It’s spring in cottage country

It’s spring in Ontario's cottage country. Over the weekend, our small town was buzzing with our city neighbours returning to open up their cottages. The ice is off of nearly all the lakes and the river in our backyard is fully thawed and running fast. My fall bulbs are popping up and I’m sure any day now I’ll see trilliums on my trail runs. I should be happy, but I’m miserable. 

 

To our family, spring in cottage country means:

 

I’d give anything for a few days of sub-zero temperatures to kill all of the bugs. I’d swap SPF for mittens to give me a break from the raccoons scaling the trees to jump on our deck to either poop or tear things apart.

 

To be fair though, there are many wonderful things about spring in Ontario’s cottage country. 

 

Of all of the good things about spring, it’s the maple syrup that makes putting up with the smelly roadkill and giant spiders worthwhile. As a girl, I spent every spring in my father’s sugar bush, helping collect sap, topping up the fire that boiled down the sap and, my favourite, making taffy by dipping sap into the snow. Last weekend, we took our kids to the Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival. Very different from the way our family processed maple syrup, with sophisticated taplines and stainless steel drums, the Sandy Flat Sugar Bush in Warkworth is a study in efficiency. My husband, who had never seen how maple syrup was made, suddenly had a new appreciation for the cost of maple syrup. Our children loved maple syrup candy floss and the horse-drawn wagon rides through the bush. And I loved watching my family making the same memories that I had as a girl.

 

Maybe spring around here isn’t so bad after all.