Oops, I did it again.
In spite of my best resolutions, I again forgot to take a "before" picture, so any "after" picture I were to post now wouldn't show the true results of my hard work.
Which is okay, since I don't happen to have an "after" picture. I could go take one, but it's not really "after" yet. I'm not sure when "after" is going to be.
I've been making our larger camp ("cottage" in southern Ontario, "cabin" in Manitoba) habitable for relative strangers who have been warned about the virtue of approaching this experiment with a sense of adventure. One of the group is expected tomorrow. And, in a near-miracle, we seem to be ready. Even the water seems to be okay, for now. (That sound is me madly knocking wood.)
All this "strangers at camp" stuff is new territory for my siblings and me. Until our parents retired in the late 1980s, our family always stayed at the other place, the "it may be a shack but it's our shack." This other, larger camp had been built by my grandfather so that he and my grandmother would have a "nice" place to stay and dote on grandchildren from afar. However, they were incapacitated around 1960 and stopped using the place.
Because my mother preferred the shack and our time was always limited in the summer, the "nice" camp lay fallow for about ten years. Then a math colleague of my mother's mentioned that he and his wife were finding it too difficult to paddle Quetico in their retirement. My mother said they were welcome to stay in this place--and issued the warning to them I mentioned earlier, about the virtue of approaching this experiment with a sense of adventure.
For some fifteen years, the Mendenhalls stayed in this camp. They were a treasure. They brought it back from edge of ruin. They cleaned and painted, fixed and fiddled and futzed about, and generally made do with the quirks of the place. Every year when we arrived for our three weeks in the summer, my mother would comment about a new piece of furniture (an end table made from a painted wooden spool, a lawn chair with new webbing and a grafted-on wooden arm), and Dr. Mendenhall would allow, "Picked it up cheap." Which meant, "at the dump."
The Crapture delivered the "nice" camp from many vestiges of his, ahem, ingenuity, and that of my parents. (The four of them could have given those Hoarders shows guaranteed syndication.) A few last bits are stored in an outbuilding until we have another full load. I think of it as a form of reincarnation: from the dump it came, and to the dump it shall return. Er, landfill. Ashes to ashes, dump to.... never mind.
So tomorrow is a new beginning. And as Green Day says, "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." Which is as close, I guess, to an "after" as I am going to get here.
And that's okay. Because the "before" was "now," and the "after" will be its own "now," and I know that the "now" I'm living in is pretty darn good. (But, that wish list.)
