weekend update

Friday found me, as usual, playing the rebuy madness known as the donkament. I lasted about a  half hour when I was dumped from the game; it seems it doesn’t matter if you have the auto-rebuy button clicked if you find yourself disconnected after going all in with 83 offsuit (I cannot believe that did not hold up). I reconnected just in time to see that I had finished 13th of 13.

It’s definitely a sign of how far I’ve come when my only reaction was to mentally shrug my shoulders…no tilt, no gnashing of teeth, no cursing.

However, it was still the only poker I played all weekend.

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I headed to the north end of the city far too early on a  Saturday morning. I wrote a while back about signing up for the Adult Literacy Program run through the library, and the training was the full day Saturday.  I tried not to look at it as an auspicious beginning when just as we arrived (Keith gave me a ride up), the skies opened up and treated us to a downpour complete with lightning and hail.

Nothing like starting the day wet and poorly caffeinated. To make matters worse, the power was out for the morning, meaning I had to follow along with the paper copy of the presentation rather than going with my original plan of paying half attention while jumping on the library’s free wifi.

To be honest, it was a good session. The trainers were all passionate about what they were doing, and the volunteers were there because we wanted to be there.

It was an interesting group; twenty-five of the most disparate people I’ve seen in one room. Old, young. White, black, brown, yellow. Professionals, labourers, stay-at-home moms. It was a visual representation of the melting pot that is my city. There was no bullshit, no attitude; we were all joined by the desire to pass on the gift of literacy that we had received, to someone else who needs it.

There are a lot who need it; the number of North Americans who are classed as only semi-literate is embarrassingly high. But I’m not going to talk about it. I’m going to do something about it, one person at a time.

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Sunday was Mother’s Day. I decided to endure an afternoon with my Mother-In-Law rather than endure an afternoon of Yay Mom flag waving on TV and online. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for moms and think that they are often under appreciated. But forgive me if I’d rather just stay in bed and avoid it.

Seventeen years later, and I still miss her.

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Once we got back from the in-laws (where once again, we could do nothing right), I worked on my writing assignment.

I’ve signed up for a memoir writing course run by a woman I get a very good vibe from. The first assignment was to be something around the word home. I’d had two weeks to play around with different concepts and places that I would call home, but of course I’d left it until the last minute.

What came out last night was not about the things I had initially thought of exploring. What landed on my page was in reaction to a real estate agents listing I had run across on Wednesday.

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ChurLee

Now and then I get hit with an impulse to throw places or people at Google and see what comes out. I don’t expect to get hits, especially on things from the past, and I like that. No news is good news. But things change, and one day my search had new results. I clicked through to a real estate agent’s site and there on the screen was the place from my childhood divided into lots for cottage development.

We’d originally started going to Chur-Lee Lodge on Whitestone Lake because a family friend had bought property on the lake and wanted my dad’s help in building. My dad was a handy guy with a hammer and nails, and so was a handy guy to know.

Chur-Lee was built in the 20′s, and had it’s heyday in the 40′s and 50′s as a fishing retreat. There were simple cottages built around a big field, a big lodge for dinners and entertainment, a private beach and docks. It had started to slip when the Kirkpatricks bought it, and it just kept slipping.

I remember the first time we took a look at the place. I must have been about 10, and was walking along the curving lane with my mum and younger brother. Dad was just ahead of us talking to the owner, Mr. Kirkpatrick. (For the life of me, I cannot remember his first name. He was always just Mr. Kirkpatrick.) I remember the unhappy look on Mum’s face as this run down resort was not exactly what she had in mind for a summer vacation spot, and I distinctly heard her muttering about what a dump the place was, and surely he didn’t expect her to spend three weeks here?

It’s funny that from that beginning, ChurLee would grow to be so special. Yes, it was a dump, and got to be more so as years passed. but it was quiet and lovely in it’s own rustic way.

We always rented cottage #2, right next to the lodge. It had two rooms, one with two double beds and the other with a propane stove, a sink with only cold water, a shakey wooden table with mismatched chairs and an old musty sofa that no one would sit on unless a blanket was draped over it. A screened porch ran along the length of it that had the old refrigerator that seemed to run pretty much constantly. It’s compressor would shudder and jerk to a stop and just as you thought, oh, how quiet it is now, it would shudder and jerk back to life again. The whole cottage always seemed to be shuddering. It was on 14 concrete pilings and some had heaved and gone crooked from the frost in the winters. Every step vibrated through the place. Even the door closing, an old wooden screen door with one of those spring closures with the rollers, the old kind that would snap the door closed that final inch with a lot of force and a loud bang, caused the cottage to shake.

But no one ever came there for the accommodations. We all had our reasons for loving the place. My dad loved the fishing. Mum loved the lazy days spent on the beach with the Dions and the Frasers, drinking, swimming and talking. My brother and I loved being able to run wild with their kids (10 in all), with only the minimum of adult supervision to keep us on track.

There are a thousand stories in a place like that, covering the ground like the Queen Anne’s lace that covered the field when it didn’t get mowed enough. I looked at the aerial online picture and got lost for a while.

See this spot beside the boat launch, in Lot #1, this is where we used to catch frogs and sell them to the grownups for bait, and this clearing here, by the old farmhouse on the right hand side of the picture, this is where the wild raspberries grew, small and tart and hot in the summer sun. We would close our eyes and eat them slowly, giving the still hot summer days a taste to remember them by.

You see that line in Lot #1, that goes to the water? That is where the path went through the trees and down a steep hill to the beach. The hard packed dirt always felt so cool on bare feet as we ran down the steepest part, whooping and barely staying one step ahead of a fall.

You can’t see it in this photo, but from the beach you could see the rock that we used to call Tom’s Rock for no other reason than Tom Kirkpatrick, the owner’s son, went and painted his name on it in the white paint that he should have been using to touch up the lodge’s exterior. Just down the bay from Tom’s Rock is the spot where my dad taught me to run his boat when I was thirteen, opening the way for me and my friend, Sandi, to escape mothers, fathers, siblings, and explore the lake. Down the stretch of water called the Long Arm is where her and I and her sister would go and fish. Fishing is what we told everyone we were doing. What we were really doing is nothing; but you couldn’t tell people you were doing nothing because then they would find something for you to do.

Over in the bottom left hand corner of the aerial shot, this is where the lodge was. It was an L-shaped building with a kitchen and a dining room that the adults used for playing cards and drinking in the evenings while us kids played flashlight tag under skies filled with stars. During the day, the lodge was ours, a place to get away from the sun or get in out the rain, to thump on the out-of-tune piano, to curl up in a big armchair with a book from the shelves filled with old detective novels, Harlequin romances and Reader’s Digests.

There, in the corner of what the real estate agent has labeled Lot 4, see that thing that looks like a hook? That’s the dock that my dad built when he and Mum came back to Chur Lee with a 40′ trailer they parked where the Honeymoon Cottage used to be. Dad was retired and they would spend months up there. My brother and I were grown with our time filled with work and friends, and we didn’t make it up more than one or two weekends in a summer. We were too old to run wild like we used to, and instead we would help out with building the path and steps from the trailer to the dock and with putting a big screened-in porch on the front of the trailer where we could all sit and drink beer and shoot the shit. We’d go up as a family for Thanksgiving weekends, and even now that spicy smell of fallen leaves in autumn makes me think of bulky sweaters and boat rides to see the fall colours on the shore.

You can’t see it in the picture, but across the bay from the dock is a small pile of stones on the shore. This marks the approximate spot where my parent’s ashes were spread, Dad’s 5 years ago, Mum’s 12 years before. It is fitting that they should be there in the place they both loved so much.

I looked through the other pictures that the real estate agent took, and thought of the hundreds of pictures we took during 35 years spent at ChurLee, all these little rectangular pieces of treated paper waiting to trigger more memories of a home now lost. While I hate that a spot that has been so constant for most of my life is being split up and sold, I hope that whoever follows finds as much there as we did.