cottage (and Happy Simcoe Day to Torontonians and Honourary Torontonians)
Friday, the OB&D drove me to my step-mother's a cottage. It took 5, instead of 3 hours and we got in by midnight. It's in an area near Algonquin Park, where there happens to have been a Polish community for 150 years- we stumbled upon a local festival on Saturday, on the way to Kilaloe. I enjoyed the textiles and the music (a young fiddler was quite amazing, and there's something so sweet and innocent about a country fair, with the traditional Polish music mixed with Celtic music one expects in Upper Canada, and Bluegrass of small towns). It was mostly overcast and rainy, which meant long hours to fill. Apart from our excursion, we went for a walk (and saw snake and shrine), went swimming, and ate, argued politics, ate some more and drank too much, though we did share with the neighbours. In Bary's Bay there is a monument to that quintessential Canadian story; the Avro Arrow, whose designer hails from thereabouts. In fact, though there were mercifully few motor boats on the extremely quiet lake, but those that we saw were FAST, having been designed by an Arrow test pilot.
The cottage is quite something- built 40 years ago as a sort of collaboration between K's father, an architect, and a local Métis carpenter, who often continued ahead with the work, prior to receiving plans- it is not a geodesic dome, but somewhat reminescent hexagonal wooden egg, suspended from 5 thick beams, shaped rather like a mushroom. There are plates from around the world (with obvious Polish bias) on the ceiling, and Cree and Objibway masks and beadwork from K's fieldwork in Northern Ontario, and moose antlers donated by the carpenter. There are also very 60s canvases by K's brother along with elaborate macrome.
I never knew that people outside Toronto don't call the first long weekend in August "Simcoe Day" until Friday, when I was asked about it by an American colleague and looked it up. Lord Simcoe was an interesting character. But his abolishion of slavery in Upper Canada (completed just after his death by 1810), long before this happened in the rest of the British Empire, is enough to make one overlook a certain aristocratic high-handedness (though perhaps not by our neighbours to the south).