Thus spake My Dear Uncle Harry as he contemplated how to renovate the loverly Old Cabin that was bequeathed by my long-departed grandparents to his dear wife, my aunt Bubs, without ruining the character of the place. And yes, I meant to write Bubs. No, that’s not the name that’s on her birth certificate but it works, in fact, it’s especially good for a blahg pseudonym. Anyway, I doubt that back when My Dear Uncle Harry was growing up in the Bronx, he ever dreamed he would be saddled with own a log cabin on Lake Superior. And it is a real log cabin, not one of those cheap (or prob’ly not cheap) fakey looking things that are available these days, dry-wall on the inside et al. Built in 1924, this one has real logs with some kind of cementy-type stuff chinked in between them to keep the nice gentle Lake Superior breezes gales out. Roight. It can get pretty dern cold in there if you aren’t handy at keeping a huge faaaarrrr going in the big stone fireplace.

Anyway, there is a sleeping porch in the front. It faces Gitchee Gumee and it has always been a wonderful place to sleep. In the summer, anyway. I know this because I spent the first six summers of my life sleeping there. It had windows all the way around and you could flip them up and hook them open when it was hot. When a storm blew up in the middle of the night, someone — most likely an adult, and *sometimes* my now long-dead great-aunt Elizabeth — would get up and hurriedly shut the windows so all us little chickies wouldn’t get wet. The cabin has been settling over the years and even though it isn’t used in the winter, the snow that was drifting in through the front door was getting to be a problem, among other issues. So My Dear Uncle Harry did some reconstruction. It isn’t the same but it’s an 84-year-old cabin, fer kee-reist, and I like what’s been done to it.

The pics below are the original cabin front porch, the Old Cabin “charter”, and the new front porch. Click on the gallery pics to see larger versions. Thank you Harry! Good jorb!

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