Dog Days of Summer
Summer days stretched out, languid in the monotony of cicadas buzzing in the trees. Long days of living in my bathing suit. The blue lake and endless sky ever present. One summer day like the next except for the direction and velocity of the wind.
When it blew long and hard from the north, it whipped the lake into a frenzy of rolling white caps, over which seagulls hovered, riding the wind. Big puffy cumulus clouds took turns playing hide and seek with the sun.
A day like this, challenged me to find ways to get warm enough to swim in the lake. I was a kid with the staggering privilege of having to get warm enough to go swimming in the lake, right next to my cottage. On a windy day, that was my biggest problem. As a kid, however, I was only peripherally aware that my normal world was not like many of my friends’ normal worlds.
Janie, Hellah, my other cousins and I had various strategies to stay warm outdoors in the wind, and hopefully get hot enough to jump in the waves.
One of the methods was to venture off the property for awhile. Our three cottage lots were connected, side by side with our grandparents’ property, so we had a lot of area to roam, four different dwellings to play in, but most of the time, we didn’t want to be inside, and so a windy day provoked us to leave.
If we walked over the two roads toward the Froggy Pond, we could visit our Cousin Fancy in the golf course club house. I wasn’t clear how this older lady with her impressive auburn beehive was my cousin, but the fact that we were somehow related by blood was enough to warrant a visit.
She wasn’t always there. Sometimes it would be an old man minding the club house. And then we were wary. Old men were all business, and none of our business. We never tried wheedling anything out of the old man. Instead, we’d hang around outside the club house, drinking cold water from conical paper cups or washing stray golf balls in a sudsy contraption. The sun was dappled through the swaying maple trees, but if we went late enough in the day, the edge of the golf course would warm us sufficiently to go back to the cottage for a swim.
Sometimes Hellah’s dog would accompany us, a docile black lab named Jessie.
One day when we went to the golf course, we were in luck; Cousin Fancy was minding the shop.
I wandered around the clubhouse, peeking into the deep dark cooler where pop bottles jostled. Hellah chatted to Cousin Fancy who was as nice as pie, while I wandered around, the sisal runner prickling my bare feet.
A couple of golfers came in in their spiky shoes, the same ones my dad wore, and Fancy attended to them. Some business transaction, which took place on the small cedar table, home to a glass case that housed a small selection of chocolate bars; life savers; and Wrigley’s gum.
The club house didn’t have the variety there had been in the hotel coffee shop, but by then, the hotel had burned down, and it was either spend my thin silver dime at the golf course, or go uptown to the drug store, where the choice was bigger but the staff less accommodating.
Cousin Fancy often took pity on her poor cousins, us, with our daily allowance of a dime; she was generous with her pricing, but we always had to pay, there was no free lunch.
I sat, waiting for the golfers to leave, on the hearth of the big stone fireplace, drinking in the log cabin-ness of the clubhouse. It was literally a log cabin, though the logs were glossy brown and the window sills spanking white, all painted, not rough like in the pioneer times I learned about in Social Studies.
Hellah bought something. She usually had more money than Janie or me. Cousin Fancy was no pushover, she didn’t treat the rest of us to free chips or pop or candy bars, but she always let me take a stubby wooden pencil, a prize no one else was interested in. But I had dreams for that pencil.
We walked back to the cottage. Now, warmed up enough to swim. We ran down the dock as usual, yelling “Geronimo, look out below!” and jumped. Then made our way through the rolling white caps to the sandbar to try body-surfing in the waves.
The afternoon was spent on the south side of the cottage, lying on towels, playing cards in the sun; the big building, which once lodged hotel guests, provided a wind shield for us. But when we got hot again, another run around the cottage to the lake was easily accomplished.
That evening at dinner time, Hellah’s mother started asking if anyone had seen Jessie.
Usually, the big black dog was just one of the gang, lying around, her fur getting hotter and hotter as the afternoon passed, taking a swim in the lake if she felt like it or lapping a drink of water from the edge of the shore. But no one could remember seeing her.
Hellah’s mother was getting worried.
Tasked with a mission, we kids wandered around the property, calling and calling, our voices flying away in the wind. Hellah and Janie whistled; they could both make piercing loud whistles with various fingers stuck in their mouths. We wandered along the shore, calling Jessie’s name, but she didn’t come bounding like she usually did. She was nowhere.
Night fell. No Jessie. We went to bed.
In the morning, the wind was gone and Jessie was lying in the sun on Aunt Donna’s porch.
“Where was she?” I asked, joining my aunt for our usual morning visit.
“No idea,” Donna answered. “She was waiting on the porch this morning.”
Jessie didn’t say a word about where she’d spent the night, and just thumped her tail on the wooden porch boards when I asked and patted her velvety ears.
Around noon, the mystery of Jessie’s disappearance was solved when my dad and uncle got back from golfing; it seems that Cousin Fancy had been surprised by a bolting Jessie when she’d pushed open the door the washrooms behind the clubhouse that morning. Jessie knew the way home and lost no time, crossing the busy roads by herself.
Many a time Jessie had accompanied us into the washroom where she could get herself a drink of water out of the toilet. She must have been really thirsty yesterday, and while we were in the clubhouse shopping for candy, she pushed open the door and let herself inside.
Sometimes doors are easy to push through, but much harder to pull open, especially when you’re a dog.
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