the last highway... and even then its only a brief view at the public beach... but its enough to whet your appetite to jump straight out of the car, run past the building, down the stairs and off the dock into the cool, clear depths..
There are so many floods of memories once I am there that it's hard to pinpoint just one or two...and before I do, now that I've set the scene, I'd like to share a few of my favourite pictures.... Chandos Lake at twighlight... taken the last time I was there.... in Summer 2007.
Now as for memories... in a place that beautiful there are many. My favourites were learning to play bridge and scrabble around the kitchen table after we had cleared off and washed the dishes.. no dishwashers there... jumping off the dock for the first time every summer, just to see if the water had warmed up.. but of course it was still cool, clear and beautiful... the lake was so deep that the water never really warmed past cool.
It was a great place to be a kid and explore... there was 'Club house mountain' where bits of wood had been cobbled together to make a table and chairs so that we could go and climb the large rock and have a place to eat the candy we had conned out of Mom or Pompa (Grandpa) after a boat ride to one of the three marinas... my favourites were always the shaped sugar candies that came in garbage pails, lockers and other neat shaped containers, but sometimes you just craved any candy...
There were trips to the neighbours cottage - we didn't really socialize with either of our direct neighbours - at least the kids didn't...there were no kids there :) but we'd spend hours at the Canden's cottage two doors over... not really an kids there either, but Mrs. Canden had all kinds of toys and neat things in her small cottage... and a really neat concrete dock that jutted high out of the water to jump off. As we got older, the thing to do was to jump off our dock, swim to the Canden's, climb out and run, soaking wet, back to our cottage and start again... then we'd become better swimmers and would swim there and back, and finally, as we got older we'd be able to swim the other way... past several cottages of people that Nana and Pompa knew, but we didn't.
The other thing I remember about the cottage is that's where I developed a love of bird & animal watching. The kitchen and living room both had wide expanses of windows, due mostly to the fact, I'm sure, that my Grandfather was in the glass and mirror business... but it was a wonderful window on the world.... and with all those trees, not a minute went by when you couldn't see a curious chipmunk, chatty red squirrel, blue jay, hummingbird, chickadee, or any other of a multitude of birds, animals and insects... my favourite to watch for was the Great Blue Heron... if you were up early enough, he'd be there waiting to say good morning, standing on the end of the dock, watching the glassy water for his breakfast. Sometimes he'd do a fly by later in the day, but he was almost always there in the creeping dawn....
If you didn't know what bird you saw, Nana was the expert... with her Peterson's Guide to Birds, well loved and never too far away. I also learned all about the fish in the lake, but was never really a fisherman... the rule was you had to bait your own hook and take off your own catch and that wasn't for me... so my brother and sister fished, and I cast a weighted bobber off the dock with no hook, just for casting practice...
My favourite time of year at the cottage was the middle of August... Raspberry season... There is absolutely nothing like fresh-picked wild raspberries that you've scoured the ditches by the dirt road for... juicy, tart and perfect... we'd pick pints at a time and they'd be gone within an hour... the only evidence was the raspberry stained plastic container and our juicy looking fingers... One year we actually had a bumper crop available, so much so, that we pulled all of Nana's recipe books down, searching for yummy raspberry recipes... and decided to make Raspberry Sherbert.. My Aunt Barbara helped and boy was it delicious...
The cottage was a great place to be a kid... and my Great-Uncle Dick Parker christened it with its name long before grandchildren were even a thought on the horizon, but he knew exactly what all of us were going to say at the end of our time there... "Iwannastay"
