Happy Canada Day! The Nuns are Coming.

We are all looking forward to Canada Day, hoping for a normal Canada Day, pleading for a normal Canada Day.  So let's think of that lovely day in the future when you can use a different excuse other than "social distancing" to leave your neighbour's house early.  And while we are thinking of that lovely Canada Day of the future, would it be OK if I told you about a Canada Day of my past?  I could write it and you could read it and we would both kill a few minutes of quarantine, so there's that.

When I was in grade nine my parents bought a cottage on Little Kennisis Lake and my Dad was the head of English at Paul Dwyer Catholic High School in Oshawa.  Sister Mary Elizabeth was my English teacher and of course, out of every fourteen year old's nightmare, my Mom and Dad invited Sister Mary Elizabeth and ALL the Sisters of St. Joseph to our cottage for the Canada Day weekend.

Now before we continue, the cottage at Kennisis was what realtors would call "rustic".  It was the cottage with an outhouse outback, newly abandoned because Dad and the music teacher he worked with, had put in running water in the spring.  Musical pipes. 

It was the cottage that was used three seasons and had no insulation between walls.  No sound proofing.  I repeat...as if you didn't hear me, NO SOUND PROOFING.

The nuns arrive on the Friday of Canada Day weekend.  If there is a more depressing sentence than the last, I don't want to read it and I hope I never write it...again.  The nuns arrive on Friday of Canada Day weekend and they, there are three of them, are given the room beside me with the two sets of bunk beds in it.  I know.  You are picturing nuns in bunk beds.  I will wait.

Did I tell you there was no sound proofing?

By Sunday morning, I am an atheist.  Dad and I are outside, in front of the cottage and because the cottage is too far away from the local Roman Catholic Church, the nuns are forced to gather on our lakeside deck to read their Breviary, their book of prayer. 

Dad and I are working at trying to remove a stump, the nuns are up on the deck, "reading" and down comes Floyd .  Floyd was the York Regional Cop who had the cottage next door that clung to the side of a cliff.  Floyd's only running water was him, running to the lake and back.   Sunday is Floyd's bath day, he is wearing a swim suit from the '70's.  Google it if you must.  And he does what Floyd does at the cottage.  He dives in.  He soaps up.  He repeats.

I am digging at a rather persistent root and Dad gives me a nudge. I finally look up and there is my English teacher and all of her sisters, their eyes peaking over the tops of their prayer books, enjoying Floyd's bath. 

We all pray for something.