My Occupancy of “Seven Person’s Cottage,” on Muskoka’s Lake Joseph
My first summer working as a reporter, for a publication then known as the Muskoka Lakes-Georgian Bay Beacon, in MacTier, gave me a rather unique opportunity afforded very few in our region.
I was asked to move closer to my work area, at least for the active summer month news season, and there wasn’t a great availability of affordable rentals especially close to the lake. Getting a small cottage was my choice, budgeting for a larger rent if it facilitated an on the job, half vacation feeling. I looked at a few places and frankly wasn’t impressed by either the asking prices or the rooms without a view at all. Finally one day I got word there was a rental for me, if I was interested, that would put me on the shore of Lake Joseph, in one of the most amazing cottages in the District; May to October, for a wee rental fee. As I would find out later we needed each other….it was an abode that simply had to be occupied, and well, after a recent break-up of a relationship, I confess to having been pretty lonely. For that brief period of time I was the occupying soul, and it made me feel welcome.
I caught a wink in the story teller’s eye as this story of nirvana, on the lake, continued to spin. I agreed to meet with the owner later that day, and to inspect this so called fairy-tale estate on the lake. Well, it was an experience like no other. I would become the first reporter-historian to occupy what was known affectionately as “Seven Persons Cottage.” When the host family brought me down the path from their house to the cottage, I was half expecting to find a castle-like structure, with a spire poking from the wreath of evergreens along the shore. They described it perfectly and I imagined it as precisely as my cogs and wheels of imagination could concoct, from the information provided. The only detail I had missed in the story, that was particularly relevant, was the scale of the castle to a full grown man.
When I got my first look at Seven Person’s Cottage I was aghast. Here was this architecturally interesting little building, perfect in every detail, but somewhat smaller than I had been led to believe. Actually it was tiny. Dwarf-like. A place best suited for gnomes and their kind. While I’m not a giant, I couldn’t imagine my robust frame getting through that doorway, let alone moving around inside. If I rented this place it would undoubtedly be a chapter right out of Gulliver’s Travels; and that I should certainly expect a visit from the Liliputins. If memory serves correct about Gulliver’s captors, and it doesn’t always live up to my expectation after all these wearying miles.
While I don’t believe I ever got the precise scale of the cottage, to what the full size home would have been on a normal, run of the mill lot, everything about the place was proportional, from the small doorway to the fireplace, the living room with bow window, to the dining room with pull-out table. The furniture wasn’t tiny but none of the pieces looked out of place in the small digs. While I didn’t have to duck except when coming through the front door of the cottage, it took awhile to figure out how to relate to everything being so much smaller than, well, I was used to as accommodation. The owner had a copy of the well known book that purportedly documented the lives of Gnomes, sitting atop the built-in desk just inside the door. The wooden mantle above the fireplace was carved with gargoyles supposedly to protect the place from wise guys like me.
After sitting in the living room for awhile on normal but minimalist chairs, I realized that this place was a blessing to my creative enterprise. I could watch out over the lake and a flat area of grassed embankment, where my neighbors at the adjacent cottage played croquet. That cottage was built by the gentleman who actually thought-up and scaled down the “Seven Person’s” abode. I got to meet him later in the summer season and that was a treat. He also collected old wooden pipes, his living room at the cottage jammed with these keepsakes. Some with carved faces, others made out of the world’s most precious woods.
My first night at Seven Persons Cottage was like living within the fiction of stories like Alice in Wonderland; a tad like Pooh Cottage, a slight sensation of residing at Toad Hall, in region of Wind in the Willows. I was in Peter Pan’s Neverland with Tinkerbell. When I ignited an old oil lamp in the front window, and threw a few bits of wood in the fireplace, the orange glow on old wood, made the place seem everso enchanted; antiquated beyond its years. The flickering flames of lamp and hearth gave the shadows a more sinister appearance than the place warranted, because of all things small, it had a large, warm soul if any residence can bestow such a feeling of welcome. I sat by the window for most of that first night, looking out at the lake bathed in moonglow, and watching the gargoyles on the mantle to see, if by chance, they might animate in the midnight revel known of the fairy kind.
In the morning, the light coming through that large front window made the rich wood interior appear as if it was the rear cabin of an old schooner, and the view behind might have been of the open sea. I sat there having a coffee and feeling as if I had known this place my whole life. What I would find out in the fall of the year, is that it would be the hardest place to leave as well.
As I recall, it had three bedrooms and a loft, and during that summer I had, at times, four people housed overnight, and more for get-togethers during the day. Everyone who visited got to share this prevailing, soothing well being, despite the evil eye of watchful gargoyles. The kitchen was tiny and the fenced-in backyard included an outhouse, the only real inconvenience of the place, other than the necessity to re-kindle a fire in the hearth to keep from freezing.
I wrote poetry throughout that spring-to-fall residency as this was a poetic place. I sat at the pull-out desk in the front room, and wrote by the light of the oil lamp, and listened to the boat engines chugging by day and night. How peaceful it was to sit by the crackling cedar fire in the cabin’s hearth. I would climb onto the window seat and drink wine until midnight, and then sleep in comfort until the invigoration of morning light poured through the window. In the daytime when I wasn’t chasing fire trucks or ambulance crews to accident scenes, or covering local municipal council events, I could sit down by the miniature harbor with proportionally constructed dock, and feel truly in another world….one so much smaller and more interesting than the one I knew during work hours. I half expected “Hammy the Hamster, and Roddy the Rodent,” to pull their little runabout up to the dock, and scurry along the embankment for a friendly game of croquet, with the other miniature characters I was sure dwelled here, kindly amongst the other curious non-realities concocted by over imagination..
I never felt alone at Seven Person’s Cottage. I never once felt bored or uninspired, and it was one of the most prolific writing jags of my life. I could hardly wait to get home and saddle up to that desk to pull another all nighter of composition. More than a few times something or other woke me up, with my head down on the desk top, a half glass of wine teetering on the edge of an old book. Maybe it was a mindful gnome begging my full retreat to bedlam. I smelled of woodsmoke and wine most of that summer season, or so I’m told. If ever there was a perfect spot to commence a writing career, one that for me began seriously that year of 1979-80 in the Muskoka heartland, it was at hearthside in that little cottage named “Seven Person’s.”
If you wonder about where my zigs and zags of authordom were first seeded, it would be correct to say, I had a fantastic beginning…… and in the tradition of the way it began, at Seven Persons, it has been an enchanting adventure ever-since. I think about that cottage frequently, and wish one day to return.
PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER BLOG AT GRAVENHURSTONTARIO.BLOGSPOT.COM
My first summer working as a reporter, for a publication then known as the Muskoka Lakes-Georgian Bay Beacon, in MacTier, gave me a rather unique opportunity afforded very few in our region.
I was asked to move closer to my work area, at least for the active summer month news season, and there wasn’t a great availability of affordable rentals especially close to the lake. Getting a small cottage was my choice, budgeting for a larger rent if it facilitated an on the job, half vacation feeling. I looked at a few places and frankly wasn’t impressed by either the asking prices or the rooms without a view at all. Finally one day I got word there was a rental for me, if I was interested, that would put me on the shore of Lake Joseph, in one of the most amazing cottages in the District; May to October, for a wee rental fee. As I would find out later we needed each other….it was an abode that simply had to be occupied, and well, after a recent break-up of a relationship, I confess to having been pretty lonely. For that brief period of time I was the occupying soul, and it made me feel welcome.
I caught a wink in the story teller’s eye as this story of nirvana, on the lake, continued to spin. I agreed to meet with the owner later that day, and to inspect this so called fairy-tale estate on the lake. Well, it was an experience like no other. I would become the first reporter-historian to occupy what was known affectionately as “Seven Persons Cottage.” When the host family brought me down the path from their house to the cottage, I was half expecting to find a castle-like structure, with a spire poking from the wreath of evergreens along the shore. They described it perfectly and I imagined it as precisely as my cogs and wheels of imagination could concoct, from the information provided. The only detail I had missed in the story, that was particularly relevant, was the scale of the castle to a full grown man.
When I got my first look at Seven Person’s Cottage I was aghast. Here was this architecturally interesting little building, perfect in every detail, but somewhat smaller than I had been led to believe. Actually it was tiny. Dwarf-like. A place best suited for gnomes and their kind. While I’m not a giant, I couldn’t imagine my robust frame getting through that doorway, let alone moving around inside. If I rented this place it would undoubtedly be a chapter right out of Gulliver’s Travels; and that I should certainly expect a visit from the Liliputins. If memory serves correct about Gulliver’s captors, and it doesn’t always live up to my expectation after all these wearying miles.
While I don’t believe I ever got the precise scale of the cottage, to what the full size home would have been on a normal, run of the mill lot, everything about the place was proportional, from the small doorway to the fireplace, the living room with bow window, to the dining room with pull-out table. The furniture wasn’t tiny but none of the pieces looked out of place in the small digs. While I didn’t have to duck except when coming through the front door of the cottage, it took awhile to figure out how to relate to everything being so much smaller than, well, I was used to as accommodation. The owner had a copy of the well known book that purportedly documented the lives of Gnomes, sitting atop the built-in desk just inside the door. The wooden mantle above the fireplace was carved with gargoyles supposedly to protect the place from wise guys like me.
After sitting in the living room for awhile on normal but minimalist chairs, I realized that this place was a blessing to my creative enterprise. I could watch out over the lake and a flat area of grassed embankment, where my neighbors at the adjacent cottage played croquet. That cottage was built by the gentleman who actually thought-up and scaled down the “Seven Person’s” abode. I got to meet him later in the summer season and that was a treat. He also collected old wooden pipes, his living room at the cottage jammed with these keepsakes. Some with carved faces, others made out of the world’s most precious woods.
My first night at Seven Persons Cottage was like living within the fiction of stories like Alice in Wonderland; a tad like Pooh Cottage, a slight sensation of residing at Toad Hall, in region of Wind in the Willows. I was in Peter Pan’s Neverland with Tinkerbell. When I ignited an old oil lamp in the front window, and threw a few bits of wood in the fireplace, the orange glow on old wood, made the place seem everso enchanted; antiquated beyond its years. The flickering flames of lamp and hearth gave the shadows a more sinister appearance than the place warranted, because of all things small, it had a large, warm soul if any residence can bestow such a feeling of welcome. I sat by the window for most of that first night, looking out at the lake bathed in moonglow, and watching the gargoyles on the mantle to see, if by chance, they might animate in the midnight revel known of the fairy kind.
In the morning, the light coming through that large front window made the rich wood interior appear as if it was the rear cabin of an old schooner, and the view behind might have been of the open sea. I sat there having a coffee and feeling as if I had known this place my whole life. What I would find out in the fall of the year, is that it would be the hardest place to leave as well.
As I recall, it had three bedrooms and a loft, and during that summer I had, at times, four people housed overnight, and more for get-togethers during the day. Everyone who visited got to share this prevailing, soothing well being, despite the evil eye of watchful gargoyles. The kitchen was tiny and the fenced-in backyard included an outhouse, the only real inconvenience of the place, other than the necessity to re-kindle a fire in the hearth to keep from freezing.
I wrote poetry throughout that spring-to-fall residency as this was a poetic place. I sat at the pull-out desk in the front room, and wrote by the light of the oil lamp, and listened to the boat engines chugging by day and night. How peaceful it was to sit by the crackling cedar fire in the cabin’s hearth. I would climb onto the window seat and drink wine until midnight, and then sleep in comfort until the invigoration of morning light poured through the window. In the daytime when I wasn’t chasing fire trucks or ambulance crews to accident scenes, or covering local municipal council events, I could sit down by the miniature harbor with proportionally constructed dock, and feel truly in another world….one so much smaller and more interesting than the one I knew during work hours. I half expected “Hammy the Hamster, and Roddy the Rodent,” to pull their little runabout up to the dock, and scurry along the embankment for a friendly game of croquet, with the other miniature characters I was sure dwelled here, kindly amongst the other curious non-realities concocted by over imagination..
I never felt alone at Seven Person’s Cottage. I never once felt bored or uninspired, and it was one of the most prolific writing jags of my life. I could hardly wait to get home and saddle up to that desk to pull another all nighter of composition. More than a few times something or other woke me up, with my head down on the desk top, a half glass of wine teetering on the edge of an old book. Maybe it was a mindful gnome begging my full retreat to bedlam. I smelled of woodsmoke and wine most of that summer season, or so I’m told. If ever there was a perfect spot to commence a writing career, one that for me began seriously that year of 1979-80 in the Muskoka heartland, it was at hearthside in that little cottage named “Seven Person’s.”
If you wonder about where my zigs and zags of authordom were first seeded, it would be correct to say, I had a fantastic beginning…… and in the tradition of the way it began, at Seven Persons, it has been an enchanting adventure ever-since. I think about that cottage frequently, and wish one day to return.
PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER BLOG AT GRAVENHURSTONTARIO.BLOGSPOT.COM
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