Change is happening and I want my mother!

More than anything, I wanted to tell my mother.

Earlier, I had told her that we were planning to sell the cottage. She was surprised that we were moving ahead with this because she knew how much we loved the place as, indeed, she, herself, loved it, but she also understood that time moves along and one’s capacity to keep doing everything changes along with it.

But Mum died in April, so I can longer tell her anything. And I am realizing more and more how her absence means I am on my own in this world of ours. Not literally. I am not alone in my daily life. I have my family and friends and community. But in the larger sense, there is now no generation above me, no older generation to be the buffer between me in the here-and-now and whatever comes next out there in the universe for me.

For so many years, I had parents and grand-parents, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles. Now they are all gone and I am the aunt. My sister and brother and I form the buffer for the two young family members of the next generation.

This is life. I get that. But I don’t I like it. At least not today when I would so love to be able to share with my mother the excitement and the sadness of selling the cottage and moving on to whatever new ways we’ll discover of getting out into nature. I want to reminisce with her, to remember things, to ramble down the memory lane of our cottage life of which she and Dad were so much a part.

I grew up camping and have a holistic sensory memory of time spent in the great outdoors, a place of wonder and delight and — so important, of fun. Water and sun, family time, meals cooked on a Coleman stove (and sometimes a campfire), then eaten at a picnic table, the dark of the evenings creeping into night that, if we were lucky, included the sounds of wildlife — present and amazing, and buffered by the parents who made every adventure both fun and safe. We would have spent the days hiking and swimming, boating and exploring — activities of a regular Canadian family with the good fortune to share unconditional love and the wherewithal to do good and enjoyable things together as a result of that love.

I am not naive. This is not everyone’s experience of family or adventure. But it is mine, and, via the cottage life, I have grown those roots of contentment and security in my own version of family and adventure and appreciation of nature.

Now it is coming to an end and I will work to find within me the generosity of spirit, the sympathetic joy, to be glad that a new much younger family will take over this place we have called Clifftop Cottage to make adventures of their own.

I think Mum would like this news, even as she might wish that it were her instead of this new family sitting in the gazebo watching the white caps on Lake Winnipeg.

I wish that, too. But life moves on, though the memories remain, as do the hundreds of photos of sunrises and moon rises and of Holly, the cat, in her various hiding places and of good meals at our own table and of fun times having ‘art camp’ in the gazebo and…and…and…more than anything, I want to tell my mother…

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.