“Old age sure ain’t for sissies.” A famous actress might or might not have embroidered this on her pillow. My own pillow slips, stitched by my grandmother, are showing signs of age, so I store them carefully away in a cupboard. Perhaps I should “let them go”—along with a lot of other stuff we don’t use anymore. Simple.
I’ve spent years searching for simple as my husband and I lurch into our 70s and begin downsizing, as one does when the kids move out and assume lives of their own. Or, in a twist for seniors at the family cottage, as the kids move in, take control, and start remaking the nest in their own way.
As we get older, we’re suddenly conscious of our accumulation, and so to simplify both our urban and rural lives, we’ve embraced the buckets of decluttering: keep, give away, toss. We excise items that our kids don’t want, so that they don’t have to. As the Swedes cheerfully label it, we “Death Clean,” which is somehow meant to be a jubilant process.
The struggle is most real at the cottage, where goods arrive by boat. Stuff gets dumped on the dock, hauled up the hill, and proceeds to settle in forever—not unlike us. The cottage is 94 years old. Two previous owners left us everything. You can imagine.
Our cottage is by no means the only archive in our nook of eastern Georgian Bay. Take Gertrude Green’s place. In 1989, I interviewed Gertrude, our cottage neighbour, for a story in this magazine. “I was rather shocked to learn this year that I am an old-timer,” she told me at the time, “because all the people I have known up here have been coming longer than I have.” She arrived by canoe in 1937. Her husband’s family had been in the area since the turn of the last century. In 1989, Gertrude was 87, not old by modern standards. But maybe that’s the POV of someone with an altered appreciation of age.
Consider these design features to welcome every body to the cottage
Gertrude no longer stayed alone at the cottage. Her family helped out, doing the heavy lifting. She kept coming, she said, partly from habit and the allure of the place, but also because “when you get old, you want to feel useful, and I thought I could give some continuity to the summers as people came and went.”
Nearing her ninth decade, she too had the urge to simplify. “I didn’t know for sure whether I was coming or not this year,” she mused, “but I thought I’d better go sort out a lot of junk and not leave it for somebody else to do.”
At our place, the kids are already rolling up their sleeves to chop wood, mend screens, and make meals. Like many thirtysomethings, they lean into minimalism, likely a desperate act of self-defence against the abundance bearing down on them. Thus, they also clean and declutter and plunder the cottage pantry for “Best Before” dates. We’re grateful. Meanwhile, we play with the grandkids and secretly bewitch them with the magic of cottage stuff. They delight us, these babies who have no sense of their own mortality, or that of the antiques—human and otherwise—around them. They live every moment full of joy.
Meet this bear-punching grandmother who cottages on Georgian Bay
Life is grand when we’re young. Others care for us, feed us, make sure we don’t fall out of the boat. Then we grow up and careen onto the stage as lead actors. We are in charge. We make decisions for ourselves, our children, and possibly our parents too. We transition from the ones who are cared for to the ones who scurry about like frenzied chipmunks looking after everyone else. Life is busy and complicated. There’s no room for simple.
Until there is. Retirement brings more time to breathe at the cottage, less time to be breathless on highways choked with exhaust. More time with grandkids and more time with aged parents, if we’re lucky. My mother-in-law, cottage matriarch, doesn’t go to the cottage anymore except in her imagination and her stories. Every spring, when we open up, she asks, “Is the old place still standing?” “It is,” we tell her. And despite our decluttering, it is still packed with her treasures, a sentimental shrine to the antecedents of our cottage lives—or a surrender to the impossibility of moving that motherlode off the island.
I sometimes wonder if there is a risk in the search for simple. Are we throwing away all that makes us complicated and messy and human? What if we’re not supposed to dispose of our lifetime cache? We could celebrate its sheer impracticality. Enjoy the beautiful relics where they lie in basements, attics, sheds, and—take a breath, friends!—storage units. What if the path to simplicity is to not do anything?
There will come a day when our children fully take over—both the cottage and looking out for us when we are there. We will have to give up control and find our own inner joy—and peace—living each moment as it comes. But not yet. “Should Dad still be going to the cottage on his own?” I’ve heard it whispered. The reality is that Dad has been going to the cottage on his own since he was a teenager. These days, his chances of falling are greater. And that possibility matters even less to him than the need to Death Clean, a concept that would astound him if he knew about it. You could no more stop my husband going to the cottage than you could stop the sun setting.
We were going to retire to the lake together, but life had other ideas
Like Gertrude, we are surprised to find that we have become the old-timers. For now, though, we are the ones giving continuity to the summers, the thread that connects generations and gives meaning to the hoarded bounty that surrounds us. We find immortality in stories that ramble through every dog-eared paperback, battered board game, and mismatched cup and saucer. When those relics finally get tossed, we’ll be here to stitch the memories into a patchwork for future generations.
This article was originally published in the Early Summer 2026 issue of Cottage Life.
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