Some family of ours had this beautiful cottage when I was growing up.  Grandparents of theirs had bought the land on auction decades earlier and built a tiny little home right along the water.

As a child, I spent countless summers there.  Playing with my cousins…canoeing around the lake…playing Monopoly at night…roasting marshmallows over a fire.  And though my days at the cottage didn’t last much into my teens…so much of it has stayed with me.

And it doesn’t take much either.  Sometimes it’s the smell in the air or the dew on the grass during those really early mornings.  Sometimes its the way the sun sets or the way the rain falls.  And sometimes it’s just because that’s what I need in that moment; a memory filled with nothing but summer.

To have places like that to look back on is a gift.  To have your childhood spent on a single lakeside dock or etched into a nearby tree.  To go home with all of your clothes smelling like smoke and your skin kissed by the sun.  So, it’s not hard to believe that when so much of your life has happened in one beautiful place…you would want it to remain in that very same place.

Queue Janelle and Mitch!

A couple so smitten with their little corner of the world that it only made sense for their new life together to start there as well.  Benches were made…electricity was brought in…and magic happened!!  Two people so ridiculously in love brought their own brand of beauty to a place very near and dear to their hearts.

And the result was spectacular.  It wasn’t just the story of a little girl brought to life along the shores of her favourite lake…but it became the story of two people who fell in love…two people who decided to share a life…and two people who chose to start it in the most perfect place they could think of…