Memories of my grandparents’ cabin

 

The white farmhouse cabin on Big Lake was built on a hillside so that it had to stand on stilts, and underneath in the crook between the bottom of the cabin and the sloping hill were all good things, like boats and paddles and canoes and coolness and must.

Inside it had a woodstove, a Fisher stove or potbelly stove, I can’t remember, but I think that on July 4th weekend when I was very little, and I was intrigued by fires and wood and stoves and fireplaces I begged my father to start a fire in the stove. And I think that he did for my sake, and they opened all the windows, and we were lucky there were so many windows in the cabin overlooking the lake.

But I might be just imagining that. That is one of the gifts and curses of a writer: sometimes you do not know when you write or work with words and images whether something really happened or didn’t happen. In fact, that is the goal: to write so well so as to convince yourself it was real.

I could do that when I was younger in my short stories. One story was about a certain girl and guy going to a cabin only to break up; the cabin was the guy’s world and he and she found out the hardest way that she wasn’t meant for that world. Of course, I was the guy, and the girl was one I had known. But she had never been to the cabin in reality, nor skinny-dipped in the lake, or picked blueberries there. And the real breaking up wasn’t so civil. That short story is lost now, but I remember it like a memory because I worked on writing it so hard.

Later at Big Lake there was the Coop, the chicken coop that was renovated with a bathroom and two bedrooms, the great living room and a fireplace and kitchen and dining room. I imagined, and this I recall very accurately, that those chickens had at one time lived very well in this coop if this is how they had lived.

That was back a ways on another hill amongst the oaks and pines and on one side the Coop overlooked the trout creek that meandered through the broad tall grass meadow. That trout creek appeared in my stories, and again the story parts felt real to me after I constructed them, but no one else found them to be quite the writing I did. I had fully convinced myself of the reality of the stories. Maybe I’m delusional.

The first Cedar Lake cabin was very quaint for our family of my grandparents and aunts and uncles and my parents and brother and me. But I have only two memories of that: in the wintertime when they’d go snowmobiling, but that memory is actually no memory of mine but comes from a photograph of my aunt and my mother in the snowmobile suits and helmets inside the cabin getting ready to go out in the cold with the gasoline smell in the dark.

In the hot season in high summer late at night my grandmother would send me up back in the dark among the buzzing of mosquitoes and gnats and the rush of the bats to the strawberry and raspberry patch where I could pick a cup of raspberries, very frightened in the dark and far back of the cabin towards the treeline with only a flashlight which I put in the crook of my arm or on the ground as I picked.

And then I would hurry down, the way you hurry when the darkness is behind you and when the unknown is behind you and all good things are in front of you. Inside bright with warm lighting and familiar with the smell of wood and wool she would make me a bowl of vanilla ice cream with red raspberries before bed. And I never felt as safe as I was when I was in the cabin at night with my silent, powerful grandfather near, and no more adored than when my grandmother watched me eat.

Then that cabin was renovated. The quaint little cabin was lifted by my grandfather at all corners and a new foundation of rock and stone and brick and block was put in under it so that now the quaint little cabin was on top, and underneath was a walk-in split-level with much more room tucked into the steep hillside.

Eventually my grandparents retired and that became a home for them, not so much a cabin. And eventually my grandparents moved away, and my aunt moved in there so then it wasn’t a getaway as often, although she always welcomed me through my rambling, lost years.

But always I will associate that place with catching walleyes in the ice and snaring cottontail rabbits in the pines and sliding down the snow-heavy spruce boughs and catching walleye in the high summer and the fall and some big fish like that musky and those northerns and my brother’s walleye and my silver bass and boats and my grandmother’s impatiens and my grandfather’s strawberries and my raspberries.