I was gonna kvetch about the new FENCE that the school district put up in the schoolyard I walk through EVERY DAMN DAY. But I won’t. At least not today. Because this photoooo appeared in my facebook feed and I am shamelessly stealing it from Mouse and posting it here. I don’t even care if the folks in it don’t want to have their faces plastered all over them thar tubes. They are already out there on facebook. And I think they are all beautiful!

This is the “hole” in front of the Old Cabin. It is a loverly place to sit at 0-beer-30 on a cold, windy day. Like today. These folks are my “baby” cuzzint npJane, a fellow Planet A2 denizen, my cuzzint Jay (npJane’s sis), Jay’s loverly husband Carl (they are Seattle folks), and, oh there’s the dern GG who gets toooooo much vacation time, not to mention he’s one o’ them thar sequester-type folks*. I have sat in the hole many a time with npJane and sometimes others but (all too often) by myself. They have BEER there and The Commander’s old basket, which nowadays permanently contains a bottle opener.

This doesn’t look much like a hole but, when I was a beach urchin, this spot was a actually a hole, a deep sand hole. Rumor has it that it was *possibly* created by a small tornado during a legendary storm back before I was born. I do not remember this of course but throughout my life, The Commander and others would refer to That Storm back in 1950 where the water came over the bank and up the road (?). Of course, these are the kinds of things I wish I could still talk to my parents and Radical Betty about. But when I was hanging out with The Comm at FV or the damn hoosegow, believe me, between the food and transportation complaints and later on the pain (sigh….) the last thing I could think of to ask her about was That Storm. Did it include a tornado or not? I do not know. Did anyone ever know? Looking back, it sure looked like something a tornado would do. Tornadoes are rare in the yooperland but they do occur. Maybe a small funnel cloud touched down.

Anyway, this hole represented major damage to the bank in front of the Old Cabin and my grandparents prevented further erosion by stacking up a bunch of pulp logs (they used to float in to the beach from Canadian paper mills) across the front. Us kids had so much fun down in that sand hole. It’s kind of hard to describe but I can still remember hanging about at the edges of the hole where little plant roots hung over the side making perfect little homes for imaginary beasties of any sort.

As you can see, it isn’t a sand hole anymore. After more years than I am strong enough to mention at the moment, the typical woods and bank vegetation have taken over again. Nevertheless, this area remains a protected spot.

*I made light of the whole sequester thing and I can do that because it does not have much of an effect on our overall lifestyle, which is pretty humble except for those few moments it’s not, like when I buy Copper River salmon at the Plum Market… We are okay because we both have decent incomes and our children are grown up and not dependent upon us (although I love love love to buy them stuff). But the sequester is extremely difficult for many people, including (but not limited to) young families who are struggling to raise children on small incomes. Like we once did. Been there, done that. But I won’t discuss the sequester tonight. Or maybe ever.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 4th, 2013 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.