But Doesn’t the Outhouse Need Shoveling?

At a time when it sometimes seems that significant kith and kin are falling like autumn leaves I am driven to shift the focus to subjects likely to induce a smile or outright laugh. Our Cape Breton summer proceeds swimmingly. Both figuratively and literally. 

The waters of the Great Bras d’Or are typically frozen solid in the cold dark heart of winter; how can it be that by early August the same waters are a blithe, bonny place to go for a swim? On sunny summer afternoons we install our ‘In the swimmin’ hole’ sign by the cabin door and head down to the shore.

There is always plenty to contemplate down there: the clean lines of a passing sloop, the views of Kelly’s Mountain and our splendid salty strait, the feathered neighbours – kingfishers, spotted sandpipers, gulls, bald eagles – demanding to know what business we have in their back yard, the 300-million-year-old Carboniferous fossils strewn along our very own beach. Visitors rhapsodize: how lucky we are to have such a paradise to call our own. I am disinclined to debate the claim.

Guests might imagine that Bigadore actually is a paradise but is any utopia truly, utterly perfect? Doesn’t the occasional fly alight in the butter dish? Isn’t it a nuisance when a squirrel chews through a kitchen screen to break into the cabin? Doesn’t a nocturnal raccoon knock over the garbage can from time to time? Isn’t the outhouse in need of shoveling out once or twice a summer?

Alice brought Randy for his first taste of this particular paradise. We stayed up late savouring meaty conversation. In the morning Randy brought out his shiny new drone, took marvelous aerial photographs of the cabin and its surrounds. I was as impressed as a 10-year-old. Michael – the man who at age two-and-a-half gave the old place its enduring name – ‘Bigadore’ – arrived with another newcomer, his squeeze Elaine, for a weekend, together with the children. We looked for salamanders under logs, pointed out some of the more fascinating flowers of summer, kept a list of birds seen and heard.

Adele, Jan’s lovely young niece, came for a week and incited only one aggravation: frustrating my quest to identify a single vice in her. Surely even the most virtuous folks have a wart or two, don’t they? 

The national historic site at Louisbourg is a major tourist draw, one that loses much of its lustre after the twentieth visit. But it was a lifer for Adele so we went again, and managed to find novelty outside the fortress walls – a guided tour of the battlefield where New England invaders successfully besieged the Louisbourg defenders in 1758. At Baddeck we introduced Adele to twin delights: fresh east coast lobster and a street festival featuring the finest, liveliest Cape Breton music.

Opportunities of the sporting-life variety are generously availed at Bigadore. Jan and I play cribbage at breakfast, and never take it easy on one other. We try to keep ourselves fit for cutthroat bananagrams with the monozygotes. For those not in the know that is the version of the game in which four players seek to lay down their thirty-six letter tiles at lightning speed. Two-letter words are verboten, at least one eleven-letter word is required. In this league a game hardly ever takes longer than two minutes. The twin cousins, Lynn and Louise, are pitiless, Lynn a particularly brutal assassin, sometimes delivering the coup-de-grace in less than 60 seconds. More often than not she outscores the rest of us combined. The humiliation guarantees I cannot get too big for my britches.

The woods through which we walk on our early morning constitutional to Dalem Lake thronged with birdsong in June and early July. Now they have fallen largely silent. At 6:30 in the morning it is easy to imagine that we have the whole world to ourselves. From the porch we begin to notice small gangs of silent warblers mobilizing for the expedition to their winter domicile. Terns holler from the strait as they too begin their southward journey. How long will it be before we spot the first scarlet leaves of autumn?

Today the next eagerly-awaited visitors – Naomi and the girls – take their turn in our little paradise. We’ll roast corn and marshmallows in the coals of a bonfire, pick blueberries on Bob’s hill, aggravate the kingfishers down at the shore, behold Andromeda and the Milky Way in the clear night sky, ponder how it came to pass we could be so lucky.