Writer's Circle Challenge—July: Summer Recollections #1

 

The Summer Of ’53

 

I was born September 9, 1939—one day before Canada declared war on Germany. At the start of the war my father, a medical doctor with the Canadian Navy, was loaned to the Royal Navy and remained in England for the duration. I didn’t meet him until he returned in January 1946, when I was six years old. He wasn’t a stranger to me though—every night, my mother told me wonderful stories about the man I didn’t  yet know. 

During the school year my mother was an art teacher at Sunnyside Collegiate and her own mother—who lived with us—became a kind of second mother to me. But as the summer holiday approached, they agreed they needed a break from one another. 

And so, beginning in the summer of 1940 and continuing throughout the war, my mother and I would travel north to spend leisurely, lingering summers with my father's parents at their cabin on Waabanang Lake. Built fifty years earlier by my Ojibwe great-grandfather from logs and stones gathered on the property, the cabin had no electricity or running water. Still, my grandparents lived there six months of every year.

Minawaki, with just the train station and a general store, was the closest town—almost ten miles from the old cabin.  Pops and Nanna would meet us  there with a horse and cart for the final stretch of our journey. Pops was my hero. From the moment we stepped off the train and climbed into the old cart for the bumpy ride through the woods, he and I were inseparable.  The train ride lasted almost twenty-four hours, and looking back, I can’t imagine how my mother managed it that first summer—me, an infant, she just twenty years old and barely five feet tall as we boarded the train at Dominion Station. 

Of course, my memories of those early visits are shaped by the stories my mother later told me, and by a few faded photographs we keep in an old shoebox. But from the summer of 1945—when I was almost six—I remember everything clearly. That was the beginning of my love affair with Waabanang Lake and that old, rustic cabin.

Though we still returned to the cabin each summer after my father's homecoming, we never again spent the entire season there as a family. My life in the city had changed. My father had accepted a teaching position at the University Medical School, and we no longer had the luxury—or perhaps the need—for such long escapes.

We moved to a house in the upscale neighbourhood of Rosewood, and I was enrolled at Lady Elmsworth Academy, a private girls' school that taught Latin and had an endless list of rules. Life in the city was orderly, structured, and clean. I wore a school uniform, said “yes, Ma’am” and “no, Ma’am,” and practiced piano for exactly fifty minutes each day. I never had any doubt that I was loved, but in our house, signs of affection were understated. My father’s idea of a hug was placing a hand on my shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze.

My connection with Pops, though, was different. He showed affection in bear hugs and gentle teasing, in the way he let me steer the boat before I could even swim and in the secret wink we shared when I would catch him sneaking an extra cookie. With him, I was never too loud or too messy. I was simply me, and that pleased us both. 

In the summer of 1953, my parents decided to take a much-needed trip—a honeymoon, they called it since they’d never had a proper one. So while they headed to the east coast for their extended vacation, they put me on a train, alone, at thirteen, and sent me to the cabin on Waabanang Lake. A whole summer. Just me, Pops, and Nanna.

I still recall the feeling as the train pulled away from the city—the way my stomach flip-flopped between excitement and fear. I had received strict instructions, remember I am a young lady and behave as such. By the time I stepped down onto the platform in Minawaki and saw Pops grinning, holding his old straw hat in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. He greeted me with his familiar bear hug and plopped his hat on my head.  Nanna held my hand as they led me to the pick-up truck that had replaced the horse and cart.

That summer, Pops taught me how to drive on the dirt road that ran behind the cabin. He let me try one of his cigarettes—“just so you know what you’re not missing”—and poured me half a glass of beer on the dock one particularly humid July evening. Nanna pretended not to notice, though I caught her smiling into her knitting more than once.

I helped in the garden, picked wild blueberries, and spent hours with Pops fishing off the dock. I read books I wouldn’t have been allowed to read at home. And when Nanna gave me her copy of The Scarlet Letter I curled up in the window seat and finished it in two days—though I likely didn’t understand it. Some nights we stayed up late playing cribbage by the light of a lantern, and they told me stories about my father I’d never heard before—how rebellious he was until he met the most beautiful young girl, my mother. And how he cried tears of joy the day I was born.

That summer was everything. No school, no piano, no expectations. Just the lake, the trees, and two people who loved me exactly as I was.

It was the last summer I shared with Pops. He died on my birthday, just a few weeks after I returned to the city. My father broke the news gently, sitting beside me on the edge of my bed. I remember nodding, then turning to the window and watching as grey clouds filled the late summer sky. And then I sobbed and my father wrapped his arms around me and held me close, in a way he never had before.

Now, seventy-two years later, I’m an old woman myself. But when I close my eyes, I can still hear the creak of the screen door, the slap of the water against the dock, and Pops’ voice calling, “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go catch us some dinner.”

It was, and always will be, the best summer of my life.