Modernity Comes to the Forest

Since Monday night, I've been at my cottage, which is less a house in the forest and more a rustic cabin.  We have some modern conveniences, but also some notable throw-backs. 

When I was a child, I would inform my mother that when I was grown-up, I would winterise the cottage and live here.  I had great plans for bringing the little five-room camp into the 20th century.  By the time I was in my teens, I had grown quite accustomed to the propane lights and a refrigerator that needed its pilot light lit.  Unfortunately, the appliances were getting old, breaking down and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get them repaired.  And Superior Propane, long the supplier of the gas we used to run those appliances was no longer close by, but a substantial drive down the highway and not remotely convenient.  As my mother priced out replacing the dying propane appliances and compared the costs to electrifying the camp, it became clear we were going to have to modernise.  14-year old me was utterly horrified.  As far as I was concerned, there had been plenty of change in my short life and the cottage was a constant.  It did not change.

The first summer we had electricity, the camp was struck by lightning and I was electrocuted.  See?  That would never have happened if we'd stayed on propane.  That is a story for another time, however.

As I write this, Glenn is showering outside and the electric pump (which replaced the propane pump that required pulling a beligerant rip-cord to start) clicks on and off, I am admittedly grateful for electricity.  For instance, we now can shower with, more importantly, hot water.  Amazingly, it took us a full ten years after electrifying of lake and sink bathing to realise we could rig up a shower outside (we do not have a bathroom). So it's probably fair to say that change happens in fits and starts.  We also have a splendid toaster oven and a counter-top roaster which we enjoy using for big roasts.  I take issue with the microwave that my mother installed, and stalwartly refuse to make use of it for anything but a breadbox.  And yet, thanks to Glenn's fancy "spacephone" and the free data usage he gets for working for a cellular company, we have Internet.  I find this far less troubling than a microwave.  I'm not even troubled by a window-mounted air conditioner, but the microwave makes me furious.  And God help us if a TV ever turns up.

Still, when I am here, I feel like I am in a land that time forgot, regardless of whether I write by hand on paper with a pen, or type into my blog on my laptop.  Yes, Highway 50 is finally open and, yes, I can hear it, but it's not any less intrusive than the aeroplanes and helicopters that fly low overhead, or the sound of the river rafters' bus and truck passing on the road in the summer.  I thought I might be horrified by the 50, but, unlike the microwave, I've adapted to it readily.  Go figure.

We leave here tomorrow.  Tonight I will put the non-essential pillows away in plastic bags (to keep the mice out) and strip the bedding off the guest bed and the slip covers off the couches.  Tomorrow morning, we will roll down the window blinds and shut off the power, put the cats in their carriers and hit the road back to London.  Sometimes people ask me if it's worth it to drive seven hours for a week's worth of vacation and I never hesitate.  It's worth it.  Every bit of being here in this land where time moves in fits and starts is worth it. 
Except the microwave.

An extract from my thinking

The following was written during the lunch hour while I was at a time-management course at Fanshawe College. I know there is much I should be writing about, but I just don't seem to have the energy any more. Anyway, read on:

I found myself sitting at my desk in my one-day time-management class, enjoying my lunch and playing Spider solitaire on my computer with, as usual (perhaps the reason I'm in the class?), a wandering mind. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about a Christmas long ago, in my childhood in the house I grew up in on Avenue Road. In this recollection, I am sitting at the dining room table, feet curled from the inside out around the front legs of the dining room chair that marked -my- place at the table. I am colouring. It is the afternoon, probably around lunch time and it is either a weekend or a holiday, because I'm not at school, but I'm not sick. It's quiet in the house. We were the first house on the block to install sliding doors out into the back and ours were the kind that have panes, so they looked like French doors, rather than a standard plate glass patio door. I used to like how the light came in and used to try to take artful photographs of the outside through the panes, maybe with a plant in front, but it never really worked. There were light, filmy transluscent drapes that hung on either side of the doors, in front of the pair of covered radiators on which the cats used to sleep. It was a really beautiful room and I spent a lot of time at the table, not just eating - we used to try to have most of our meals at the table back then - but doing homework, doing art, working on projects, practicing the various instruments I was learning to play. There was a certain way that the chairs scuffed the hardwood floors, snagging in the cracks and making the chairs creak dangerously. The chairs had a habit of collapsing for no apparent reason and you never knew when it would happen. Sometimes only the slats would fall out like a folding fan opening, the way they did that time when Tracy was over, on rare occasions the wrong twist on a chair leg could cause the whole thing to hit the ground, legs akimbo, but chair back still rigidly upright. The table creaked, too; it still does, as do the chairs for that matter, but they don't collapse any more. The table would click and creak with a staccato rhythm when I coloured, my hand working back and forth over the sheet, marker or crayon leaving behind streaks and stripes of colour. The marker, in this case, made soft shushing sounds as I worked. I am, in this recollection, colouring transluscent paper Christmas ornaments of the sort meant to look like stained glass. It's a lovely colouring book sent to me, I think, by my Tantes - my Dutch great-aunts.

Oh Internet

The last time I did any serious thinking about my childhood neighbours in Brooklyn and tried to find information on the Internet about them, the resources were a good deal slimmer than they are now.

Anyway, the neighbours in question are the Scopos and the information I refer to is about the death of Joe Sr. I used to play with Joe Jr when I was a little girl. We didn't stay in touch with them when we moved away in the early 80s, but Joe Sr. was killed just days before my nana died and so we were in New York while it was all still being discussed in papers and in passing. Seems my account of how it went was a little off, now that I've found some online resources, including the NYT article, but I was pretty close. There's also a page about the guy who did the hit.

Based on this list, it looks like Joe Jr. is in the Family. Also, apparently he's been indicted in some business. I had kind of hoped that by some miracle he'd have avoided it, but oh well. He had very good table manners as a kid.