Heading into the water, we tossed towels onto the largest rock to be picked up on the wet way back, past tall grasses sometimes stinging salty, sticky legs on a pathway lined with dried seaweed. Each step in the grass produced grasshoppers, sparking off in all directions. Wrapped and dripping, we’d take turns rinsing our feet in the bucket beside the faded deck. Underneath the graying slats lay piles of rounded glass: broken bottles and plates fallen off or thrown over the edge of a fishing boat. Each piece was worn and softened by the oceans bottom before an eventual harvesting by little hands. Favourite pieces were pushed into piles of sand and clay, instantly transforming the dark mounds into jeweled castles. Looking back at old photos, my brother commented on how ugly our creations really were. We’ve lost the ability to see in some things what we saw back then.
Days were filled with reading and croquet, swimming and inspecting ill-fated jellyfish, each head of brown hair turned white from the sun. Now and then we would dutifully crouch in the blueberry patches. Plucking each one fat and wild, we’d fill any container we could find that wasn’t yet committed to the cause. We could never pick them all and we could never pick enough. They were passed around by the handful, or shaken onto cereal in the morning. At their best, they would show up in my grandparent’s pies and pancakes.
At dinner we would slide into the corresponding benches of two picnic tables pushed together on the lawn in an attempt to make enough room for all. Dinner was cooked on a green Coleman stove outdoors before an oven attached to a propane tank was installed in the cottage. I recall eating corn on the cob as if we ate little else. On the very best nights we would drive to the Escuminac pier for ice cream, and on the way my Uncle would stop at a tiny store beside the main road. Each cousin would buy a grab bag containing hard candies, small plastic toys, Goonies trading cards and stale gum. My mom remembers a dark and dusty interior, with everything you could ever need stacked somewhere on the shelves. I remember firecrackers.
The time we would head into the cottage or back to our tents was determined by the drop in temperature and the dying down of winds, both factors responsible for the eerie increase in mosquitoes and deer flies. Nights were spent playing cards or Chinese checkers in the faint glow of oil lanterns and applying afterbite to impossibly itchy knees and ankles. Moths bumped the lamps and screens. Metal sailboat and airplane mobiles bounced on a breeze. During thunderstorms we would blow out the lamps and watch lightning touch down across the water.
In 1981 Allison MacDonald built a cottage in Hardwicke, on the East Coast of New Brunswick. A navigation instructor during the war, my grandfather retired from his job as a personnel manager for Air Canada in 1975. He was drawn to the water and chose to buy property on the coast best suited for sailing, returning to the province in which he was born. He based the cottage’s design on the Douglas Fir Chalets of Tunnel Mountain in Banff, which included four large windows purchased second hand that have since framed a view of the Miramachi Bay. The cottage was built completely by hand, with no power tools, and remains without plumbing or electricity. He also built a small sailboat, The Owl and the Pussycat, and a large white Trimaran, The Wichousen, which would carry us across the bay to Fox Island.
I have often marveled at my inability to recall events in any kind of detail, though I remember many of the things that occurred on those acres of property with a clarity my memory doesn’t often allow. It’s a surreal place to visit now that I’ve grown. Family members show up at different times, in smaller numbers. The grocery store is boarded up. My grandfather’s Trimaran no longer breaks the horizon, but I feel him in what remains. A mental adjustment has to take place while driving through the trees and up to the clearing, so I can properly enjoy the things so closely associated with my childhood. And promptly get on with doing childhood things. –Allie Jenkinson
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