WHEN WE FIRST went looking for our cottage on Georgian Bay, my husband, Anton, and I asked a cousin and veteran cottager if she had any advice. What questions should we ask of the current owners? What should we look for when we visit the property? We expected some tips on water systems, or maybe critter control.
“Look beyond the property, get to know your neighbours,” came the reply. “Meet them before you make an offer, if you can.”
She made a good point. The thing that makes a cottage special is not so much the property itself, but everything that surrounds it: the water we swim in and boat across, the islands we visit, the forests we hike, and, of course, the people and the other animals we meet and share the landscape with.
Without getting too philosophical on you, what this really means is that the things that make cottaging—and everything else we do in life—special are what we might call “relational.” The relationship between things is just as important, if not more important, than the individual. This may be a familiar way of thinking if you have read , by Robin Wall Kimmerer, or familiarized yourself with the teachings of other like-minded Indigenous thinkers. But it’s a pretty radical notion to apply to Canada’s property market, where we routinely divide parcels of land into individual bundles and
