St Eustace summer cottage, 1940s and 1950s

My father's brother, my Uncle Alex and Alex's wife, my Auntie Ivy. This is where we used to swim, at the bottom of 11th Avenue in St. Eustache, where my grandmother and Uncle Alex shared a cottage just up the street; we had a rented cottage across the street from them, behind the Goodyear's home. In the cool August evenings we'd have a fire in the Franklin stove and toast bread on it. That was always nice.

My mother and our beagle, Buddy. Around 1957 - 1958, outside our grandmother's cottage.

                                                     My brother, John Morrissey.

                        My brother and I outside of our grandmother's country cottage.

                       Auntie Mable (my father's sister) and me, maybe early summer 1951, 

                       sitting in someone's rowboat at the bottom of 11th Avenue in St. Eustache.

                      My father's sister, my Auntie Mable outside the summer cottage, in 1948.

My grandmother outside the cottage. I think this was taken in 1948, just a few years after my grandmother and Uncle Alex bought the cottage. Before this they would spend the hot summer months at Pine Beach, which is on the West Island of Montreal, just off Highway 2 & 20, near Pointe Claire.

Here I am on the left, with my mother and my brother.

My cousin Herb Morrissey and his mother Ivy (Lewis) Morrissey, around 1948.

I always loved St. Eustache. What wonderful summer holidays we had there! For a child, it was truly, shall we say, "Edenic". We had our cottage and across the street was my grandmother's cottage, which she owned with my Uncle Alex. They (Alex and Ivy and my grandmother and Mable) all shared their rather small cottage every summer. During the day, when my mother was at work, my Auntie Ivy and my grandmother kept an eye on my brother and I. We spent our days swimming, walking on the railroad tracks to a small island and making camp fires there, smoking little cigars (the things children do!), roaming around, walking on the train tracks into the country, hearing about some farmer who would shoot trespassers with pepper shot, buying candy at Jed's, going to movies at The Normandy (?) Theatre, sitting in the still hot summer afternoons with my grandmother and Auntie Ivy, the smell of Ivy's DuMaurier cigarettes, the smell of newsprint and the coloured comics on Saturday, sleeping with my Auntie Mable and grandmother when my mother wasn't there, the three of us in the same bed with my head at the bottom of the bed between them. I wouldn't exaggerate this if it weren't as I've described, but (of course) what I've described is from a child's perspective. For my grandmother there was the middle of the night phone call from my Uncle Herb telling us that Auntie Mable had died in her early 60s in P.E.I (?). Mable was Grandma's closest companion. No wonder I'm still writing about them, thinking about them, I loved them all so much.