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facts & arguments

Tacky decor, snakes in the ceiling, clouds of insects – how could I come to love my husband's summer home, Valerie Ward asks

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I was 36 when the man who would become my husband introduced me to his summer cottage and the life that goes with it. But much as I loved the man, and much as he loved his cottage, it was years before I could regard the place with real affection.

To begin with, I had no experience of cottages. I grew up in suburban Montreal in the 1960s, and our family vacations usually took the form of road trips where we stayed in motels and ate at drive-in restaurants.

What's more, I've never had the skills for cottage living. I'm not handy, sporty or even physically co-ordinated. I don't know one tool from another and am an uncertain swimmer who approaches the water reluctantly and always in a life jacket.

My husband, on the other hand, was smitten with cottage life as a boy. His grandfather and uncles had built a cottage on a nearby lake and on family visits there, he and his siblings and cousins had a great time catching frogs and garter snakes and flinging themselves into the water.

Years later, he bought the place himself and spent every weekend there from May to November, happily doing all the chores that go with maintaining a second property and a boat.

When he took me there that first summer, I tried hard to share his enthusiasm. But it was tough.

Yes, the lake was pretty and peaceful. But mosquitos and deer flies hovered in clouds, leeches hung out in the shallows and ticks lurked in the grass. As for the cottage itself, the roof leaked and the floor sloped so that you had to walk uphill to get from the living room to the kitchen. The décor featured orange velour and duct tape and macramé owls. Upstairs, there was a lamp with a red-and-black velvet shade that looked as if it belonged in a bordello during the gold rush.

For a long while, cottage weekends required a certain amount of bracing myself, not only against the unfamiliar, but against the unexpected. Because there was plenty of unexpected. In fact, I came to view the cottage as an embodiment of Murphy's Law – if something could go wrong there, it would. Among the mishaps over the years, we've been burgled three times.

The motor boat has died in the middle of the lake. The car has got stuck backing the boat into the water and when we tried to call a tow truck, the phone didn't work. Water pipes have burst. Pumps have quit. The composting toilet has refused to compost. Winter ice has crumpled the boat lift into a spiky pile of aluminum.

And let's not forget the wildlife. Families of mice have nested among the tea towels, chipmunks have hidden nuts in the beds and frolicking squirrels have tripped the alarm system. One summer, a five-foot rat snake decided to set up house in the roof and you could hear it slithering overhead, shh-shh-shh, in the early morning.

But, as I've come to realize, relationships with places are like relationships with people: they evolve. When you live somewhere, especially if it's a spot where you've struggled to find your footing, a kind of dance happens between the place and whatever in you resists it until you find yourself softening, seeing it differently, learning from it.

Given time and experience, I've learned to appreciate the cottage, even to feel tender toward it. Maybe the shift began when our daughter learned to swim there. Maybe it was the sight of her sitting on the porch with her big brother, my stepson, while he read her a story. Or it may have been the first time my mum visited and we took her out in the boat and watched her face light up because it reminded her of childhood summers on Lake Nipissing.

Whenever it happened, the cottage has become much more than the sum of its malfunctioning parts. It's the place where my partner and I have spent 25 summers, raised our daughter and welcomed friends and family. Everything in it has associations, memories, stories to tell. While we've got rid of the orange velour and the duct tape, I've learned to tolerate the kitsch that remains, even the macramé owls and the bordello lamp. Now I see them as part of the quirky personality of a rustic, 60-year-old cottage.

The cottage has also taught me to slow down and tune in to the natural world. I've learned to pay attention to sunlight as it flies from the surface of the water and the moon as it sails into the night sky. I watch a storm sweep in and smell the rain when it churns the lake.

I look forward to the arrival of the wildflowers: hawkweed and chicory, spotted touch-me-not and hairy willow herb. I study a heron standing motionless on the shore, scouting for food in the morning mist.

I lie on the dock and peer at a sunfish flickering among the weeds or a snapping turtle paddling past, algae streaming from its back. At night, I fall asleep listening to choruses of loons and bullfrogs.

I'm still a bookish, DIY-challenged person with more thumbs than fingers. And the cottage is still a quirky, unpredictable place. But I've made my peace with it. After all, life is unpredictable, too. We have much less control over it than we think and the cottage is as good a place as any to learn that.

Valerie Ward lives outside Ottawa and cottages near Kingston, Ont.