Not Just a Place

I often have dreams that we have no choice:  we have to sell the cabin.  Or worse, the local township has established eminent domain and seized the property to put in a new shipping channel.  Another version?  Squatters have come and taken over the place and made it unsafe and perilous to visit.  The worst?  Some sinister member of the family has undone our collective ownership and found a way to destroy this place of multi-generational happiness.

Of course I hope none of these ever happen, but the truth is that my grief would be immense and crushing but the cabin's heart would continue to pulse inside of me. 

My grandfather built his first structure on the cabin property as a teenager and then built the current cabin by hand in the 1950s on weekends when he wasn't practicing dentistry 25 miles north.  My father spent his childhood and adolescent summers there.  Fishing, boating, hunting, racing, building, shooting, playing, competing, horse-back riding, hiking, blazing trails and building fires. Every year of my life I have returned to this space and spent a week or more there.

It is the closest thing that I have to a "home" in this world since I am not from any of the places where I have lived.

I have taken my children there with me and taught them to fish and boat and hike and blaze and shoot and build fires and make forts.  I have read countless novels, written scripts and stories and essays and poems.  Laughed and cooked and swam and competed and hiked and kayaked and explored and hammock-napped.

Given how large a role the cabin has played in my personal sense of happiness and depth, you'd think that I'd include it in my 50 things of value.

But in this list, I have not ever referred to a specific place or a specific person - I've offered examples of specific people and places and things, but I've tried to value things that will remain and that have, because of their value become a part of me.

Growing old does mean reconciling yourself to loss and endings as a vital part of living.  But endings and loss (it turns out) do not always look or feel how we expect them to.  Some are bitter,  some surprisingly freeing.  Many are both.  But experiencing these transitions does clarify what it means to hold on to the essence of a thing more tightly than those parts of it that you can't control.

These trips to the cabin have turned me into a lover of trees, a lover of water, a lover of birds, a lover of peace, a lover of slowness, a lover of rest, a lover of looking, a lover of listening, a lover of wading, rafting, swimming, and lake-bathing, a lover of rock-skipping, a lover of campfires, a lover of kayaks.

I'm grateful for what the North Woods, the labor of my ancestors, and the rituals of a lifetime of arriving and saying goodbye have done for me and to me.  I'm grateful for all the ways those memories tie to the past, root me in the present and open my heart to the future.

#50thingsofvalue