I earned my pay today and that’s about all you wanna know. So we’ll do some historical stuff instead. My cuzzint commented yesterday that her family (who owns the Old Cabin now) recovered an old bench with some of that leather. I spent the first six summers of my life in the Old Cabin. In my VERY FIRST summer, when I was six months old, I THINK all of my grandparents’ children (4) and THEIR children stayed at the Old Cabin (except WE may have just visited from town).

The reason I think that might be true is that my uncle Don was a doc in Sault Ste. Siberia and I remember him answering a phone ringing at the Old Cabin. He had to have a phone. He and his family were in the process of building their own cabin that summer and none of the rest of us had phones until decades later. I have exactly TWO memories of my first summer there, before I was a year old. One was hearing the susurration of the pine trees in the persistent onshore breeze northwest wind as my parents drove down the road to the cabin with me lying untethered in the back seat. The other is of the phone ringing in the Old Cabin chitchen and my uncle answering it. Yes I do have early memories, as vague and fleeting as they are.

For the next bunch of summers, we stayed at the Old Cabin with the rest of our cousins, having fun and fighting like siblings. I have two female cousins who were born the same year as I was so maybe you can imagine.

We built our own little rustic place next door when I was six and Radical Betty and Dcuk built an all-weather house when he retaaaarrred from his military career. MANY years later (and quite a few ago now), here is the faaarplace at the Old Cabin. I hope these folks are okay with me posting this pic. They are members of G4, my grandparents’ great-grandchildren, two brothers (my cousin Pooh’s children) and their second cousin (one of my daughters). How many of you GREW UP knowing your second cousins?

I was thinking that whoever took that pic cut off the top of the hooked rug up above the faaarplace. But then I found this pic of that rug. My great aunt Elizabeth (my grandaddy’s sister, who never married) bought this and I know the story but I can’t remember the details for now. My favorite memory of Elizabeth is once when a bunch of us little cousins were sleeping on the front porch and a big thunderstorm rolled through. She comforted us by telling us it was just the “gods” (Thor, I think she said) rolling bowling balls around.

So here’s the other side of that big old faaarplace.

And here’s a pic of the place in the winter. I was puzzling over this a bit. Who took it and when, etc.? Then I realized it looked like a scanned SLIDE. I am all for getting rid of crappy pics but not this one! It is what it is and that’s what snow does on that beach.

So, my dad created this birch bark scroll to document when his dad built the Old Cabin. 1924. Three years short of 100 years ago. How many people have been able to hang on to family land for that many years? I mean people who aren’t trillionaires.

As I hinted at earlier, my branch of the family does not own any part of the Old Cabin any more. We built our own rustic little cabin when I was six. I have always been happy about that. It was soooo much fun to watch our little shack get built and I always LOVED being there in the summer.

My grandparents and my aunts and their families still spent summers at the Old Cabin. We ran back and forth like crazy banging in through the door (no knock policy). Eventually, through land divisions, the Old Cabin ended up in the hands of my [late] aunt Bubs and My Dear Uncle Harry.

We STILL bang back and forth into each others’ cabins without knocking. Well, at least in non-pandemic times. And (in non-pandemic times) I have to tell my cousins’ wonderful children over and over that YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOCK!

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