When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Percy and Aunt Evelyn had custom-made triple and quadruple bunk beds: the triple in the boys’ room, the quad in the girls’ – that’s seven cousins and the first set of twins: Trent and Severn. Uncle Sloan and Aunt Penny in March Five had six cousins and the second set of twins, both named after Uncle Sloan’s best war buddy: Alexander and Alexandra. The cottagette, March Six, had no cousins. It sat back on the road into Rosedale, empty except on weekends, reserved for Uncle Howie and insert name of current squeeze here.
Is this too much Marching for you? That’s exactly how Jordan and I felt. At least you don’t have to keep them all straight. Just know that there were litters and litters of them, all hanging with their sharp, genetic claws on the edges of our ‘Almost’ lives.
That’s us, Almost March Seven, clinging literally and figuratively to the edge of March. Each summer, as MC walked in the door to survey what havoc wintering mice and raccoons had wrought, she sighed and said the same thing: ‘Home is home, though it were never so homely.’ A fitting saying for a squat pine box on cinder blocks squashed against a swamp. Almost had a view of duckweed. Almost had bedrooms the size of beds, a single couch in the picture window, a dining table touching the back of said couch and a kitchen you couldn’t swing a cat in. But Dad could quite rightly and did frequently respond, ‘Yes, a poor thing but mine own.’ He’d built it all and had the film footage to prove it, of the framing, the wiring and the plumbing. He’d bricked the chimney and lived to film the flames.
Far from a haven, at best our cluster of cottages offered us a separate peace. That’s Jordan’s second favourite book, A Separate Peace, so I had to get it in at least once. And March was separate for certain, fanned around the bay a stone’s throw from the lake and each other, hemmed in on one side by Peace’s swamp, which separated our land from Hezzy’s farm, and on the other by the water’s edge that curved south from Grandma’s, ran down the canal, past the trailer park at Lock 35 and into Cameron Lake. More than tourists but not quite locals, caught betwixt and between, we didn’t live on the land, but neither could we see or hear Highway 35 as it tore past Yogi’s cage in the tourist section of Rosedale. With a foot in each camp, you’re traitor to both. There’s no place like Almost.
But Almost didn’t get its diminutive from being separate, smaller or shabbier. Dad had not married well. When he introduced Mom to Aunt May, thinking to break the ice, he proudly asked if Mom didn’t look just like Della Street, you know, the TV star from Perry Mason. Aunt May, who nursed a none-too-secret spite for all things Scottish, replied, ‘That aging sweater girl with the big cow eyes who has to type for a living because she can’t get a ring on her finger? Why yes, Tommy, I do see the resemblance. It’s almost as plain as the nose on her face.’
They married anyway. In 1951. There must have been a grace period – not one I remember, but I’ve seen the footage. Mom in a bikini and flip-flops, her curls swept up in a movie star head scarf. The uncles raising our roof. Mom planting lipstick kisses on a new washing machine. All of March on our lawn toasting the successful installation of our space heater, each with a beverage of choice in hand. Jordan’s there with a bottle dangling. Incontestable cinematic evidence that Almost began its life in white and green as March Seven. It even had the requisitely prim roses. But a new broom sweeps clean, and in 1964, my mother grabbed one. Legend has it she got out of the car, grabbed a shovel, dug up Grandpa’s roses and planted petunias before she even unpacked. She made Dad cut down the ancient hedge of lakeside cedars. She bought a second dog; nobody had two. Even if her second one was cast-iron and nailed over the door. It was still a Scottish terrier, known in March as a Rat Dog, a rat snarling bold white letters: ‘Caroline’s Clan.’ To March it read ‘Keep Out.’ So they did.
Intent on further mutiny, Mom drove herself into Fenelon, filled her trunk with leftover poorly mixed paint from Canadian Tire and handed Dad a brush. Grey paint. Pink trim. Aunts pursed their lips. Uncles came over and told him to straighten up and fly right. They yelled, drunk and sober, insisting he paint it back. They offered to paint it back. They offered him good money to do so. When it became clear who wore the pants that held the wallet that paid the painter, they demoted our cottage, and our dad, to Almost.
That was 1964. Yogi’s first summer. I was ten, Jordan nine. The separate pieces summer. For reasons I didn’t understand until I read Jordan’s diary, my parents had not wintered well and only my father managed to knock himself more or less back together. It took a frenzy of hammer and nail, a frantic effort to please Mom or to avoid her, God only knows. She spent most of that summer in her room; he worked alone and at night. It must have been odd without his brothers. Ordinarily, when someone proposed the building of anything in March, uncles discussed it, scrapped drunken plans and drew sober ones, got them approved – not by the township, but by Grandma – then built it together. That summer, none of them would have agreed to help had he asked, because everything my father built in 1964 amounted to one thing: a kick in the teeth.
It started with the dock. Low to the water, a mere yard wide, it gave a good swift boot nonetheless. No one had their own dock. We used Grandma’s; Grandpa built it. Enough said. Dad said it was for Jordan, to make it easier for her to get into the water, but nobody believed that for a nanosecond. We all saw Mom slip into the waves at odd hours, now without having to walk past all those blooming roses. Her reason for digging up ours? ‘March fecundity! Give them an inch and they’ll plant a baby every mile! Time they got a bite of their own bridle.’
That explained everything. So Dad kept hammering.
He built an addition, not on the back where the uncles had obligingly put theirs, but at the side, a choice even more affronting than a dock. It made Almost bigger across its face than all of them, even March One. He built out to the swamp, so close he couldn’t walk around it. He fell in trying. He waded out of the ooze and chased Jordan over the front lawn roaring like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the end, he had to frame the room square on the front lawn and tow it over rollers into place with Bessie B. He jacked the room on cinder blocks, glued it to the cottage and cut an adjoining door with his chainsaw. Mom cowered, clutching her ears, as the invading blade carved through the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. Despite Mom’s protests, Dad let Jordan cut the last inch, his big hands over hers.
If March allowed my father the illusion that the paint, the dock and the addition were his ideas, we all knew the final kick at the clan – the deck – was pure Mom. A deck like those of the rest of March would, normally and logically, have faced the bay, good for dinner at sunset and the moon at night. But then March could see us eating. They could see what we ate. Could see us chew. ‘And that,’ said my 1964 mother, ‘went beyond the pale.’ So our, read her, deck got built on the far side, out of sight, cantilevered out from the addition over the swamp, like a nature walkway in Wye Marsh or Presqu’ile Bay. It stuck out like a sore foot. When snapping turtles caught their dinner, we saw fronds thrashing. Dinner died screaming. Truth be told, there were twenty-plenty dead things out there, and they didn’t all die naturally.
Whatever other religious beliefs my father may have had, after his duckweed baptism of 1964, he clearly believed that from swamp we are born and unto swamp we shall return. He decided to help his God along, hurry him up a bit in the Firmament Department, so he made land for himself, from scratch, from litter, from any and everything he could find, terraforming long before Star Trek. If historians ever need proof of how the Depression marked my parents’ generation, Almost is sitting on it. Simply put, there is no such thing as garbage. There is only landfill. Like offspring, it comes in two varieties: yours and not yours.
Anything ours, as in any item given to or paid for by my parents, endured a circuitous journey to its landfill destiny. No item ever deviated from this itinerary. It went from the store to the main floor of 26 Delma Drive, Toronto 14, Ontario. Once chipped, scratched or stained, it retired to the basement. If the rec room already held a similar item, the cheaper of the two got sent to the cottage. Note: not the older, more worn or broken – the cheaper. Even when something became unarguably unusable – defeathered archery arrows, a clock on permanent midnight – if the parents had paid ‘good money’ for it, it didn’t qualify as landfill. That took years, possibly decades. That hibachi with a hole in it might be just the ticket someday. You never know when you might need an empty croquet rack or an empty crib. You can move