I miss the Americans: the disappearance of seasonal cottages, a cross-border community and the love ethic

In this an ongoing project I am trying to document the social and formal dissolution of a once tightly interconnected cross-border (US-Canada) community. I focus on the building typology of the seasonal cottage which once characterized the area and which are now being sold, en masse, by their American owners. The typology of the seasonal cottage here in this lakeside bordertown has been, I argue, a key contributor to a specific kind of “love ethic”1 that has bound people in this community not just to each other, but perhaps more importantly, to its context: the natural environment. In addition to photographic documentation and measured- drawings, autoethnography the most obvious inroad for me to conduct this ongoing project because I live in the middle of this rapidly changing community. Autoethnography acknowledges the particular circumstances of the author and “seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.”2 I live in a seasonal cottage which has been, over the decades, buttressed-up with four, maybe five, additions. Notoriously tentative in their construction, mainly because of make-shift piers used as foundations, these seasonal cottages weren’t necessarily meant to have long lives, though many have. Their humble size and informal construction juxtaposed against the big lake, mature tree canopy and sometimes-wild wind can be seen as a deferential stance.