Eventually, I will write a post about my new job, but this weekend demands a different kind of post - a post of warm remembrance. Nobody has died, but a not-so-small piece of my childhood is fading away, and I won't even be there to wish it a fond farewell. So this is my way of breaching the 1,200 mile divide and saying goodbye to the cabin, a place that taught me so much about what matters in life.
My mom's parents have owned the cabin since my mom was in high school. Despite Chase's visions of a perfectly manicured lawn on a grand estate (you can imaine his shock when he actually went out to the cabin for the first time...), the cabin is actually an old single-wide trailer parked next to a small sand pit in the middle of a cow pasture. The lake is probably a half-mile to walk around, so it's tiny - too small for motorized water vehicles - but the cabin has never been about size or grandeur. It's about time and family.
There is still a working outhouse at the cabin (though there is a fully functional bathroom with running water too), and only 3 channels come in on the TV, just enough to catch the news in the morning and at night. The air conditioner is a window unit gutsy enough to keep it bearable to sleep at night, but that doesn't matter because daytime hours at the cabin are spent sitting in lawn chairs outside or exploring the lake and pasture.
When we were tiny, Grandpa built us a "kiddie pool" area fenced off next to a sand bank that he'd made so we could safely play in the shade. He helped the boys make "lake" systems that ran water from one into another via cut pieces of garden hose, and somehow Cody and Chet convinced Heidi and I that it would be a good idea to trade hours of carrying lake water in old detergent bottles up the hill to the top "lake," in exchange for the little foam ultimately made as the water flowed through the lake system and back into the real lake. We were fools, Heidi and I for doing that, but it kept us occupied for hours.
The girls made milkpod tacos and mud pies, and the meat grinder Grandpa added to the wooden kitchen he'd built us meant we could create all kinds of new and exciting delicacies. I don't think meat was ever ground with it once, but we all found hundreds of other things that were more desirable when pulverized. We'd walk the various cow trails throughout the pasture, visiting the cow's living room, the mother stone, henthorne (or chickenthorn, I can never remember) dam, and Spook Hill. These walks were always best when one had a particular piece of equipment: a walking stick. The beauty of the walking stick was less the aid it gave in walking and much more the ability to test the newness of the cowpies we'd find. There's nothing more delightful or disgusting than poking your walking stick into a cowpie that's got a good hard shell on the outside, only to discover it is still fresh on the inside.
I remember the day Grandpa gave me my own gate key when I was maybe 17. One had to have a key to the gate to get into the pasture, and it was a big responsibility. You had to close the gate such that the calves couldn't get out, and you had to wrestle with the lock sometimes. But it meant that I was trusted to respect and enjoy this place as an adult and not just as a child.
The lake is perhaps the most critical feature of the cabin. There's really no reasoning to it, but sitting next to water lends itself to relaxation so much more than sitting anywhere else. Grandpa built a high dock (maybe 6 feet high off the water) that we spent hours jumping off of. We'd do silly dances down the dock, my favorite of which has always been the Erkel. We'd have splash contests and make our poor parents or grandparents judge which splash was the biggest or smallest or rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.
One end of the lake was always warmer than the other, and that's because it's a spring-fed lake. The water farthest from the spring is always warmest, but it's also the murkiest, because the cows more often would come drink out of the water on the warm end. We'd visit the sand bar and go hunting for cool rocks. We'd visit Spook Hill and hunt for mouse bones. We'd wander the pasture looking for deer or cow bones to add to our collection. (It sounds rather morbid to have a bone collection, but we had an excellent one that required hours of scrubbing with toothbrushes and lake water to keep clean.)
And of course we'd fish. I wonder how many hours of her life Grandma has spent untangling hopelessly gnarled fishing line courtesy of her grandchildren. I know I contributed my fair share of hours. But the hours of fishing enjoyment with Grandpa far exceeded the untangling hours. It was a big day when one graduated from the small children's fishing pole to a long, black, sleek, adult-sized, open-reeled fishing pole. I never could tie the knot to afix the hook, but Grandpa was always there to help.
The fish we caught throughout the weekend that were big enough to be keepers would go into the cage next to the low dock, where on Sunday afternoon, Grandpa would butcher them. It was always funny when one peed on the deck as it was getting fileted, and we'd argue over who got to pull the catfish's nerve cord that made the whole tail jerk once the head was off. I'm confident I could butcher a fish if I had to thanks to years of watching Grandpa do it. We'd throw the scraps out in the pasture for the coyottes to enjoy in the night, and take the meat home to fry up for dinner.
As I write, the memories are flooding back, all the contraptions and gadgets Grandpa would find and bring out to the cabin just to delight us for a few hours - the water balloon launcher, the car steering wheel, golf clubs, a water tank with a nozzel on it. Grandma could put together a supper like no other, one that tasted so good after a hard day's playing! It often included potato salad that I think after years of trying I've nearly mastered (don't ask for the recipe - it's an "add to taste" kind of thing that's a "family recipe"). The snack drawer and Mr. Bean, ski belts and driving from the gate, feeding fish oitmeal (yes, that's a purposeful misspelling), and trying to catch the ever-evading huge large mouth masterangler bass from the brush pile.
One of my favorite quotes comes from a book by Karen Huges titled 10 Minutes from Normal. She writes, "There is no such thing as quality time. There is only time, and if you spend enough of it, some of it will be quality." That's the cabin. It gave us time. There was no cable TV, there was minimal electronic distraction, not even a phone until about 10 years ago. It was a quiet, safe, old fashioned, blue-collar kind of place where seemingly purposeless hours were spent doing the most important things in life. We spent time together as a family, older generations quietly sharing the most treasured commodity in life, time, with their posterity.
The cabin was recently sold, and the new owners take posession of the place on Tuesday. This Labor Day is the last that Grandma and Grandpa's cabin will be in the family, and I wish I were there. It will be a relief to them to not have to keep up the place, and I'm thankful that my aunt and uncle own the cabin next door, so we can still enjoy many aspects of the place. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tearing up at the thought that I'm saying goodbye to it from here, 1,200 miles away.
The cabin is a place that has deep meaning to me, because it taught me the truth in what Socrates said: "Be ware the bareness of a busy life." It's my tendency to busy myself with stuff that's urgent and miss the important things. Perhaps the best way to express the importance of the cabin in the life of my family is to point out that the etching that's on my older brother's gravestone is of the view across the lake from the cabin. It's been a haven, a sanctuary of sorts for the development of the soul, at least of my soul. And on this Labor Day Weekend I bid it a fond farewell thankful that the lessons I learned there will continue with me for the rest of my life.
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