With the reopening of town facilities, Niagara-on-the-Lake residents are able to get back to exercising both the body and mind.

“I was sitting across the street looking over, upset that I wasn’t in here,” Brock Sansom said about the lockdown as he played badminton in the community centre’s gym.

“It’s better than being out,” Ron Planche said about being back in the centre.

When lockdowns shutter doors around town it isn’t just the ability to go out for dinner and have a beer that is lost, NOTL residents also lose access to the valuable resources provided by the public library, arenas and the community centre.

Arenas are also open again and children's hockey and figure skating programs have resumed.

Planche joked that he coped with the closure of the community centre by “drinking ice wine.”

He also thanked the large snowstorms from the past few weeks for creating another way to exercise while the centre was closed.

Brock and Planche are part of a group who get together at the community centre twice a week to play badminton.

They call themselves the “Bad Men of Niagara-on-the-Lake” and are looking for more residents to sign up and join the fun.

“We’re always looking for more people to join, Mondays and Fridays 10:30 to 12,” Sansom said.

The group operates between October and April before transitioning to tennis and pickleball during the summer months.

Supervisor of recreation Dan Maksenuk said the town is happy to see residents once again taking care of themselves.

“It's so good to see people back in utilizing the building, keeping fit, staying active in their wellness,” Maksenuk said in an interview.

“It's been a long haul the last two years. I want to say we've closed down and reopened at least four times. Every time it's been a bit modified.”

Maksenuk said he hopes the community centre will stay open for good this time.

All the facilities are open at the centre as are individual room rentals. Maksenuk said the only real restrictions come in the form of a 300-person max capacity for the entire community centre.

Any further restrictions on room rentals will be determined on an individual basis, he said.

The Sweets & Swirls Cafe is also open in the centre, with a maximum capacity of 84 persons.

Regardless of a fairly busy reopening week, Maksenuk said there are many longtime residents who use the community centre’s facilities that he has not seen in more than a year.

“I’m hopeful a lot of folks who haven’t come back in the last two years will slowly start to make their way back,” he said.

“We’re open and I feel we’ve created a nice, safe environment for everybody. So, hopefully we get some more bodies in the gym.”

He said the pandemic has changed people's relationship with gyms and more people have learned how to work out at home.

Balancing that is the growth of NOTL. Maksenuk said he sees lots of new faces at the gym now.

The community centre occupies an important space as one of the few public recreational facilities in town, he noted.

“It’s crucial to the community, just having this building reopened. It’s a central hub for so many people to come,” he said.

“In terms of Old Town, we’re probably one of the only public facilities saying, ‘Come on down and take part in activities.' ”

The Public Library

Next door at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library, residents are able to peruse the shelves once again and find the perfect book to sharpen their minds.

And that’s exactly what 94-year-old resident Kit Nash has been doing for the past 34 years.

“I think it’s wonderful. I don’t know what I would have done (if the library stayed closed). I practically live here,” Nash said while checking out some books.

Nash moved to NOTL in 1988 and said she began donating to the library immediately when it was still in the Court House on Queen Street.

Nash has been an avid reader her whole life and was more than ready to give history lessons on the Second World War and the changing landscape of NOTL since she started vacationing here in the 1940s.

“I love books. I couldn’t imagine life without the library,” she said.

Nash, now widowed, was married to a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the two lived all over the world during his military career.

The recent snowstorms gave her some parking trouble but she generally has no issue driving in southern Ontario’s snow thanks to her previous experience abroad.

“I learned to drive on the Alaska Highway in the '50s when it was just a gravel road. We were stationed at Whitehorse at that time. The snow doesn’t bother me,” she said.

Nash recalled being a teenager in Toronto during the Second World War and remembered many of her teachers going off to fight as well as students in grades 11 and 12.

“I love this library. For a small town it is a tremendous library ,” she said.

“They are so available to get you books that they don’t have. They will do everything they can to accommodate you, which I think is fantastic for a small town,” she said.

Despite being an avid reader since she was a child, Nash doesn’t have a large collection of books at home.

“When you’re in the military you travel light,” she said.

Nash said library closures over the last two years have been difficult.

“I suffered, I truly suffered,” she said.

But she said the NOTL library has ensured residents could still get books while the front doors were closed.

“They phone you and they tell you when they’ve got it for you and you go in and pick it up. It’s just fabulous. The only thing is what you want to do is come in and browse,” she emphasized.

As someone who started visiting Niagara-on-the-Lake some 80 years ago, she has seen the town and region grow exponentially.

“My parents shipped me out here after school. There was nothing between Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake except St. Catharines. It was all orchards, orchards from here to Toronto,” she said.

Nash said a typical 1940s day in NOTL involved a trip to the Apothecary to buy ice cream and a comic book before heading to Queen's Royal Park for the day.

But she says she spends most of her time these days at the library.

“I don’t know what we would do without our library,” she said.