Growing up with a cabin we visited nearly every weekend, I view my childhood as close to idyllic. Our cabin-life traits included friendship, solitude, self-reliance, and passing the time unhurriedly. At the cabin, it was not out of character to find us taking pleasure in naps. It was a chance to be apart from our usual fast lane work/school life. It is true we may have woken up at 6am to take advantage of water-skiing on the glassy lake, and there were chores like cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood, and cat-napping once or twice a day was a luxury. Our family of 8 spent countless hours together cooking, cleaning, reading, playing Uno and card games like spoons. Occasionally we kids had the opportunity to invite a friend for the weekend, and my parents enjoyed opening our cabin-home to our family friends. Many of my fondest memories center around these weekends, and many of the family traditions I can think of are connected, like Friday night beef stew, learning how to ski, the aforementioned spoons games, and feeding the “swamp monster” rocks. We were able to unplug from the rest of the world, and concentrate on each other.
Now, if together got to be overwhelming, the outdoors was close at hand with the surrounding wood, and there was a lake to explore or just sit and ponder. Since we were more than 6 lake miles from a truck and then time to stores, we had to plan out carefully what we needed, and if things broke down we had to fix it on the spot or make plans to figure out a fix for the future. I gained many skills there, such as how to drive an outboard w/steering handle, how to drive a boat with a steering wheel, how to drive a watercraft when you are pulling skiers or tubers, how to swim, how to make corned beef and cabbage on a wood stove, how to catch and capture a shrew with the help of a dog and a broom, how to use pulleys to move snowmachines from one floor to the second floor, how to chop wood, how to shovel snow so as not to collapse a deck, how to be responsible with your water toys, how to clear a snow berm on a snowmachine(thanks Jade!), how to extract weeds from the intake of a personal water craft(pwc), how to keep your boat in good condition over the years, how to land on an inclined dock and barely get wet while skiing, how to share your friends with others, and many others. I think about my idyllic childhood and how to recreate that for my kids. I do realize you don’t need a cabin to have a great childhood/life, and there were many hard parts to having a cabin/second home I didn’t realize growing up (utilities, taxes, planning, winterizing, wear and tear being near water, no road access, expenses related to boats, pwc, etc.), but oh that cabin-life.
No Comment