Looking Back: Elizabeth J Cottages, Bonavista

The Salt Box cottage began to appear around 1870. The name Salt Box came from the design derived from an actual box of salt with the cedar roof short in the front and very long in the back. It was a typical house of the era, quick and easy to build. It was either a two story or a story and one-half, as pictured above.

Elizabeth J Cottages, Bonavista, Newfoundland (July 5, 2008) — The cottage, shot through with sun, beckons us awake. Where there was one are now two icebergs—the night having grown a twin, imperceptibly spinning in the light gravity of morning. The thin form of Kate moves behind the windows, each a mouth set in a square jaw. Planter boxes like curled lips sprout thin beards of hearty flowers, their thin tendrils reaching toward the sky. The smell of bacon rides the back of the wind rolling in from the sea—thick, but sharp. On the rocky shore, ancient rocks crawl in millennial advance from the bay, reptilian bellies flat in the silt. The tall grass, punctuated by butterflies, rolls in the breeze and genuflects in the sun’s slow arc. The butterflies ride the breeze, their wings like fine parchment pierced with windows of mica and sturdier than one might think. We close our eyes on exhale and confuse these moments into lifetimes.

This is an post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

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  Tags Canada, Newfoundland

  Category Looking Back