NOTICED:RENTED MEMORIES

In the great Canadian tradition of the summer cottage, there are the owners, whose family retreat is a place of memory and tradition cherished by generations. And then there are the renters, who begin their vacation like intrepid 16th-century explorers searching for clues as to how, exactly, the indigenous population manages to wash dishes in this sink set-up and where they might keep something resembling a toilet plunger.

For many reasons, chief among them a restless desire to travel rather than always return to the same place, we fall into the latter category. And what I have discovered over many years as a renter is that while it can be annoying that other people’s places rarely have the kinds of creature comforts you might insist upon (some sort of functional coffee system, mattresses that date from the current century and somewhere with a pleasant view equipped with unbroken seating upon which one might sit and drink said coffee), there is something to be said for taking a little vacation in someone else’s life, and, over your stay, making it your own.

Last week, for instance, we were up at an old cottage on Lake Huron that was little more than a shack, but had two distinct advantages: It was perched on a cliff above the perfect sandy beach, and it was right next door to our dearest friends. Amid the crazy collection of mismatched plates and coffee cups (my favourite featured a commemorative portrait of the Varna United Church, complete with cemetery), we found a lovely, old straw picnic basket, which we filled with snacks and sandwiches for the beach. Since the rickety, little-used back deck faced a beautiful sunset, we swept away the cobwebs, and gathered the bits and bobs of outdoor furniture to assemble a games area for cocktail hour.

Then my son found a Chinese gong in one of the cupboards, which he gonged every time one of us answered incorrectly, or for that matter, at any opportunity, until I was forced to hide it away again. And my husband began reading aloud to us from a flowery book from the forties he had discovered about the geological origins of the local Ausable River called T’aint Runnin’ No More in an upper-class-twit sort of voice until we begged him, tears running down our faces, to stop.

For part of the magic of adventuring in other people’s cottages is that, like my mother’s freezer, they are an anthropological compost of relics and leftovers that become freeze-dried over time. As cultural interlopers, the renter lacks souviens of these souvenirs and thus is liberated to make someone else’s place of memories a playground for creating their own.

We will never forget the Railmans, for instance, who we never had the pleasure of actually meeting, but whose brown-shag-carpeted, macramé-plant-holder-filled Long Island beach cottage has entered our family vernacular as a perfect diorama of the 1970s. Or the century-old cottage at Go Home Bay that was stuffed, in every cobweb-filled nook and cranny, with old paperbacks.

That was where we played the Book Game, in which, after examining the cover, everyone pens their own opening line, and then must guess the real one (my prize-winning entry for an obscure British detective novel began, “If not for the delphiniums, X would have been eager to take the early train…”). The discovery of a bread maker at the back of a kitchen cupboard had us turning out fresh loaves of yeasty white loaves every morning, which we gorged on with jam and butter. And a working turntable and vintage LP collection had us spinning old Steely Dan and J.J. Cale for our kids on vinyl – a pastime that proved so fun for all concerned we dusted off our own kit and set it up in the family room on our return home.

If cottages are museums, they are museums without guidebooks, which makes for great opportunities to become creatively curious. Who, for instance, in the cottage in the Kawarthas was such an avid Anglophile that they read only P.D. James, Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Pym? Was it Uncle Ned? Or did he prefer to be called Edward? Did the family up at Mink Lake own a La-Z-Boy dealership or did they just really, really like them? And how did a Chinese gong end up at Lake Huron?

And once in a while, as with the house on stilts we rented in the Florida Keys, with its sunset views, sexy, seventies bathrooms, terrific sound system and brilliant kitchen, you start to like your version of the real owners so much, you begin to wish you were them.