Our family cabin was charming, cozy, cluttered and uncared for.  I moved in after making the difficult decision to put mom in a nursing home in a little town just twenty minutes from our little summer retreat.  I was looking for a place to live being recently displaced myself, since I was in the middle of a divorce.  

The cabin had a kitchen sink, with a faucet (which is still a mystery), but no running water, unless you count the water running into the five strategically placed pails during rainstorms.  On a sunny day, I could lay on the couch and see daylight streaming in through the plethora of holes in the black tar chinking that they must have used when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.  

At the time, the only bathroom was a short walk from the back door.  The outhouse is cute and scary as outhouses tend to be.  Mom had decorated it with a shelf with silly things like the jug with a goofy moose head on it that reads “Canadian Moose Milk”.  There’s also this weird sock clown hanging from the ceiling that looked like it belonged in a Stephen King novel.  I discovered that short walk became much longer when it was 10 degrees below zero at 2 a.m. and I just couldn’t hold it any longer.  My down coat and boots became my sleeping companions.  Needless to say, the first order of business was the bathroom and sauna addition.  I needed both running water and lots of unbounded heat

The kitchen counters were built when a 5’ 7” person was considered a giant.  I had to lug my seven-gallon water container up to the counter, heat the water over the stove, and then bend way over to reach the sink.  By the time I was done pitching the dirty water out the door, my back for some reason wasn’t quite right. 

I was weirdly in love with the goldish yellow shag carpet.  That was really hard to let go of.  I searched high and low for a similar replacement and relinquished my fruitless search for fir hardwood flooring.  After seeing how much dirt comes in on a daily basis, it gives me nightmares about what was living in the depth of that yellow shag forest through all those years.

After four years of improvements, there are some hold outs.  There’s the wavy window glass that’s nostalgic and beautiful.  On a windy day, I can feel a breeze at my desk which is situated between two of the six windows.   In the dead of winter, they ice up so badly that I can’t see outside, but the enchanting and ever-changing design of the ice crystals makes up for the heat loss. 

Then there’s the old 1930’s fridge with the motor on top.  It stands on four Queen Anne shaped metal legs and has big shiny silver hinges.  The sound when you shut the door is heavy and conclusive.  There’s not a lot of space, but since we have winter nine months out the year at this altitude, the big stuff can sit outside in a cooler.   It has one of those little tiny freezers that only has room for a bottle of vodka and a few ice trays and needs to be defrosted every few weeks. It’s been painted a few times by colorful personalities in its unknown history.  I’m sure it started out white and then had an aqua blue stage and is now a cross between mint and sage green.  It cycles on and off all day.  It starts with a buzzy hum that slowly sinks to a place somewhere between my conscious and subconscious mind.  When it finally reaches its safe zone again it rumbles off and physically shakes vibrating the cabinet next to it that holds my wine glasses.  If I place them too close together, they chime into the cacophony.  I often wonder if my sleep is affected by that noise since my bed is right behind the fridge. 

During the fall, my exercise routine turns from paddle boarding on the lake to venturing off into the woods with my Husqvarna chainsaw to buck up firewood.  It’s good hard work.  The reward is being out there in the crisp fall air smelling fresh cut wood and pine needles.  I load it up and haul it back to my cache in my lovely old magenta colored Ford pickup.  It has enough dings and scrapes on it that I don’t have to worry if I toss a log a bit too hard into the bed.  Throwing, stacking and splitting wood has become a type of meditation for me and by necessity, so is using the chainsaw.  My mantra is “One cut at a time, one cut at a time.”  It helps me to slow down which is good since I really like my knees the way they are. 

I spent this summer building an earth sheltered green house.  At an altitude of 6,400 feet, our growing season is almost non-existent.  The growing bed is dug two feet down with a four-foot-deep cold sink which allows the cold air to fall below the growing bed giving the plants more heat.  It has four inches of insulation around the perimeter and up the whole north wall.  The triple wall polycarbonate clear panels just went up.  Since I normally travel during the summer but decided not to during the pandemic, this project was my mental health plan.  

Life at Chateau Letourneau isn’t easy, but the magic of cabin life makes up for the small bouts of misery.  As my neighbor said when I was moving in to this place where ‘year rounders’ are few and far between…”I hope she’s a hardy gal!”