the rainbow to see us. The rest of March, who probably liked Ms. Garland well enough but saw no reason why her death should change anything, had marched as ordered on Friday. They stood primly at attention beside budding red roses, glaring at our rusty brown Ford and radiating indignation. We’d better have a darn good reason. When they judged it, and us, inadequate yet again, they eyed Tessie’s overflowing trunk tied half shut with binder twine. Tessie, named after Bessie, didn’t know she wasn’t a truck and obliged MC by hauling a rig’s worth of cottage accoutrements. Knowing it would take us all day to unpack alone, knowing that the Arrival Protocol dictates that a March always helps a March settle in, they asked themselves if they owed that courtesy to a Johnny-Come-Lately March? Hmm … Maybe not. Grandma hugged Jordan and kissed her ear. Aunt Elsbeth, who had boys but no girls, smiled at her and lifted a box or two until Uncle Gavin hollered at his wife to go back to their place to get him a beer. As uncles drifted off, they each had to remind Dad that he’d missed the Rock Concert. Dad’s name got nicked by gravel that day; Uncles called him several versions of Lazy Bum, with commiserating eye rolls in the direction of the whip cracking in the kitchen.
One might expect forgiveness. One might even assume that spending all summer, every summer, cheek to jowl with every living member of March would produce a strong sense of clan, of identity and belonging. Good ones. Logical but wrong. Proximity is not intimacy. We drove north to face thirty-odd Marches with whom we shared little more than a last name, all shoehorned into our Group of Seven cottages, so many cousins we didn’t know what to do. And we’d just done the one thing March could not forgive: we’d snubbed tradition. Again.
It goes way back. My grandparents came to Balsam Lake in 1921, before my dad, the baby, was even born. The local Anglican parish couldn’t afford a year-round minister, but in summer, their ranks swelled with the owners of catamarans, they could. They offered my schoolteacher-minister grandfather a summer job on the condition that he accept in payment what was then worse-than-worthless: seven acres of undeveloped Kawartha lakefront. Hezzy’s father, the farmer who offered it, had no use for it. It had no road, much of it was swamp, and he’d lost too many calves, some to snappers and some to the misguided bovine belief that their kind could swim across the bay and live to tell the tale. Grandpa quickly accepted.
He spent a decade burning bush and building March One, painting it in English Countryside like his church, snow white with forest-green trim. He planted the same cedar seedlings and English primroses around both, hardy and red. He put in a gravel road and spent a summer up to his neck in warm water, lugging much bigger rocks into a crib for his dock. The very day he mortared the last rock in the rustic stand-up fireplace, legend has it, he stood up, keeled over and died. Grandma’s cottage had been hers alone for forty years. High on a promontory that jutted into the bay, surveying the lake from three angles and her vast Victory garden from the fourth, she had the coldest well and the best breeze.
And the rest of us? It was an era of romantic wood-burnt names, of letters blackened into slabs of heavily varnished yellow pine, sliced like thick bananas, still sporting bark: ‘Kawartha Hideaway,’ ‘Rose of Rosedale,’ ‘Cozy-cat Cottage.’ More signs than I could count stole Fenelon’s nickname and proclaimed themselves ‘The Jewel of the Kawarthas.’ March disdained signs; we named by number or, as Jordan put it, only halfway joking, by rank.
Second in command, stationed just down the hill from Grandma, sat Aunt May’s March Two, built like a mini Eiffel Tower, an exact but scaled-down replica of March One. Technically our great-aunt, Grandpa’s sister and therefore Dad’s aunt, Aunt May crossed the pond during the war to avoid the bombs. In double disappointment, not only did she fail to go back across the pond in time to get hit by one, she never returned at all. When Dad asked Jordan why she wouldn’t call her ‘Great-Aunt May,’ Jordan looked him dead on and answered smooth as Brylcreem, ‘But, Dad! The Reverend Southwell says a lie can imperil your immortal soul!’
In the fifties, Grandma’s five children, now with their own growing families, planted their roses and their white-and-green cottages in birthright pecking order, all identically replicating the curve of the bay. From out in Grandma’s canoe, we looked like teeth with spinach trim.
March Three was the only custom-designed cottage, home to cousins Grayden, Cranston Jr., Gavin Jr., Dexter and, of course, Derwood. Dad’s only sister, Aunt Elsbeth, had ‘married well’ by ‘snagging’ Uncle Gavin, who made a fortune in post-war construction. I had visions of a big cartoon hook like the one that drags Snagglepuss offstage. Jordan laughed and quoted Mom: A rich man’s wooing need seldom be a long one. She said the real hook was Grayden’s birthdate. That Uncle Gavin had been a war buddy of Uncle Howie. That Uncle H felt sorry for his pal when he had nowhere else to go one Christmas, so Uncle H brought him home for turkey and his sister. Uncle G had been so grateful to marry into March that he became one. His last name wasn’t his anyway. At ten, he’d been sent over from Wales to some farmer out in Belleville who’d used him as a hired hand and a punching bag, stashed him in the barn and beat him senseless on a nightly basis for no other reason than because he could. Uncle G flatly refused to give his kids ‘that bloody bastard’s last name.’ So, presto, everyone in March was one.
In March Four, Uncle Percy and Aunt Evelyn had custom-made triple and quadruple bunk beds: the triple in the boys’ room, the quad in the girls’ – that’s seven cousins and the first set of twins: Trent and Severn. Uncle Sloan and Aunt Penny in March Five had six cousins and the second set of twins, both named after Uncle Sloan’s best war buddy: Alexander and Alexandra. The cottagette, March Six, had no cousins. It sat back on the road into Rosedale, empty except on weekends, reserved for Uncle Howie and insert name of current squeeze here.
Is this too much Marching for you? That’s exactly how Jordan and I felt. At least you don’t have to keep them all straight. Just know that there were litters and litters of them, all hanging with their sharp, genetic claws on the edges of our ‘Almost’ lives.
That’s us, Almost March Seven, clinging literally and figuratively to the edge of March. Each summer, as MC walked in the door to survey what havoc wintering mice and raccoons had wrought, she sighed and said the same thing: ‘Home is home, though it were never so homely.’ A fitting saying for a squat pine box on cinder blocks squashed against a swamp. Almost had a view of duckweed. Almost had bedrooms the size of beds, a single couch in the picture window, a dining table touching the back of said couch and a kitchen you couldn’t swing a cat in. But Dad could quite rightly and did frequently respond, ‘Yes, a poor thing but mine own.’ He’d built it all and had the film footage to prove it, of the framing, the wiring and the plumbing. He’d bricked the chimney and lived to film the flames.
Far from a haven, at best our cluster of cottages offered us a separate peace. That’s Jordan’s second favourite book, A Separate Peace, so I had to get it in at least once. And March was separate for certain, fanned around the bay a stone’s throw from the lake and each other, hemmed in on one side by Peace’s swamp, which separated our land from Hezzy’s farm, and on the other by the water’s edge that curved south from Grandma’s, ran down the canal, past the trailer park at Lock 35 and into Cameron Lake. More than tourists but not quite locals, caught betwixt and between, we didn’t live on the land, but neither could we see or hear Highway 35 as it tore past Yogi’s cage in the tourist section of Rosedale. With a foot in each camp, you’re traitor to both. There’s no place like Almost.
But Almost didn’t get its diminutive from being separate, smaller or shabbier. Dad had not married well. When he introduced Mom to Aunt May, thinking to break the ice, he proudly asked if Mom didn’t look just like Della Street, you know, the TV star from Perry Mason. Aunt May, who nursed a none-too-secret spite for all things Scottish, replied, ‘That aging sweater girl with the big cow eyes who has to type for a living because she can’t get a ring on her finger? Why yes, Tommy, I do see the resemblance. It’s almost as plain as the nose on her face.’
They married anyway. In 1951. There must have been a grace period – not one I remember, but
