This is the time of year when many city folk flee the metropolis for a cottage by a lake or a farmhouse in a field. Those not blessed with such a getaway may be looking jealously after the escapees as they retreat for a weekend of leisure.
But anyone blessed with a country place knows that you don't go there to commune with Mother Nature. You go there to fight her. Maintaining a home outside the protective perimeter of the city is a constant losing battle against the wind, the rain, the snow, the bugs, the critters and the weeds, all of them conspiring to drive your presumptuous little plot of human civilization into the ground.
Our slice of paradise is a tiny A-frame on eight acres in the Caledon Hills, northwest of the city. My wife's aunt bought it from a farmer in the early 1960s, found the A-frame on exhibit at the Ex as that year's model home and had it erected on a rise that commanded a sweeping view of the slumbering countryside.
That view disappeared about a decade ago. On what was once a bare field, a forest has grown, pressing in on the little clearing that remains. To maintain this threatened island, we cut what we loosely term "the grass" with an old gas mower. If we didn't, the woods would gobble us up. First the goldenrod would move in, then the brambles, then the sumacs, then the maples, until the cottage found itself overborne like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.
Despite our efforts to beat back the encroaching wild with mower, scythe, ax and saw, nature is making steady ground. Locust trees, their iron-hard wood impossible to cut without the chainsaw sending off sparks and throwing a chain, have colonized a hillside meadow that used to bloom with wildflowers. Crabgrass sprouts from the patio where the mower won't go. A profusion of weeds springs from the lawn.
Even the gentle herbs have turned against us. The thyme and oregano we planted for cooking has spread everywhere, overpowering the grass.
The forest has come so close that when the huge bough of an old maple came down like a guillotine blade in the ice storm of 2013, it severed the power line and just missed crushing the cottage. Warnings don't come much plainer.
The animals are invading, too. Porcupines shredded the walls of our garden shed with their teeth, attracted by the resin in fresh plywood. Once they even chewed through the brake lines of a car. The mechanic said they have a taste for brake fluid, too.
Raccoons invaded the basement crawl space. A plumber who went down there to turn on the water one spring lost several years off his life when he saw several sets of yellow eyes staring at him out of the gloom. A starling found its way down the stove pipe into the unlit wood stove. A bat once appeared in the living room, causing some of the family to clap kitchen pots and colanders on their heads while other flailed at it with a butterfly net.
Then there are the bugs, in battalions that would make Sauron's army look mild. Carpenter ants invade to feed on the foam insulation above the kitchen, spreading white dust on the kitchen dishes. I watch them trooping in across the patio every summer to take up residence, undeterred by the gum I stick in the fissures of the concrete-block foundation or the poison I inject into the wall.
Ladybugs – yes, ladybugs – are another threat.
Invasive Asian ladybugs. Impervious to bug spray, they let off a stench if you kill them and sometimes bite when they land on your skin. The only way to get rid of them, a pest-control website advises, is to vacuum them up, with a nylon stocking in the nozzle to keep them from living on in the vacuum bag to escape and spread again.
The most mysterious invaders are what we call the stink bugs, a sort of beetle with spindly legs and horns like some miniature dinosaur. What purpose the Creator intended for them is hard to say, but they show up on lamps, in bedclothes, on toothbrushes. And they smell something awful.
Gentle city people like us are unprepared for this kind of onslaught. We are raised to see the country as mild and welcoming, a place to go for respite from the rigours of urban life. Experienced country people know better. They keep their big lawns trimmed short as a buffer against the wild and act ruthlessly to wipe out any alien plant that manages to infiltrate the no-go zone. In their big sheds and garages stands an arsenal of heavy machinery primed to do battle with the ever-advancing flora and fauna.
In the age of environmental awareness, city people have come to scorn any attempt to trammel nature. In fashionable downtown Toronto, cropped green lawns are uncool and rampant wildflowers in vogue. A stint in the country teaches us that a little trammeling is unavoidable.
Earlier civilizations knew this. Villages, then towns, then cities grew up in part as places for people to huddle together against a nature red in tooth and claw. Cities tamed nature in formal gardens and patios, an impulse you still see in the yards of some Italian or Portuguese Canadians.
We love our little hobbit house, with its lilacs, trilliums and and goldfinches. It's cozy and it's private and we're lucky to have it. But having a place in the country is a reminder that modern humans belong in the city, surrounded by lots of lovely asphalt and concrete.
Marcus Gee