This is an meandering rumination on childhood summers as I experienced them. There isn’t really a point to it, but it’s a feeling I wanted to put into words.

The view of Lake Simcoe early in the summer

There’s something sacred about summer as a child. For me, it went beyond the simple reprieve from academia.

During the summer, I retreated to my mother’s cottage in the small town of Innisfil, on the south-west tip of Lake Simcoe. There was always the initial joy of leaving the city, leaving the school full of people I so rarely got along with. But there was more—an anticipation of the cottage. Anticipation of a small hole carved into the countryside, looking out over the vast lake.

The cottage was a small, single story affair. The living room was a cozy, wood-lined space in the middle of the building, with a cast-iron wood-stove at one end and a row of windows opposite, looking through the enclosed porch and off to the tree-lined shore. Beside the stove was a narrow hallway to the one bedroom not opening onto the living room, as well as the kitchen and rear entrance.

Faux-wood paneling lined the rest of the cottage, with peeling wood-pattern linoleum to match. Everything was dark and old, from the heavy carved cherry-wood desk set under the porch window to the faux-wood ceilings. My father always complained about the dim nature of the place, but I always thought he missed the point.

If I wanted light, I went outside. As it was, I spent my time at a day camp down the road, acquiring blistering sun burns that would gradually fade to a deep tan. My hair, light brown during the school year, would turn a brilliant, metallic gold. When I was inside, I found calm in the subfusc interior of my summer home.

Still damp from a day spent on the waterfront, I would snack in the rays of the late-afternoon sun beaming through the kitchen window. I might run about the three-quarter acre property, climbing trees and building bridges across the small creek on the edge of the yard. Still wearing my bathing suit, I would eat dinner, then read by the warm incandescence of the living room lamps.

Worn from a day of ceaseless motion, I fell asleep atop one of two bunk beds in a small room shared with my younger brother and sister. The absence of light in that room was total—no streetlights pressed between the curtains, no glow crept in under the door. Even with my siblings just feet away, I was totally alone in the world.

Late August always felt like the Sundays of the school year. The lake grew choppy and grey, as though in perpetual preparation for the storms that grew increasingly common. Indoor spaces claimed more camp days, subjecting us to arts and crafts, and group activities in place of sailing and dodge-ball.

Choppy seas and grey skies herald the end of summer freedom

The wind picked up too, as the temperatures began to dip. The recently vivid countryside began to appear bleak and grey as the summer crops gave way to windswept husks. Even the sunflowers began to wilt.

When the time came to uproot the volleyball net from the lawn and carry the sailboat back into the boathouse, the summer weather already seemed to have forsaken us. Packing up the cottage and loading the big, teal Toyota Avalon felt like a funereal affair. Even though I knew we would all return next June, the final walk to the car felt as though I was abandoning a dear friend.

Each year, even into my 20s, I would whisper my farewell to the cottage. As I walked through it for the last time each trip, I would assure the old building of my return. “I’ll miss you, cottage.”

Getting out of the car in the city felt strange. The air was different, and the black asphalt of the driveway radiated heat. On the wide ceramic tiles of the basement mudroom, we piled the remnants of summer in a heap to be dealt with later.

The return always felt the same. The large, new house felt strange and foreign. The cool basement air smelled of concrete—a hard, dusty smell, like the clean mess of a construction site rather than the warm organic entropy of the dusty country roads.

I would always run up the hard, even stairs to my bedroom on the top floor. The house seemed so perfect, so stiff compared to the peeling, tilted, imperfect cottage.

The night sky is infinitely bigger in the pure dark of the country

It always seemed that there were millions of things waiting for me to do when I returned. There were TVs and computers—the cottage had neither. There were my toys, my friends, the multifarious things I had left behind back in June.

I’d sit down on my big bed in a room I shared with no one, and I would stare blankly at the bright, poster-coated walls. I would look out of the broad south-facing window, out over the busy, bright, concrete neighborhood, and I couldn’t think of a thing to do.

I knew my Lego lay in the closet, as did the host of objects that kept me entertained through the year. Shelves of books lined the walls of my room, but it all felt cold and distant. The house felt like a museum. It was too bright, too open, too big. It smelled too new and clean, and the air conditioning—something else the cottage lacked—felt unnatural.

Sleep was impossible. I would lie awake in my large room awash with the glow of the city. Plagued by the energy not spent during my newly sedentary day, I was oppressively aware of the vast space around me. No longer was I wrapped in a thick blanket of darkness in a small room, with a wall to my right and my siblings to my left. I never felt less at home than I did on the first night back in my bedroom.

Of course, the alien sensation would fade, and excitement would mount for classes just days away. The city never truly felt natural, though. After a summer of bare feet, socks and shoes felt strange and bulky. I was smothered, riding the bus to school in jeans and sneakers just weeks after I had walked home from camp in nothing but a bathing suit, flip-flops in hand.

Always, I struggled to keep myself occupied. Always, I felt as though my activities were nothing but futile diversions—a jigsaw puzzle given to the inmate of a vast, grey prison. Always, some part of my mind counted down the days until I could be free again.

Summers lost