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May 2-4 is a distinctively Canadian, (even Ontarian?), double entendre, with allusions to both the holiday and the beverage of choice you’ll consume over the course of it; an American purveyor of beer would be as lost as with the question “I’d like a 2-4, please”, as he would with a colloquy about the recent Press Gallery performance of Elizabeth May.

If you’re opening your cottage, as we do in southern Ontario, while those in the north head to their “camps”, hope springs eternal over the next few days: please don’t let it rain, please hope the critters haven’t trashed the place more than their fair share, please hope the kids don’t drive their grandparents nuts (you can add mom and dad to that list, but no one’s counting on miracles).

The Canadian summer is as gloriously short as it is spectacular. At least, that’s what you remember during the winter and what you’ll want to keep in mind as you inch your way along the 400 series highways in Ontario, or the crumbling bridges and potholes that are your conveyance if trying to exit Montreal either north to the Laurentians, or south to the Eastern Townships. I’m not qualified to say what happens in the other largest metropolitan area, B.C.’s Lower Mainland, but I’m sure that clearing city limits is a similar Stygian misery that Torontonians and Montrealers are now all too accustomed to.

Forgetfulness, which is a condition necessary for re-visiting a great summer, like a great piece of art, is nowhere to my mind more beautifully explored than in David McFarlane’s 1999 novel Summer Gone. The book hauntingly opens up the relationship between a son and his divorced father, and the tenuous bonds that remain of the family with each other and cottage country. The book is uncanny in the seamlessness in which the decline of the environment and that of the family are as one. Just as father and son have so little time to spend together, so too is a canoe trip and conversation strained, as the cycles of summers, growing up, and even life and death, stilted and disrupted.

This might or might not be the right book for you this May 2-4. But there are others. Lots of others, and that’s what summer up north is for. Great art, like a great summer, isn’t perfect, but it’s about as good as it gets.

National Post

Adam de Pencier will be opening the family cottage and hoping for good weather instead of bad traffic.