Home matters more to me than almost anything else. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps because home has been such an ephemeral concept since early childhood. I was put into a foster home when I was five years old. Four years later, just when I was finally beginning to feel at home there, I was shipped like a package to a boarding school 1200 miles away. I don't think I truly felt at home anywhere until I lived in an old school house in the Ottawa Valley. It was the kind of place where you could paint the floors purple if you wanted to. I left that home more than 30 years ago and the only place that has felt like home since then has been my cottage on Pike Lake up here in these hills.
Over the years, the cottage foundation failed and the building fell into disrepair, a little more each year despite repeated attempts to shore it up. Small children either delighted in the slant, saying it was just like the crazy kitchen at the museum, or feared that they would slide straight out the door into the lake and drown. Adults felt intoxicated after a first glass of wine, and struggled to stay on their chairs during dinner.
Two years ago, I realized that this was where I wanted to live. This was home ... not the ramshackle cottage, perhaps, but this place ... the lake, the woods, the mountain.
Today a new house looms above the old cottage site. I feel a little saddened to see the cottage reduced to rubble and spent fire patches in the snow, its bones waiting to be buried. The cottage sustained me for all those years I didn't have a real home. My children and grandchildren swam and partied at this cottage. For a dozen summers I raised orphaned baby groundhogs here.
The new house is still unfinished, but it is my home. It is the place I feel free to be me. I look around me and feel gladdened by the fire in the wood stove, the woods I glimpse through windows, the lake whose presence dominates, even by the fresh snow that will need shoveling ... and shoveling ... and shoveling. I park a quarter kilometre from the house in winter, just in case I won't be able to get back up the big hill. I drag groceries in by sled, and take them down the last hill ... 39 steps down ... to the house.
I won't be painting these floors purple or raising groundhogs here, but I do have dogs, and it is home.
Happy Groundhog Day!
2 comments:
And it is a beautiful home!
I am so happy that I get to visit your new home!
Such a wonderful space...not only the home itself, but the whole area...I have wandered out of its doors and gone straight up the mountain to revel in nature's beauty and to sit and write.
I am thankful to be able to know you and thus (but not simply thus :) ) to be able to add your home to my repertoire of mental escapes!
Its true, the house on botsford was never "home" - my childhood memories are all wrapped up in the house in Kinburn, and the cottage.
Hey M and I were being haunted by a house in Windsor that we never checked out and kept thinking we'd have liked so we drove by it yesterday (across the street from a 24 hour car and dog wash???, too close to the road, etc.) Anyhow we visited the old Edgehill campus - it is looking like a slum landlord bought it!!! Too bad, its such a grand building, but its fallen on hard times.
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