Thursday, July 26, 2012

Down at the Lake

Further to my entries about my dad, I thought I'd do one about my mom.

The entries about my dad were lifted from a family history book. There's also a book about Lake Katepwa which contains recollections and descriptions from folks who lived in the Qu'Appelle Valley close to Lake Katepwa as well as a bit of general history of the area.

We had a cottage on the shores of Lake Katepwa. Our farm abutted the east end of Katepwa Lake so my mom authored one of the entries in that book. It's about 2 1/2 pages long. She talks about the cottage we had on the shores of Katepwa Lake, among other topics. On page 185, she writes:
"It was the thing to do as Linda (my older sister) and Louise grew older, to spend a week alone at the cottage with five or six (eight, one year) of their friends. There were not enough beds, so they spread out on the floor."
Oh, Mother. If you only knew! (Maybe she did. Gasp!)

Further down the shore, a quick walk from our cottage, there was another cottage full of boys. We used to have some good parties at one cottage or the other. I remember a poor neighbour standing out on his deck around 4:00 AM yelling at us to STFU so they could get some sleep.

On another occasion, one of the girls' parents, along with our own mother, were due to come down to the cottage, the day after one of the wild parties. We had to get up relatively early, load all the empties into the row boat and take them out onto the lake, about 30 or 40 yards out, and fill the empty bottles with water and let them sink to the bottom.

If the lake ever dries up some future archeologist will have to theorize how those brown bottles got to the bottom of the lake.

PS: When I lived and worked in Brandon, Manitoba, many years ago, my boss's husband was an archeologist employed at Brandon University. According to him, sites where broken brown glass were found in abundance were called the Brown Bottle Culture, so there's already a name for this strange tribe with strange customs.  But at the bottom of a lake???

PPS: Not far away from where we grew up and across the lake from where our cottage was situated, there was a lovely, sandy beach. It's now a Provincial Park.  Was then, too, actually.

We always wanted to go to "the beach", but we rarely got to go, having a cottage on the same lake and all.  But the bottom of the lake at the spot in front of our cottage was covered with rocks and sharp stones. Not nearly as good as at "the beach".  Bummer!

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