A Week in the Woods with Family E-Book

Giselle Renarde

• Herausgeber: Giselle Renarde
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

What happens when five completely mature adults spend a week together at a cottage? No, it’s not the plot of a family comedy, dramedy, or reality show. It’s the situation you’ll see played out before your very eyes in “A Week in the Woods with Family.”

In this intimate portrait of real life events, celebrated author Giselle Renarde pens a fine series of letters home from the woods. Alternating between humorous, heart-wrenching, mundane, mouth-watering, board-gaming, wildlife-spotting and much more, these in-depth communications to her cat-minding sweetheart are part secret confession, part reflection on writing, part letter home from camp.

Join Giselle and her family in the woods as they take to the lake, run from friendly foxes and adjust to one another’s very special quirks. In cottage country, the dull moments are the ones to remember.

Leseprobe

A Week in the Woods with Family: Letters from an Author in Cottage Country

© 2014 by Giselle Renarde

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design © 2014 Giselle Renarde

First Edition 2014

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Introduction

A Week in the Woods with Family | Letters from an Author in Cottage Country | by | Giselle Renarde

ABOUT GISELLE RENARDE

If you enjoyed A Week in the Woods with Family, | You might also enjoy: | Like it’s 1999: Diary of a Teenager in Love with a Teacher | By Giselle Renarde

Introduction

IT’S ABOUT THIS TIME every year that I seriously consider moving out of the city. The urge for going is usually precipitated by coming back to Toronto after a week in the woods. After a week of peaceful relaxation at a family friend’s lakefront property, the city feels unliveably harsh, loud, irritating. When I get back from the woods, I always ask myself why on earth I live here.

But this little book isn’t about the city. It’s about my time away from it... with my family.

“A Week in the Woods with Family” was inspired by a mundane confluence of thoughts and events. First off, I wanted to stay in touch with my girlfriend/cat-feeder while I was away. Without internet access or cell service, I turned the clocks back to the days of letter-writing.

The last time I recall writing letters with any regularity, postage was thirty-seven cents (it’s now a dollar) and my cousin, who lived in a town I then considered far-far-away, was my best friend and pen pal. There were fewer choices for communication, back then. Long distance phone calls were strictly forbidden in my household (they cost significantly more than $0.37, I presume), so we put pen to paper.

I wonder if I still have any of her letters. I’d be very curious to see what a pre-teen would have written about. I do recall the paper we wrote on, because it was floral and about as thin as one-ply toilet tissue. My grandmother bought us co-ordinated stationery. Or somebody did.

So, it was kind of a blast from the past to write letters again—a throwback to the pre-internet days, long before I met my Sweet. I put a moratorium on work while I was on vacation, and so letter writing quickly became a surrogate for creative expression. I kind of felt like I was sending my girlfriend her daily reading assignments, but she claims to have enjoyed them and I hope you will too. (Nota bene: Sweet has often instructed me never to tell readers “I hope you enjoy my book” because it creates the subtle suggestion that they might not. “Instead, just say ‘Enjoy my book!’”)

The other point I wanted to mention paragraphs ago, before taking off on that Grampa Simpson ramble about pen-pallery and floral writing paper, was a thought I’ve often had, about artists and letters. Years after their deaths, collections are published of communications between artists and lovers, writers and friends, musicians and patrons. We arts enthusiasts love letters, and not just love letters (sorry—had to). We devour them, because when we read a communication between two individuals, we feel like we’re getting right inside their heads and indeed their relationships with one another.

What then becomes of those of us operating in the internet age? Who’s going to delve into our email accounts after we die? And would they find anything there that would be of interest to anyone? Do we honour paper with more thought and reflection than the keyboard? I would say so.

At any rate, this is my chance to get ahead of the game. “A Week in the Woods” could well have been called “A Week in Letters” because that’s precisely what it is: a week in the life of a family, as communicated to my significant other. Now, I haven’t lived with family (or anyone) in well over a decade, so sharing space is always an adjustment. I would say that being adults together is also an adjustment, for any family. Relationships are in a constant state of flux, and roles are constantly being renegotiated as we strive to wriggle out of the parts we played as children. Maybe that shows up here. And maybe it doesn’t. I’ll leave that for the reader to decide.

Ready for a pleasant ramble down country roads with me and my family? I’ll bet you are!

Enjoy my book...

Giselle Renarde

Toronto, July 2014

A Week in the Woods with Family

Letters from an Author in Cottage Country

by

Giselle Renarde

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SUNDAY, 5:30 P.M.

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HI SWEET!

Just arrived at the cottage about an hour ago and I miss you already. Wish you were here, although if you were you’d be stuck sleeping next to me in Bert-and-Ernie style twin beds... in a room with mousetraps on the floor and giant ants crawling across the ceiling. But don’t feel bad—Jane’s got the other attic room, and it has three mousetraps (to my two) and some kind of sticky sheet that’s supposed to catch rodents but seems only to have attracted more ants.

This is a classy joint, I tells ‘ya.

Everybody but Steven and I are napping at the moment. I don’t know what excuse Leslie and Mom have (aside from being tired and being on vacation), but Jane drove to the city after her shift at the bar, which ended at three in morning, I think?  She arrived at my mom’s house at 5:30 and woke up just after me. And I woke up at 7:22—which I don’t think I’ve done since I had a real job.

We left around ten with the car packed full of food and luggage and humans.  It’s been a while since I’ve travelled with my entire family. I got to sit in the back seat, in the middle, because I’m the smallest. It was a blast. I held a watermelon between my legs the whole way up, which my mother told me I probably shouldn’t repeat to anyone.

It only got worse when we stopped in Napanee for more groceries which, we now realize, were not exactly necessary. I think we brought enough to feed... well, certainly the ants in my room, and probably the ants in Jane’s room too, and maybe even the mice we have yet to see. Too bad the ants aren’t in the kitchen this year, but maybe all the groceries we brought will coax them out of the little cabin and into the big one.

Oh, I want to tell you something funny that happened in the car: we’d just stopped at the chip truck in... oh, I forget what the little town is called... anyway, it’s not far from the cottage.  Jane and Mom went to get us all fries because Steven, Leslie and I were trapped under piles of groceries.

So, as we waited for fries, I told Steven about all the things that have scared Leslie while hiking (he never comes with us on hikes, for some reason). I think this whole conversation started because there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Rod and Todd are afraid of a ladybug.  Leslie is a lot like that, which is weird, because she loves nature.

One time a butterfly fluttered gently across her path and you should have seen her. She nearly jumped out of her shoes.  The last hike she went on, she saw a frog and hopped away faster than it did, then she saw a garter snake and screamed. Then she saw another garter snake and screamed again. Four times, this happened. She’s afraid they’ll scurry up her pant legs. She seriously thinks this is going to happen.

Also, she says she’s been attacked by red-winged blackbirds, so any time we’re walking by one she slows down and makes me walk on that side so I’ll get attacked instead.

But nothing beats the time in that campground... what was it called? The one we went to last year—not in Penetanguishene, but the other one, in Georgian Bay.  Anyway, we were walking to the bathroom late at night and I must have heard the sound first because I knew exactly what it was. I didn’t react. When Leslie heard it, she screamed and took off in the other direction. She didn’t even turn around, just started running backwards down the dirt road. I grabbed her arm and pulled her forward because I knew exactly what she thought she was hearing and I knew for sure it wasn’t that.

She was like, “A bear! It’s a bear! It’s a bear.”

And yeah, okay, it sounded a little growly I guess, but that was no bear. It was a man in a tent, snoring loudly. Convinced I was wrong, she said (now famously, because my mom tells this story to EVERYBODY), “That ain’t no human!”

It’s established that Leslie is afraid not only of butterflies and pretty much every other species of insect, but she’s also afraid of anything she perceives to be an animal. Even if it’s just a man asleep in a tent.  So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when, as we waited in the car for Jane and Mom to get back with our fries, Leslie started screaming, “Get it off! Get it off me!”

I thought maybe a spider had crawled on her. Not that I have issues with spiders (I quite like them, actually), but lots of people find them creepy. Someone who’s afraid of butterflies would probably be afraid of spiders, right?

But I needed some direction, because she’s just looking down and screaming her head off and I’m not seeing anything at all.

So I ask, “What’s wrong? What’s on you?”

And she’s like, “A worm!”

A worm? Where?  I’m not seeing anything.

She’s like, “Right there! It’s on my seatbelt!”

So I look at her seatbelt and here’s this tiny green inchworm moseying on up. And, honestly “inchworm” is an exaggeration because this thing was practically microscopic. Not just that, but it looked like it should have had the soundtrack from a children’s cartoon accompanying its journey. It was the cutest little thing you ever did see.

But Leslie’s still freaking out, going, “Get it off!  Get it off!” like it’s going to eat her brains or something. So I plucked it up and tossed it out the window. Crisis averted. Honestly, it’s always an adventure. You think I’m afraid of everything? With my family, I’m the brave one.

Miss you. Love you. Wish you were here. Big hugs and kisses.

Giselle

*****

SUNDAY, JUST AFTER midnight

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HI HONEY,

Remember how I said I’m the brave one in my family? Well, tonight I got to prove it.

Steven and I made a watermelon salad from a recipe mom tried at a friend’s dinner party:

-watermelon

-cucumber

-fresh mint

-feta

-a splash of olive oil

-salt and pepper

It didn’t taste at all the way I thought it would (thought it would be sweet), but really refreshing and delicious. Try it! Try it! You will like it! We only meant to make the salad as a side dish, but it brought everyone out of slumber and I guess they were hungry because they/we devoured it and... I guess that was dinner.  We made a ton, but it’s easy to eat a lot of watermelon and not really notice.

After dinner, we took a bit of a night walk. We know from past years that the bugs come out in droves around dusk, which is why my mom brought mosquito net hats, which everyone but Jane and I wore. The rest of those guys looked like utter morons, especially when they stepped outside the cottage and there was nary a bug in sight.

But off we went down the dirt road when right away Leslie leapt back and screamed, “Fox! Fox!”  Sure enough, a young fox leapt up and took off into the woods. Fox sighting. Exciting.

So we continued down the road and when we looked back the fox was trotting along behind us. Hmm... interesting. Especially when we noticed it was limping. One of its back legs was underdeveloped.  It had a beautiful coat but it was utterly emaciated.

Leslie started panicking because OF COURSE she’s going to panic when she’s being followed by a fox, even if it’s not much bigger than my cats. Especially when Jane piped up to say that rabid animals are often very friendly... until they attack you. 

Well, at that serendipitous moment, the fox picked up speed behind us until it was moving at quite a clip.