Unplugged

Cottage vacation 2007 has come to an end – the children are back to pooping and sleeping on schedule, and I am back to blogging. My in-laws’ cottage is the real kind of cottage: linoleum floors, paper-thin walls, and orange-and-brown floral-print furniture. The walls are decorated with 1970s prints of surfing doll-children, along with a glued-together puzzle depicting Neuschwanstein castle. One can go into a cottage like that, but it still feels like outside with the windows thrown open and the floors strewn with sand. Inside is simply a more contained version of outside, a convenient place to stow the children while I prepare yet another pot of macaroni and cheese.

That’s from my perspective, of course. From the children’s perspective, there is an absolute division between inside and outside. Outside is the world of tactile play and gross-motor activity. They run and splash; they carry buckets of water and pour them over carefully piled-up mountains of sand. They dig into the wet sand with greedy hands, shaping, smearing, pouring, smoothing. When they go inside, however, a switch is thrown and they immerse themselves in pretend play. Ancient Fisher-Price buses crash off of armchair-cliffs, and the passengers (animals from a cardboard puzzle) are strewn over the floor below. “Are you okay?” Bub asks with well-feigned concern. “Everyone’s all right!” he announces a moment later, manoeuvering a dinky-car bulldozer into position to pull the bus out of the cavern.

When I’m at the cottage, I like to tell myself that I am living the life of my pioneer ancestors – the life they would have lived, at least, if they had access to electric appliances and back issues of People magazine. (Julia Roberts’ pregnancy was not, it appears, the well-kept secret I thought it was; Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson have, apparently, broken up.) Cottage life forces me to live from the neck down. It is hot; sweat and sand mingle in crevices I’m not ordinarily aware of. The part of my brain that churns out blog posts is temporarily disabled – there is a kind of thundering silence, a deafening absence where the hum of words and sentences used to be.

Food takes on a new significance. At home, suppertime always takes me by surprise. At five o’clock, I suddenly remember that I need to think of a plan, scavenging through my refrigerator with a kind of hopeless optimism. At the cottage, supper is in the works from 10 am, when we walk up to the variety store to buy corn from the back of a truck, assured by the driver that these cobs were picked only hours before. Ice cream cones are the focal point of the evening as we walk over to Wallygators for scoops of Moose Tracks and Bear Claw. Even Bub, who spits out his mouthful of strawberry kiddie-cone, is fascinated by the illustrated list of flavours, memorizing the sequence: Vanilla, Butterscotch Ripple, Black Cherry.

Aside from eating, the main activity at the cottage is sleeping. I go to bed shortly after dark, packing away the Scrabble board and reading a chapter or two of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets before turning out the light. The children call out often in the night, unsure of where they are, wanting reassurance that their parents are near. Thus punctuated by frequent interruptions, my sleep is full of uneasy dreams – rage dreams at my ex-husband (who knew I still had those, buried in the darkest recesses of the night?), high-school reunions, terrifying stalker-nightmares, and Nancy-Drew detective mysteries that I try vainly to recall when I get up in the morning. (I would have caught the counterfeiters, I’m sure, if only I had been able to sleep just a few moments longer!) Bub is up at six, but the Pie snuggles into bed with me until eight, her forehead pressed into my shoulder, her body perfectly still. Occasionally, she mutters a few words, pulling me out of my light doze. “It’s me!” she whispers. “It’s Mama,” she adds, patting my breast with a proprietary hand.

I tried to compose this post many times while I was at the cottage, struggling in vain to dredge words up from my sun-baked brain. And then I got home and the words came back, tumbling out of me this morning as I changed sandy sheets from last night’s hasty bedtime. The comfortable hum of air-conditioning and writing has resumed.