HANDING OVER THE REIGNS: How Living at Deer Lake Has Changed Me
Updated: Jul 13
As I sit down to write this blog for Deer Lake Wilderness Retreat one massive thing has changed — I am no longer the owner of this beautiful piece of property.
I have handed over stewardship to Lisa and Jeff Spence who have the same vision I had for the property when I moved in five years ago, such as adding more sites and turning the barn into an event space. But there are two of them, and they are a decade younger than I am, so I’m hopeful that their combined energy and enthusiasm will carry them over the finish line, whereas mine flagged a while ago.
I want to take this time to not just announce the change of ownership, but to also write a blog about how living (mostly) by myself in a big old yellow farmhouse in the Almaguin Highlands has changed me. Because there’s one thing I know for sure: I am definitely not the same person who moved into Deer Lake Lodge five years ago. And I don’t just mean I’m five years older (and look it), and 15 pounds heavier (unfortunately), I have changed in ways that I struggle to identify, but will attempt to articulate.
RUNNING FROM (AND TOWARDS) MY LIFE
When I bought Deer Lake Lodge in the spring of 2021, COVID had been going on for about a year and my life in Guelph (where I’d been living for almost two decades) was no longer working for me on many levels.
The freelance work that I had as a graphic designer to not-for-profit’s had shrunk up in the pandemic and I was feeling the financial pinch of that. In addition, my daughter (18) had moved out to attend university and my two boys had become basement dwellers in my house on Oxford Street where they were smoking way too much weed. I knew this was likely just a phase for my younger son (16), but my older son (20) was a different story altogether. He’d had been struggling through life for well over a decade by then, and had even attended a treatment program called Pine River Institute for 20 months from 2017-2019 which was a successful intervention while he was there, but by the time the pandemic came along we had all fallen back into our broken way of doing things.
All I knew was that as long as I had a basement that my oldest son could hide away in (and I could find ways to ignore his lifestyle), not only was I enabling his addiction, but we were stuck in a dysfunctional family dynamic that felt like a trap, and I wanted out.
I also had begun to realize that after five decades of city living, I was actually more of a country mouse. So, more out of desperation to flee the life I was living than anything resembling the courage people attribute to my decision, I sold our family home and started looking for a piece of property where I could start a glamping business.
Glamping was an idea I had been coveting for several years and was keen to give a whirl because the concept seemed to pass every litmus test I put it through. After scouring the internet for properties and finding none that quite fit my vision in the Collingwood area (my ideal location), I widened my geographical criteria and Deer Lake Lodge popped up, which ticked all my essential boxes including needing a refurbishment.
The only thing I had reservations about was how far away it was from my tribe and the life I had been living up until then. My comfort zone is Toronto (where I was born & bred), Guelph (where I raised my family and lived for 19 years) and Collingwood (where I have many roots). I knew that living 2-4 hours away from all of these places — and everyone I knew — was going to be the hardest part, but I told myself to give it at least two years and if I was feeling lonely and it just wasn’t working out, I would give myself permission to sell it at that juncture.
BUMPY LANDINGS
It’s hard to look back on myself five years ago and recall all the mixed emotions and complications that were unearthed by the move, but I do know that when family and friends excitedly asked me about my new adventure (assuming that it was all going really well of course), I would cryptically reply that “it’s been a bumpy landing.”
Because it was a very bumpy landing at first, and the wheels temporarily fell off my little life plane for lots of reasons.
For starters my romantic relationship of 2.5 years did not survive the move, which blindsided me because I had thought it was quite solid up until that point. We didn’t have any plans to move in together — this was entirely my adventure — but he was extremely supportive of the move itself and even purchased the geodome so that he could have his own little piece of my paradise, thus making him a minor investor in Deer Lake Wilderness Retreat. However, it turns out that the nitty gritty details of moving is a good way to test a relationship, and ours didn’t pass this test, which was a big grief that I was not expecting to have to navigate at that time.
Then there was the resurfacing of some unresolved grief that leaving the city in which I had put all my hopes and dreams as a young mother brought up. When my ex-husband and I moved to Guelph in 2002 he had just landed his dream job as a professor at the University of Guelph, and we had a 2 year old son and 4 month old daughter in tow, the perfect family set-up. Although our first few years in Guelph were extremely happy ones, and we added one more boy to the brood, I see now that our relationship had hairline fractures that increased in size as the years went by and the stress of life began to test them. Ultimately we broke apart when our kids were the tender ages of 9, 11 & 13, and moving brought back the sadness of that chapter again, mostly because I had always intended to keep our family home long enough to see my youngest son through his final year of high school. But in the end I couldn’t swing it, so he stayed in Guelph and moved in full time with his father.
This inability to hack it out for one more year in the city for his sake felt like a failure on my part, and I missed him like crazy, more than I realized I would. So I rented out Deer Lake Lodge and moved back to Guelph from Nov-April that first winter, which helped my heart and eased the transition.
But most importantly, even though my oldest son’s addiction chaos felt smothering — and truthfully was the biggest reason I felt desperate to leave the city — it was clear that in spite of my intention to throw him out of the nest and let him figure life out on his own from a distance, he really had nowhere else to go.
So I reluctantly decided to bring him with me to live in the country hoping that the change of scenery (and lack of access to weed) would be the ingredients he needed to get himself onto a better path. But it turns out that this was a great example of “magical thinking”, because wherever you go you take your problems with you, and weed can get delivered to a mailbox in the countryside. Needless to say things got much worse very quickly because the blinders I had been wearing quickly fell off, and when I look back at all that’s happened in the last five years with regards to my oldest son, and recall all the things I didn’t know, I marvel at my naivety.
But we don’t know what we don’t know, and I’ve learned how to allow myself grace on this subject. I have blogged about this messy chapter of my life and for those interested in learning more about it, you can read my three part trilogy here. But to sum up the last five years of my oldest son’s journey, he has spent over two of them homeless (although not all at once, but always during winter), has been hospitalized a few times (most of which feel like a waste of time), has been living with me off and on (which has always ended badly), and has spent the last year living in a series of seedy motels in the Collingwood area not doing much of anything. On a positive note his weed use is way down and he is no longer angry at the world and blaming me for all of his problems, mostly he just seems lost and in need of a very specific type of intervention.
So I have a new dream where he is concerned, but hopefully one that is a bit more grounded in reality and takes into consideration all that I’ve learned in the last few years. My new passion project is to start a small scale flower farm in the Collingwood area that employs kids in their mid-20’s who are socially isolated and hard to inspire. I am using the 'care farm' model which supports its participants by creating a community that is set up for their success and leans heavily on the concept of becoming by belonging. Although I thought about starting it at Deer Lake Wilderness Retreat (the property would actually be perfect for it), I think for it to be viable it’s going to need to be closer to large urban populations, and I’m going to need my tribe around me to keep me energized. (If you are interested in learning more please visit my website wildflowerschooloflife.org for a vision board describing this new endeavour.)
BEAUTIFUL GROWTH
When I look back at my younger self who took possession of Deer Lake Lodge in June of 2021, I barely recognize the person I was. I can honestly say that that living on this little patch of land has healed me in a multitude of ways that I hadn’t anticipated, or even knew needed healing. This is an excerpt from my blog trilogy, FINDING MY GREAT BIG LOVE (Part 3): My Chrysalis in The Country.
Needless to say, the stress of that first summer at Deer Lake took its toll on my relationship with my boyfriend. When I got back from BC (after dropping my son off at a treatment program which he chose to walk away from and be homeless instead) it was clear that he needed some space from the intensity of my life and I was once again on my own and blindsided by grief. I headed north to my yellow farmhouse and spent the next two months grieving deeply. I have never felt so alone, psychologically and literally. I tend to turtle in times of stress so I spoke to almost no one during this period, sometimes a week would go by and I hadn’t connected with a single person, not even by text.
In her book Untamed, Glennan Doyle sums her spiritual journey up like this: We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated. Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.
During those solitary two months in the fall of 2021, much of what I believed to be true had just been annihilated. To keep myself busy I refurbished the small rental cabin on my property and listened to podcasts to distract myself as I worked. Winter came and some days I worked on the cabin until well after dark. As I walked back to the house on those evenings the newly fallen snow on the ground would glitter in the moonlight and I would stop to look up at the stars and breath in the fresh winter air while soaking up their vast, twinkling silence.
In those moments the solitude of my property wrapped me up in its magic and held me tight, and with each passing day something elusive deep down inside of me felt sturdier and more grounded. When I first moved to the country this city gal found the isolation so terrifying that my whole bed would shake at night with the pounding of my heart. But during this period of mourning I knew that in spite of life’s curve balls and crippling uncertainty, I was exactly where I needed to be, and the universe was watching out for me in some intangible way.
THAT MAGICAL FEELING
The feeling that I was being held by the universe has never left me while I lived at Deer Lake Lodge, and it is something glamping guests have also described to me. I do feel like there is something magical and healing about the property itself.
It has been a solitary five years, and when I first moved to Deer Lake Lodge it felt strange to not have to spend all day, every day, playing a supporting role in someone else’s life such as mother, daughter, girlfriend, friend, colleague, etc. But I’m very used to my own company now, and weirdly I never feel lonely anymore, far from it. I’ve even made some very good friends in the hood, people I expect to keep in touch with for life, and if anything I’m more anxious about feeling drained by the requirements of socializing and just being around people again in general. I will definitely miss my solitude.
I’ve also learned that I can manage life on my own, and on my own terms entirely. I can support myself and put a roof over my head, and I have learned how to pivot when I need to. I am much better at holding healthier boundaries around myself, and I have a clearer understanding of my role in my relationships, and what’s mine to own, and when I’m being gaslit.
It’s a strange sense of irony that although not much happened in my life on the daily during these past five years — most of it was pretty mundane in fact — it feels like everything about my life has changed. I feel like an entirely different person than the one I was five years ago.
Long gone is the shaking bed from my thumping heart. I have been through some hard times times in the past five years, but worrying about my son during his homeless stints trumps them all for sure. I have come face-to-face with many of my fears and stared them down, all by myself. I now know that “I can do hard things”, as Glennan Doyle would say, and this is no small achievement.
So although there are many things I will miss about living at Deer Lake Lodge, especially watching the sunrise from my bed, the time has come to hand over the reigns to the enthusiastic new owners, Lisa & Jeff. I know that I’m leaving Deer Lake with a much stronger sense of self, and a new sense of purpose, which is allowing me to step into my next passion project feeling older, wiser, and stronger.
For that, I am grateful.
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