threatening to quit on me, but I talked her through it, coaxing and chiding her until she came to a relieved stop in the cabin's mossed-over driveway. Could be that she doesn't want to start again when the time comes to leave, but I'm not worried about that. If anything, the fact that Monday night could roll around and I end up stuck here is far from a tragedy. I could stay here forever, and that would be just fine with me.
It's still early enough, maybe eleven, and the day stretches out before me, full of promise. Outside, the rain hisses like the static from an old radio, the volume turned right up. With a fire crackling happily in the little wood burner Dad brought up here for me a couple of years ago, the little cabin's toasty warm and cozy; it feels like a sanctuary of sorts. One I'm always loathed to give up.
When the girls used to come here with me, things were very different. I didn't really give a shit about the cabin. I didn't pay attention to the small details of the place. I only cared about the partying. The booze we could steal away from our parents. The occasional bottle of pills Zen lifted from her Mom's purse. Diving into the lake in the middle of the night, high, drowsy and languid on Percocet, everything feeling like a dream, the black, inky water over our heads, laughing like giddy ghosts, clinging to each other on the pebbly shore. I'd sleep like the dead, not caring where I rested my head because that was unimportant.
Now, I see the scuffs and the scratches of the place and think of them as lines that mark the face of a familiar old friend, bringing them to life. The collection of small, colorful steel wind-up birds perched on the bookshelves, hiding in the corners of closets, at the back of kitchen cabinets, fallen down the back of the furniture, are totems of my childhood, reminding me of a time when I used to delight in the way they seemed to move of their own accord overnight. I would wake to find them relocated, convinced that they came to life while I slept and fluttered all over the cabin on silent wings, communing with one another in the dark. It was Mom who'd moved them, of course. She'd place them around my bowl at the breakfast table, as if they'd gathered there, waiting for me to drag my lazy butt from my bed, but the sunrise had rendered them inanimate again before I managed to show my face.
The throws that hang over the backs of chairs and at the ends of the beds are old and a little holey, but surprisingly spared by the moths. They have a smell all of their own, a little musty and dusty but comforting—the smell of faded sunlight and summers past, captured in the crocheted pinks and blues, and browns and oranges of the rough wool.
The creaky floorboards have been worn raw in some places, the varnish rubbed away by the footfall of too many sock feet, and the paint on the window sills is chipped and peeling in places. The stove in the kitchen is temperamental and likes to cut out halfway through boiling the water inside the old, dented copper kettle, and sometimes the pipes rattle and judder mid-shower, but there isn’t one single detail, one single flaw that I don’t cherish about this place. It’s perfect in its imperfection, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My favorite part of the cabin, though, is the deck. Out of the front bedroom, the raised wooden platform is at least six hundred square feet and seems to be both suspended amongst the trees and reaching into the water at the same time. I used to spend most of my time at the cabin sprawled out on the deck when I was a kid. I can close my eyes and still feel the rough wood beneath my belly, the sun beating down on my back, as I laid on my stomach, flipping the pages of book after book, the weeks of summer vacations passing by in a lazy, hazy blur.
I stand in the kitchen now, patiently waiting for my tea to steep, steam curling up from my grandpa's old mug, and I plan out my day: first, guitar. Then, couch time with the newest Orla Stanislavski book. Later, probably around three, I unashamedly schedule in