Five Quiet Recognitions

This is the year we protect what made us fall in love with this place.

You remember the first time you came. You’d visited what seemed like hundreds of cottages but this one was different. Maybe it was the light on the water. Maybe it was the smell of the White Pines. The feeling was that this place was right – it was complete – and now you wanted to be allowed in.

That’s why you bought the cottage. It’s why you came back every weekend from May through Thanksgiving.

But slowly something shifts. Not all of a sudden but a little, year by year. Maybe there’s fewer birds singing in spring or the shoreline is less wild.

The reason you fell in love with the cottage that June day isn’t gone. It’s just waiting to be picked.

This is the year our landscape finally reflects our values.

You know what you believe. You’ve bought an electric car. You vote according to your values. You talk to your kids about the world.

But not at the cottage.

At the cottage, the lawn still goes right down to the water. The landscape looks like it could belong in Forest Hill or Oshawa. It’s all OK… but there’s nothing Haliburton about it. There’s nothing of you about it.

That’s the anxious knot you feel. It’s not wrong; it’s just not right.

This is the year we choose care over control.

You’ve done everything like you’re supposed to. The beds around the cottage are mulched, the lawn is cut, the shrubs are trimmed.

And still… the cottage landscaping feels like something you’re holding in place rather than something alive. It’s something managed rather than something lived.

Control works… until it doesn’t. It works until you notice the effort – and money – it takes to keep strange plants from arriving and others on life support.

Care is different. It watches instead of controls.

This is the year we stop worrying we’re doing harm without knowing it.

The worry lives in the background like a low hum. You sprayed for mosquitoes last year because that’s what you’ve always done. You’re not sure if it matters. You’ve heard spraying is bad but you haven’t looked it up because part of you doesn’t want to know. You keep coming back to what they told you: it’s “all natural.”

And so the summer arrives and the lake is still beautiful, the trees still tall, and you sit on the deck and you don’t think about it. Until you do. Until you notice there are fewer dragonflies this year. You ask: is this OK? Am I part of the problem?

The question doesn’t go away because you ignore it.

This is the year we hand future “us” something better – not something to fix.

You received things at Christmas someone else chose. Some were lovely gifts. Others were burdens disguised as gifts so you had to fix what shouldn’t have to be fixed in the first place.

It’s the same as the cottage. Those choices you made quickly in the early days and things you installed on the cheap because you just wanted them done. Then there’s the fragile deck and rutted driveway you deferred because there’s always next year.

The trouble is, next year keeps arriving.