Winter is made for children. Last weekend my two daughters and I visited the family cottage in Central Ontario, three hours north of Toronto. The girls reminded me of my own unquenchable energy for fun in the snow when I was young.
The house is insulated and equipped with two oil furnaces, a wood stove, a range, refrigerator and lights that run on propane, a flush toilet for summer, a chemical toilet for winter, and an outhouse. Drinking water has to be hauled in, although the lake is clean enough to drink. We use an ice auger to drill through more than half a metre of ice for wash water.
Despite all these conveniences, the family rarely uses the cottage in winter. Until recently the access road was never ploughed, so all our supplies has to be pulled a kilometre from the main road on toboggans. This was a great adventure when I and my cousins were teenagers. Our parents conscripted us to do much of the grunt work.
Now that my parents are older and I have small children of my own, the effort is less palatable. My parents share the cost of ploughing with one resident who lives there permanently, but the road is only navigable to the sturdiest of vehicles. The area is heavily wooded, and cliffs surrounding the lake ensure several feet of powder snow that persist until at least April 15. I rarely visit the place between Canadian Thanksgiving in early October and the end of thaw. But even in the harshest seasons, Lake Fletcher rewards his guests.
This year we had a family reunion of sorts. A winter storm threatened to sweep Ontario on Friday (in the end it fizzled) so my daughters' mother took them to meet my parents a day early, on Thursday night. On Friday I woke in Guelph to overcast skies and no snow, so I drove up to join them.
I never saw the winter birds I had hoped for. But on the hike in, I saw a flock of eight purple finches, a white-breasted nuthatch and two downy woodpeckers.
On Friday evening we were joined by my brother's family, which I haven't visited for four years. My oldest nephew is 19 and an aspiring writer, so the gathering was long overdue!
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