cabin fever (the long goodbye)

I haven't been to my favorite place in almost two years. I don't know if I'll ever return to it. It's not even that it was that special, I just knew it really well. I had a history there. It was a small cabin on a modest piece of lakeshore. It had running water (from the lake), an outhouse complete with spiders, wild raspberry bushes, a beautiful wooden swing with a table in the middle of two benches, lots of crawfish, a heron (Ed Heron) and a loon (Loony). My grandfather and father built the cabin when my brother and I were toddlers, back when people of modest means (or even less) could do such things.

I don't know how much of who we become has to do with what we did as children, but I know that spending time there made me the person I am today. I would rank it first on the list, with college second (exempting obvious things like parental involvement and genetics). We learned so much about our world, without ever really knowing we learned it. I am still sometimes surprised by people my own age who can't recognize a strawberry plant or a merganser, just common things on our property that we knew as 4-year-olds. And I don't know exactly what purspose that knowledge has....it certainly hasn't made me rich or successful, but it has made my world a little more beautiful. The time we spent outside, especially there was so special, but also so ordinary. We caught fish, frogs, butterflies, and fireflies, watched birds, made mud pies, just played out in the woods. And I feel so lucky to have spent my childhood that way.

And even after I grew up, I loved the cabin even more. Greg and I started going to it every fall, starting when we were 19. Sometimes it was beautiful weather, sometimes it snowed. If it snowed, we just piled on about 10 old quilts a piece and drank hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. The year we were 22, it was nice fall weather for our annual trip. We spent a quiet evening talking on the old swing and staring at the stars. We ended up that night, Septmenber 29, 2000, engaged to be married, a secret we would keep between ourselves for a while (seeing as how we were "seeing other people" at the time, it seemed kind of awkward). A year later, it was also great weather when we got married on September 29. A year after that it was COLD AS HELL after Lisa's wedding in September, and we used every quilt in the place to keep warm, but to us it was still preferable to staying in my parents (blessedly heated) house.

For Greg and me, the cabin was where we wanted to go all summer long. It was just where we belonged, where everything just fit perfecctly. A lot of things were changing on the lake, but we still loved it. Huge houses were going up all over at an alarming rate. At first we laughed at them....how they just didn't fit in at all with their huge garages and blacktop all over the place. But they just kept showing up, and then they did fit in, just because there were so many.

Two winters ago I was talking to my mom on the phone, and she said that they were thinking about selling the cabin. In a year that was filled with loss, the possibility of that particular loss was the hardest one to take somehow. I truly felt like I'd be lost without that place....like I'd have no home. My parents didn't own the place outright. They were half owners along with my aunt and uncle, who were the ones who wanted to sell. My parents have never had any money and couldn't buy them out. It was just the way things were. I was mad, and sad, and my parents were so matter-of-fact about it. But they didn't want to sell that place at all. After all, it had been dad who built it with his dad. And my mom, a stay-at-home mom for those years watched her children grow up there. And they loved it just as much as I did, maybe even more. They never told me, but I knew. And, as the summer wore on, it became even more obvious, as nobody mowed the grass or cleaned the spiders out of the bathtub. Greg and I blatantly didn't lift a finger to help it look any better, kicked the ant traps into very visible locations, and routinely turned away people curious about the "for sale" sign by saying we didn't know the asking price, but estimating it to be extrememly high.

We went to the cabin all summer and enjoyed our time there even more so knowing that each time might be the last. That summer the weekends seemed hotter than ever, and the lake water lower. It seemed that there were way more boats and jet skis than ever, and we rarely saw Loony or Ed Heron. There were more and more people and bigger and bigger "cabins." Looking back on it, we were saying a long goodbye that summer, trying to convince ourselves that we would be just fine without that place, indeed, it was changing for the worse.

But then fall came. Greg lost his job, and I had requested a month's vacation to enjoy my favorite season. We ended up living at the cabin for that month, and in the fall, all the magic was back The boats and trucks and noise were gone, and Ed and Loony were back every day. We lived our perfect life in that tiny cabin, with crappy or no appliances and loved it so much. It was so natural. We fell into that life as if it was what we were always meant for. As our time there came to a close, we thought the cabin has escaped sale for the season. But as we packed the car to leave, I knew suddenly that it hadn't. I stood there in the early October snow, watching Loony out in the gray waves and cried, telling Greg that I'd never see it again if we left. "Sure we will," he reassured me, but we never did. Just a week later, the sale went through, and just like that, my place is someone else's now.

I still miss it, but life is like that, and Greg and I now frequent state parks and kind of have a few new places that are "ours." But tonight, I had a migraine, and one of the symptoms I get with these headaches is an extremely heightened sense of smell. It's usually a bad side effect, as I hate to smell any food at all (and others need to eat), or any dog at all (and we have 2), but tonight it was kind of nice. I was laying in the guest bedroom with those old quilts from the lake because I could smell the cabin in them. It was like a small, sweet little gift from that place that had already given me so many big ones.