My grandpa had purchased the land in the late 1940s, and he, over the years with the help of parishioners, neighbors, and his dedicated family, quietly built a home.
First they built the original part, then the old part, then the new part, then finally the renovated new part. As is often the case, the good things stay around because something about them is worth renovating.
That cabin housed more than I can name: every sermon my grandpa wrote and book he read, the couch on which I slept for six weeks every summer for 18 years, almost everything my father owned. I wept in my brother's arms the day we found out. The immensity of my grief even still cannot be named.
And yet, admittedly, it seems silly to grieve so deeply the loss of this place. After all, no one died.
But life was lost.
The precious life I shared only with my brother, my dad, my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents was housed in the blue earthenware coffee mugs, the sage green stove, the butterfly wallpaper, and knotted wood panels of the old part's loft.
The brown shag carpet on which Erik and I made card castles on hot summer nights, the porch where we hung lake-drenched suits, and the table where Grandma Leora last served creamed chicken on toast - those things of which I can't post pictures - all gone in a matter of hours, consumed by fire that first raged then quietly smoldered through the better part of two days.
But like the charred exterior panels and twisted steel frames, there is rich beauty in this rubble.
Maybe it's the beginning of a more robust appreciation of what we had.
Or what I still have.
Or maybe it's the possibility of something new. Whatever it is, I am so thankful for my family, friends, and the rich memories of such a cherished, dear place. The cabin is already becoming a story of our past, a precious myth so much like the other ones I inherited from Aanestads before me. And so I live into this new era, post-cabin, as the one telling the stories, wiping away tears, and wrestling with bitter-sweet longing for a time and place that once was but no longer is.
