Revisiting memory lane

When my sister Kathleen and I were young, we had a cousin near our age who lived close by. She was the daughter of our favorite aunt, my mother’s only sister, and we were as tight as sisters ourselves. She was a year younger than me, was mildly dramatic, and had a mad crush on our oldest cousin John. Oh, she was a dynamo!

While we were very tight growing up, once we entered the real world as adults married with children, as often happens, we drifted apart. Aside from the occasional get-together, we all lived our lives rather independently of one another. Eventually, after some tumultuous times, my cousin moved out east and made a wonderful life for herself with a wonderful man.

But here I must digress for a moment . . .

When my mom was about eight years old, her dad built a little white cottage on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron. It’s the white one in the gallery below. There’s not an inch of it that would pass code nowadays, but to a person, it was our happy place in the summer. We spent countless weekends at ‘The Lake,’ our large family sleeping in the makeshift bunkhouse that Grampa built upstairs in the garage at the rear of the property. DCF would have had a field day with it, but that’s a whole different story.

One ‘tradition,’ if you can call it that, from days of old driving up to The Lake was to be the first one to yell, ‘I see Grampa’s si-gn!’ in a sing-song voice where all the kids would join in until we turned onto the long dirt road leading down to the cottage. Then the entire family would begin singing in loud voices, windows down, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re heeeeeere! We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re heeeeeere! ” It didn’t end there. It was repeated over and over until we came to a stop at the back yard of the cottage, all of us piling out with our brown paper bags of clothes, the bigger ones helping the littler ones while Gramma and Grampa and any other adults already there would begin the long walk from the cottage to the drive. Our cousins would race ahead of them to get to us, all of us excited to be there even though we might have seen each other just the weekend before!

The memories are sweet and never-ending.

Fast forward to 2022. After Mom’s burial last June, I was invited to spend some time with Julie at The Lake. She and her husband had purchased the place next door to the cottage and remodeled and refurbished it to be a haven for any and all visitors. And there were always visitors. During my long weekend there, we talked of our shared childhood and about how much fun we all used to have, recalling the later years when, with Molly, the four of us would take the train out of Sarnia to Toronto and see a show or two, ride the subway to the comedy clubs, and simply laugh ourselves silly over stories we’d never share otherwise. That’s when Julie came up with the idea of starting an annual Girls’ Weekend at her place in late August. Needless to say, we all jumped at the chance!

I was lucky enough to drive with Kathleen, and all the way there we reminisced about the days at The Lake. We shared similar stories from different perspectives, wondered repeatedly at the sleeping arrangements we’d all endured, and exclaimed whenever we saw something familiar along the route. Finally arriving at our turn onto the still-dirt road, we glanced at each other. Then we both started singing at the top of our lungs, tears running down our cheeks, as we retraced the memory lane of our youth to create new memories while reliving the old.