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My grandmother’s Gimli, Man., cottage smells musty – a familiar summer welcome after 10 months of work. Winter has long since abandoned the place, like an unfaithful lover with its eyes fixed on warmer flesh, but it’s left its scent behind, the product of melted ice seeping through flimsy wood, permeating the linens.
“Amma” isn’t there. Quickly approaching her 100th birthday this fall, she lives in a Winnipeg nursing facility, too confused to change “homes” for weeks at a time. She visits only occasionally, when her children feel she’s up to a day trip.
A strong, healthy, Icelandic pioneer, she’s only recently begun to spin away from us into a slow-motion hurricane of memory loss. There are moments when, caught up in it, she demands to know why we threw out her collection of handmade housecoats from the front hall closet. At other times, we find ourselves explaining who her children are, where she lives, or that her beloved Charlie’s been gone more than 37 years now.
Despite Amma’s absence, our family flies in every summer from Victoria, Toronto, Boston, Calgary and even Dublin. We come for the reconnection to family, the stunning front-row view of “our” lake and the smell of our childhood, preserved between pillowcases.
My husband Jeff drops two overstuffed duffel bags at the bottom of the attic stairs and turns back toward the car for the bouncy chair.
“You’d think we were moving into the place permanently with all this stuff,” he laughs.
I thank him silently and turn to hug my Uncle Guy, peeking over his shoulder at the lake. There it is, rippling gently, a single sailboat floating, framed between the front window’s crown mouldings. A wide beam of sunshine sparkles the water’s surface, illuminating the lake’s timeless beauty.
Amma and Grandpa Charlie purchased the cottage in the 1950s, when my mother was 4 or 5, and had it transported to a waterfront lot at the southern tip of Lake Winnipeg. They subsequently spent every summer of their lives down here with their four children: Ross, Mom, Cameron and Guy.
When Grandpa Charlie died, Amma carried on as the matriarch of the place. She still “rules” from a distance, her instructional notes masking-taped to cabinets, drawers and mirrors. “Coffee.” “Tea.” “Flush sparingly.” We’d never dream of taking them down. They’re pieces of her that we cherish.
“So, are you going to jump in?” Guy’s daughter Jil has been coming here her whole life, too. She knows the drill: Jump into the lake within the first 15 minutes of arrival, no matter what the weather. We have a lot of traditions here, played out to the letter for so many years that we’ve become compulsive about them – as if even the slightest misstep in protocol could result in a fatality. It’s just what we do; it’s what we’ve all done.
My daughters are the fourth generation of Maddins to frequent North Lake Avenue, the fourth to embrace the “beach towel legend” created by Amma in the 1970s when she taped notes on the bathroom mirror reminding each of us which towel to use for the season. They’re the fourth generation to swim religiously before breakfast, clap their way through the Icelandic weekend parade and play with kids from the Taylor cottage, the Orris cottage and the Hollenberg one. All these families picked their homes-away-from-home 60 years ago, too, and have been eating vinarterta and ponnukokur, catching leeches in the government ditch and drinking beer behind the old Gimli arcade with us ever since.
“For sure, I’ll go throw my suit on,” I answer Jil.
There are 14 of us in the humble three-bedroom cabin for the week and the kids are already roaring through the galley kitchen, unperturbed by the scalding pot of pasta ready to boil over.
Cottage culture is part of the fabric of Prairie life. As I make the drive from Winnipeg’s airport each year, my tired eyes take in flat fields of canola and sunflowers framed by nothing but telephone wires. The Prairie sky is an enchanting ocean, in which onlookers could happily drown. And the lake is my Prairie sky.
As I wade into the waves, I feel the rush of cold radiate up my legs. It’ll only shock for a second and then I’ll be enveloped by the tingling “refresh” of adrenaline I crave with every dip. The kids and all their accessories can be sorted later. Everything can be put on hold five minutes as I disappear beneath the surface.
I imagine this is how Amma feels in those moments when memory fails her. I hope that when concrete facts spin slowly from her mind, she feels as though she’s diving into her favourite lake too, revelling in a fleeting oasis safe from the chaos of a cottage full of dependents.
Surfacing, I see my daughter Malia racing for the shore. She’s refused to nap more than five minutes, apparently, which means my moment’s over. I anticipate the rigmarole of lunch prep: slicing veggies, spreading mustard, reassuring my niece that the mustard knife didn’t touch her bread, and I duck back under. Maybe Amma hid in the cool comfort of this water, too, when we were young, when her children were young. The lake is my eye in the storm, and I’ll linger just a few seconds longer.
Heather Neale Furneaux lives in Victoria.