1980s Ontario, Canada
More about the author's journey to the present time:
My wife joined me before Christmas 1979, and we began life in the then ‘booming-est’ part of Canada. Ontario had everything going for it, and it seemed we did too. We bought a house, My spouse got a job, and we had two children. The millionaire’s family, one of each, a girl and a boy, and began the normal way of family life here in North America; sports camps and programs for the kids, long commutes for the adults, and that staple of the true Canadian experience, taking a summer cottage by any one of the thousands of lakes that dot Ontario’s vast hinterland.
Cottages then weren’t like cottages now. Today they’re fully kitted out second homes with a manicured clearing around them. Then they were slightly upgraded hunting or fishing cabins of the generation before, closely pressed on three sides by trees.
All of them came with wildlife, sadly not the photogenic kind. My most vivid recollection of our last trip was our daughter being too horrified to play with the similarly aged girl next door because the poor girl's face was swollen by the insect bites she’d received. Our then two-year-old son was discovered eating tent caterpillars dropping from the trees above. Somehow, in my mind, this was far worse than all the seriously dangerous flora and fauna we’d learned of in Australia. We never stayed at a cottage again.
