Washing Off Winter

BY MARY ELLEN GEIST

It’s time for that yearly springtime ritual performed by cottage owners across the globe: washing off what’s sometimes months of dust, the kind of grime that accumulates only in a home that hasn’t been inhabited for several months. Scrubbing off the residue left by snow on sidings. Removing sticky cobwebs. Wiping the winter film off windows. Peeling the dried leaves of several seasons from the screens. Moving the summer furniture back onto the porch. Taking off the storm doors. Plucking the water skis, sailboats, kayaks and canoes out of storage and placing them on the shore.

My grandfather bought this cottage on Walloon Lake in the 1950’s, but it was built in the late 1800’s. In its original state, it was something close to a lean-to. Over the course of a century, owners added oddly shaped rooms in helter-skelter fashion to what began as a one-room structure. The walls were not plumb, the floors not level.

Though we had electricity, the first summer I can remember at the cottage we pumped water from the ground by hand from a well we shared with the neighbors. We even had a dark green outhouse with a half-moon carved out above the door. We didn’t acquire a real toilet and sinks with faucets until I was five years old. In the winter, when the place was boarded up, snow came in through the screens. In the summer, when the storms moved across Walloon Lake, we ran to get pails to push under the windows where water rushed in.

One year when we came Up North to get the cottage ready for the season, we found a pillowcase full of beechnuts— probably gathered by a hungry squirrel— in the upstairs bedroom. Assortments of seeds always showed up in drawers, cupboards and bedsheets. One spring, we found tiny teeth marks on a bar of soap someone had accidentally left in the bathroom: a mouse, we presumed, or some other rodent desperate for food. Dried up tangles of daddy long legs corpses dangled from the ceilings in spider webs. And, of course, there were mouse droppings galore.

Sometimes, after we thought we had scoured almost everything, and placed fresh linens on all the beds, we’d hear a strange flapping sound above us. We’d look up in the eaves, and a tiny bat would be staring down at us as if we were the intruders, not him.

Every spring, it seemed, there were icky things. One year, a bird got in, but apparently couldn’t get out. We discovered its fragile skeleton and a few gray feathers splayed near the fireplace—a nuthatch, I believe.

Chipmunks, mice, squirrels, birds, an assortment of insects and spiders, they took our places each year after we left at summer’s end. They moved in, perhaps, in October, and stayed until spring, when we arrived with our arsenal of brooms and vacuums to drive them out.

I always had such mixed feelings about the presence of these creatures in our lives. They were trespassers and invaders. They created hours of tedious work. But I was strangely happy the chipmunks used my pillowcases to store their food; that the mice had a place to sleep when the cold made their own homes uninhabitable.

Now that I live at Walloon full time, and even though the cottage is now enlarged and winterized—no squirrels or mice run amok—I still participate in the ritual of washing off winter. I have my own springcleaning dance, which usually begins at the