Cottage Life
Growing up in this land between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, I spent my share of summer days loafing about the shores, swimming, skipping the water-worn shale rocks, or just sitting and enjoying the view. Many friends had lakeside cottages, and I always dreamed of my family having our own. Now, with a property in Scarlet’s family (passed down from her grandmother Dede), that dream is a reality. An authentic cottage, in my book, is more than just the simple, rustic building by the water, it is a multi-generational gathering place steeped in family traditions. At times it may be used by a single-family group or even a solo practitioner, but at any other time it may become a gathering place for a large group of cousins, aunts, and uncles, hopefully announced but sometimes not. Sleeping situations may require creative solutions: every couch typically opens out into a bed; hammocks are strung between trees or porch posts; and daybeds are standard for every room. A one- or two-bedroom cottage can sleep ten or more in a pinch. Life is communal and privacy is found on solo swims or paddles toward the middle of the lake. The minimal privacy is not a detriment, but an expected condition taken for granted. This situation may not be much fun for an adult who needs undisturbed sleep, but heaven to a pre-teen who can stay up late and giggle under the covers with cousins for hours.
There is a code of maintenance with cottages. Upkeep is essential as with all dwellings, but here, the maintenance must be almost invisible so that the status quo is also maintained. The human efforts to push back against the forces of nature, which constantly threaten to erode our existence, must be kept in a delicate balance with nature’s chaos. On the shores of a lake, those forces can rear up unpredictably—like when the boathouse roof was sheared off during a storm this spring at Scarlet’s family cottage. But the new roof looks like it has been there for fifty years. The weathervane, with its lake trout constantly swimming into the wind, was rescued from a neighbor’s beach, untangled from water weeds, and replaced after a fresh coat of paint (stressed to appear weathered). Use older materials (or old looking), use minimal effort, and keep polished professionals out of the mix (unless they are capable of slightly shoddy or hurried work like the kind that comes with working with a beer in hand). Keep the markings of family history, especially those pencil lines measuring the growth of generations on the kitchen door jamb, and the cutesy painted signs, but repair the inevitable rot that seeps in, seeking to destroy all history.
There is a term for all of this: cottage life. It means paring down to the essentials you can fit in one bag (never a suitcase, which has implications of a hotel) and always having a good book or crossword puzzle to kill time with or signal that you are having alone-time.
Pitching in for meal prep or clean-up (choose one) without question is required. Dishwashing machines are forbidden in cottages since washing dishes is another way for family members to share in the collective industry, one washing and one drying. The kitchen is always small, requiring dance moves to navigate around one another, but it is wholly adequate, and the utensils are spare but serviceable. Most cottages have a few months set aside for seasonal rentals, so nothing of great value is kept there although everything there has sentimental value. Family history is written in the worn edges and missing parts: the knife that grandpa used to clean fish, the cutting board that is bowl-shaped from a half century of use, or even the trinket on the windowsill—God only knows where it came from—which no one dares to get rid of at the risk of disturbing the delicate balance of cottage hierarchy.
There is no visual way to capture cottage life. Photos won’t do. The family cottage is more of a scene than a structure, more of a shared history than individual experience. You can’t buy into it, and it can’t be sold. Sadly, many cottages do have to be sold, due to rising taxes; but hopefully, the new owners realize the value of their acquisition and tend to the history of the place with care.
Even with all a cottage has to offer, like the family cottage Scarlet has been visiting since childhood, the addition of a sauna is like ice cream on the apple pie. Not completely necessary, but it sure is a good combination. Saunas are gathering spots for communal experience. They enhance the routine of cottage life—morning sauna, evening sauna, all-day sauna—and their heat extends the swimming season indefinitely. On Cayuga Lake, the swimming season is typically two or three months (depending on how much polar bear is in your DNA). With a sauna, lake dipping is possible all year!
So, with all of this in mind, we recently converted a small room in the walk-out basement of the cottage into an electric-stove sauna. Never mind that the floors above all sloped several inches in ten feet or that the headroom is barely six feet, we worked with what we had and created a perfect oasis of heat. Some family members will have to work on their bad posture to avoid bonking their head, but once on the bench—whose height is always measured from the ceiling down—all is well. An existing steel framed basement hopper window was converted to cedar and now frames a perfect view of the lake. The 9 kW Harvia Cilindro heater with its two hundred pounds of rocks holds the heat to make the sauna usable for hours with repeated löyly.
Now that it is mostly done (cottage projects never seem to get finished), we have been using it daily while there. It is making our late summer stays at the lake perfect. I can’t wait to come out later in the season, or even in winter, to enjoy a jump into the lake and tease my inner polar bear.
