In the second summer of Covid, my extended family spent the first week in August at the Portage Inn, on Peninsula Lake, just outside of Huntsville, Ont. Built in 1889, the Inn had operated as a small hotel until 2019, when its owners began renting the entire place out to large groups as a kind of mega-cottage. The large, commercial kitchen was ours to use, as was the vintage lounge with a bar, and, most memorable to me, the large terrace on a hill high over the water, where we all ate breakfast the first morning after we arrived.
There were 27 related people on the patio that day—30 counting dogs—ranging in age from 77 years to 11 months. The former was my brother-in-law Ed Brown, who was drinking a cup of coffee and reading Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The latter was my granddaughter, Evie Chaya Teitel, who was crawling. Crawling was Evie’s prime occupation then, and, to my dispassionate eye, she was possibly better at it than anyone in recorded history.
I was probably alone in thinking this, mind you, because everyone else was engaged in the mandatory activity for all Canadians at 9:30 a.m. on a cloudless, windless August day at a lake: slow inattention. All of them, even the teenagers with their phones—especially the teenagers— looked drugged, but pleasantly so. They might have been breaking their fast in the south of France or Spain.
Canada has no palpable south. The Canadian south is a time of year, at a place near water. For two months in the summer, the Canadian south is the cottage, the cabin, the lake. And the deeper Canadian south is mornings at the cottage. For 10 months of the year, we wake up in the morning and remember what we have to do; in the summer, we wake up and remember we have nothing to do. The result is languid and drifting, slowly paying attention to nothing at all. T.S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world”; Frank Costanza’s “serenity now.”
Meanwhile, back down at terrace level, Evie was still crawling. The degree of awareness from the world above her was something like the attention paid to the diaper-clad baby boy crawling on the floor of a crowded apartment in a scene I seem to remember from an old black-and-white Italian movie. Every few minutes the baby courts some disaster, reaching for a piece of broken glass or a frayed electric wire, before an adult arm swoops down at the last moment and plucks him from harm.
But Evie had other ideas. Instead of reaching for anything, she stopped crawling and sat up, with that supernatural posture every baby has. Then she stood up and took three or four somewhat hesitant steps. Then she sat down again, and paused, and stood up again, and took three or four less-hesitant steps.
I don’t remember who spoke then. It wasn’t me.
“Hey,” they said. “Is Evie walking?”
There are moments in your life—too few—when you realize precisely why you’re alive. It helps to have the sun on your face and a bagel in your hand and to be surrounded by people you care about, especially when they’re all speaking at once and cooing and laughing. It turns out that cottage mornings at the lake are for more than kicking back and exhaling. They’re for witnessing things small and miraculous.
Evolution personified, say. A person’s first steps.
This article was originally published in the June/July 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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