July 20, 2007
The Cabin, Part I
Husband and I will be going to my family's cabin briefly this weekend. Mid-July is awfully late for my first visit of the year. Most summers, I'm at least up there by the first week of July, with the rest of the family, serving as buffer for my Mom so she doesn't go stir-crazy while my Father spends his days in stoic, Scandinavian silence.
My Mother has certainly put up with a lot from my Dad over the years. For example, 'though they have been married for over 50 years now, he continues to introduce her as "my first wife." Nice, huh?
Frankly, the man is lucky she hasn't poisoned him by now. I wouldn't turn her in. His eternal trying of her good will began not long after they were married.
At the time, they were living in a "garden efficiency" apartment. I.e., a tiny, basement apartment. And as any savvy financial advisor will tell you, they were in the perfect position to buy a summer home!
Not.
But Dad did it anyway. He went in on a place with his father and brother. Grandpa had his eye on this sweet, little, white cottage and, apparently, couldn't afford it himself, so he had his sons each pay him back for part of it. Not a bad deal for my uncle, who is quite a bit older than my Dad and probably in a better position at the time to afford $20 a month. But for my parents, that was a lot of freakin' scratch!
Can you imagine, as a new bride, being told, "I know you're the only one working to support us while I finish college, but can you squeeze twenty bucks out of the budget each month?"
I've got one word for you. Anullment.
Oh, and that sweet, little, white cottage? Well, the owner backed out of the deal at the last moment. Some of you might think that that ought to have been the end of the fiasco, at least for the time being. But no one has ever gone to the animal shelter "just to look" and NOT gone home with a puppy.
They came to buy a summer home, and by God, they were going to buy a summer home!
And thus, the shanty came into our lives. An old, three-season fishing cabin that had been unused for a couple decades. The walls are split logs with tar paper in between. The roof requires buckets when it rains. The floor is such that, when you sweep, you don't need a dustpan because you can just sweep the mouse droppings right through the floor! Handy!
It had no electricity and no running water. There was a water pump a ways down the road. There were (are) bats and spiders and mice and raccoons and God knows what else. My Mother cried the first time she saw it.
I don't blame her. We have 8mm film of her washing out Spikette's diapers on the rocks down on the beach. Yes, the poor woman who dreams of satin sand beaches and tropical climes got a rock beach 300 miles north of her Chicago home.
See what I mean? And miraculously, she didn't forever withhold sex from my Dad because here I am! She's a saint.
Also in my parents' collection of 8mm films is footage of my Dad skiing. It's very old footage. Very. I know this because I have inherited my Dad's under-performing knees, and at 37, there's no way in hell my knees would allow me to barrel down a mountain on two planks of wood. So Dad had to be under 37 in the movie.
(Yes, they had moving pictures when my Dad was younger. But no sound. Or color.)
When I was growing up, there were three girls my age on my block. Over the years, I hated them all on-and-off. I distinctly remember their brightly-colored down jackets. A sharp contrast to the faux-fur hand-me-downs Billi and I got from one of my Mom's friends.
Growing up un-affluent in an affluent neighborhood sucked. My clothes were never the right clothes, and I was shunned mercilessly for it. My friends tended to be the class clown, the class bully and the new girl -- all outcasts in their own right.
How I wanted a ski jacket. Of course, I never skiied. My zipper pull would never have the collection of lift tickets that fluttered on the front of the other girls' jackets year-round. I envied them those tickets. And they knew it and flaunted them. Bitches.
But my family never skiied. In fact, we rarely went on any vacation, except to that shack in the woods. Which is probably for the best, if I'm going to be honest. Skiing involves three things that don't sit well with me: cold, speed and coordination. I can't imagine not ending up in the E.R.
So my father perfers snowy, northern climates. My mother yearns for the hot, sunny tropics. I supposed a cabin on an island in Wisconsin was my father's idea of a compromise. Hey, it's an island, right? Just not a tropical one.
Irene, Patron Saint of Non-Murderous Wives. Patron Saint of the Long, Slow Burn.
While the girls on my block were going skiing and taking horseback riding lessons and visiting grandparents in sunshiney Florida, I was spending my summers far away from any modern comforts.
I remember one time, I accidentally left a sweatshirt at one of these girls' houses. It was my favorite -- pure white with the name of the island proclaimed in blue script, a drawing of a viking ship sailing proudly beneath.
I found out later that her mom had asked her and one of the other girls to walk it down to our house to return it. But instead, they had thrown it up on the roof of another neighbor's house and secretly rejoiced when it thunderstormed that night.
I never saw that sweatshirt again. And I take some smug glee in the fact that it bothered her conscience so much that she had to confess it to me a decade later. Hee!
Could it be those over-priviledged girls were jealous of my ramshackle, bat-infested, barefoot, oak- and cedar-surrounded, hot-dogs-over-the-bonfire, red-truck-ridin', wood-stove-warmed, split-log cabin?
You bet your sweet ass they were.
P.S. Back on Tuesday!