A Fading Summer

Tucked between the wild edges of Lake Erie and the whispering leaves of Ontario’s southern Carolinian forest lies Rondeau. One of the province’s oldest provincial parks, and one of the last places where summer still feels the way it used to. Unhurried. Unplugged. Quietly unchanged.

For over 75 years, my family has returned every summer to a cottage here. One of the few remaining seasonal homes built on leased land within the protected park, it is more weathered than quaint. No air conditioning. Water from the well that tastes like straight iron. Floorboards sagging from decades of damp towels and sandy feet. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in permanence. In memory. In the kind of rootedness that has grown rare.

Each June, we pull rusted bikes from sheds, pump tires with hand tools older than I am, and fall back into the rhythm of Rondeau. Mornings begin with the creak of a screen door to feed the random cats who make the yard their home, the sizzle of hashbrowns and peameal bacon in a cast iron pan that predates most of us, and the scramble of cousins claiming the best tubes for the lake as we set up the beach. 

Afternoons drift. Some of us to the water. Some to a sun-warmed chair with a paperback curling at the edges. There is always a bike ride or walk to Bayview Market, more of a ritual than an errand. We go for marshmallows, a dusty DVD rental, or a paper bag filled with penny candy that never seems to lose its magic.

Sometimes in the evening, we ride to the pier for ice cream. Everyone still calls it the pier, even though the pier itself was washed away many winters ago during storms. What remains is just a patch of shoreline and a long memory of jumping off the end as kids, but the name sticks. It always has.

Here, time dilates. Days stretch long and loose. A swim, a slow bike ride through the trees, a game of Uno becomes enough. Evenings are for bonfires, cold beers, cocktails, roasting marshmallows, citronella coils and raccoons rummaging for leftovers outside. There is no curated aesthetic here. No dockside yoga. No drone-shot sunsets. Just tangled bathing suits on the line, sand in the sheets, and a dinner table that always seems to stretch to fit one more.

Rondeau lives on resilience. Not just in the decades-long effort to preserve these cottages, but in the way families like mine return again and again through busier lives and longer drives. It is a place where nostalgia is not just remembered but relived. A stubborn, sacred stretch of shoreline that still believes in slow summers, shared meals, and stories that begin with “remember that one summer when…” .

And so we return.

Because there are fewer and fewer places that let life slow down like this. Where childhood does not need planning. Where presence is enough. Where, for a little while, the world feels smaller. And somehow more full because of it.