That Special Place
Every summer I try to get back to this place. It is where I spent my childhood summers. A small cottage with two big verandas overlooking the Ottawa River. It seemed to be the only place where I was alive, where memories are now rich and where I want them to be. I've managed somewhat successfully to forget most of the rest of those years when I was a prisoner in a brick building called a school. School made no sense to me. Others knew the value of good marks and hard work, and they've since proven that with their boutique law firms, second and third homes and vacations that come around quicker than the seam on the treadmill in their in-home exercise studio.
The cottage has informed some of my writing, recently more so. I had a chance to get up there this summer. My sister owns it and when there is a space of vacant time, when they are all off doing other things, I like to have it to myself for a few days, if my own schedule permits.
Yes, the memories flood back when I start to smell the cedar through the open car windows. Layer upon layer, the young boy's imagination and wonder, the up-tight adolescent, and the self-centred teen.
My novel, The Summer Between (working title Our Own Sargasso Sea, which I think I still like better), involves a twelve-year-old trying to understand and deal with feelings of attraction for a slightly older boy. He is thwarted by everything, family, class, racism, and the girl next door.
The seeds of this novel were planted by two very real people who are now gone––that boy and that girl. It is that time of life, isn't it? When not only parents go, but friends or partners of friends and then friends and on and on, go. I always thought there would be a time when I would meet the object of my attraction just one more time, to see him full-grown. And I met the neighbour upon whom I based the foil, a few times over many decades. Our past, our fist fights, fishing victories, swimming races, nighttime barbeques and bonfires seemed to bind us to our most authentic selves. There was little to blur the view of who we really were, regardless of our present lives.
It was fiction. It was a what-if, in a way. I am not sure if a part of me is gone too or has simply embraced what they were to me, a little more. Of course the place has changed a little, still a dead-end road. People still wave to passing strollers or drivers, the sound of boats and voices on verandas still permeate the summer nights.
There is something about the places I love and places I've loved. Those are the places that work themselves into my writing for the simple reason that I can have a few more minutes, hours and days to spend––in the Byward market and coffee with a dear friend, on the banks of the Ottawa River with my dog, in Montreal or Old Quebec being a star or a slut, somewhere on the sunny Mediterranean, or warm and salty on a tropical isle, looking off to expansive horizons.