Winter clamps down with an iron hand, and indoors I wander from room to room trying to figure out why the central heating has gone berserk.
The living room and master bedroom are the comfortable 68°F I intended. The den is snug. Both Anna’s and Dan‘s rooms are as cold as the tomb. They look at me with round, accusing eyes. Is ‘hardening off the children’ yet another of Mum’s weird ideas? The downstairs cloakroom is as hot as newly-baked biscuits – it even smells scorched in there – and, as I pause at the kitchen sink, a blast of warm air billows up my skirt from the curiously misplaced air register I’m standing on. I keep this one closed but the hot air goes on blasting away anyway.
Outside, frost bites the edges of the kitchen window and to take my mind off wintery things, I decide to think summer thoughts …
Last year we became the owners of a lakeside summer cottage and joined the many Canadians who escape the city heat by trekking off into the countryside at weekends and for holidays. As a result of this a new phrase has entered our vocabulary, well known and well used by all summer home owners, namely – ‘It’ll do for the cottage.’
Canadians are, generally speaking, luxury lovers. Their homes hum and ping and shine. Deep shaggy carpeting spreads richly across golden oak floors. Logs crackle in natural stone fireplaces. Showers work and Tiffany lamps abound.
But once they get away from all this in the summer, the rugged pioneer approach takes over.
We bought our white clapboard cottage already furnished, obviously from a long line of ‘It’ll do’s’ and I wouldn’t change its essential character for the world. Not even the three-legged armchair, the chipped and faded plates which state on the back that they are ‘as presented to His Majesty during his visit in 1936’, nor the mouse-nibbled maroon patterned carpet which blends so fetchingly with the orange patterned net curtains.
Actually I do have a pair of very nice Heals curtains going spare, which would just fit the living room windows. I could also rustle up a neutral, unchewed carpet. But that would break all the unwritten rules of cottage decor which state – silently but quite firmly – that this is pioneer living, boy, and we don’t go in for any of that new-fangled Conran, taste-for- the-masses stuff out here in the bush.
No, by golly; the farmers’ almanac and last year’s calendar of a boy with his dog are good enough for us. Plus a toaster that has to be set permanently on ‘very, very light’. Move the indicator even one sixteenth of an inch towards ‘medium brown’ and the whole thing bursts into flames. True I have been heard to murmur plaintively: ‘But couldn’t we even buy just one new, flat-bottomed frying pan?’ as the menfolk jiggle their manly fry-ups in old, beaten metal objects which wobble and stick and grow blacker and warpier by the minute. But somehow the spirit of pioneer life prevails.
The moment the word gets around among friends that we’ve joined the weekend cottage set, gifts pour in. Not alas new toasters or fancy skillets. Hereabouts it seems the world has been waiting for the chance to fetch out all these old boxes of mixed china; the cruets that don’t quite pour right; these old cushions we don’t use much; some quite good assorted pillow-cases that just need a stitch: this old television which is quite a piece of furniture isn’t it? And it can get one channel fairly clearly if the weather’s right.
Suddenly our lives are filled with endless happy unloaders telling us cheerily that: ‘It’s a bit chipped/clogged/lumpy/torn/gigantic, but – it’ll do for the cottage!’ And strangely enough the cottage accepts all these offerings and we resign ourselves to life with the painting-by-numbers portrait of the girl in the bonnet, the varnished brown orange box that doubles as a bookcase, the enormous cylindrical washing machine, with gears, which was the Rolls-Royce of its day. (A lot of cottage equipment gets described as the Rolls-Royce of its day.) While anything new or citified or well-designed immediately looks out of place.
The cottage does concede me a few tiny victories. I am glad to discover that my two first-ever crocheted bedspreads (which didn’t do all that much for our town bedroom) seem to hit exactly the right note on our new/old twangy metal Art Deco beds. (No, this style hasn’t finally come back in. At the cottage it never went out.)
But when I raced in with armfuls of new oatmeal upholstery tweed for the two faded tartan divans out in the porch room, even I had to admit that it just didn’t look right. Too stylish. (Dangnabbit, there she goes, getting all new-fangled again!)
And really, what does it matter, when in that same porch room, you can look out through picture windows twenty feet from the water’s edge and watch a pair of ospreys? Or hear the loons calling. Or see fireflies to-ing and fro-ing at night, like tiny Hobbits with torches.
Or, after a hot, hard-working week, plunge blissfully into shorts and tee shirts and clamber down on to our own rickety jetty to watch the blue heron flap by. And swing at last in my (sneakily tasteful) Habitat string hammock which for years I’ve been lugging around, looking for two likely trees.
Now we are surrounded by enough sturdy maples and willow and birch to lash ourselves aloft. Chipmunks come and sit below us and chatter for peanuts. Swallows zoom overhead. And I’ve even managed to track down a lovely new, un-read Iris Murdoch.
Ah, summertime! Such a far, far cry from frost, snow and chilblains and erratic hot air vents.