Once an Iowan, Always an Iowan

I have been going to the lake for about as long as I can remember. Okay, longer than I can remember. My parents met at the lake. Their first date was a sailboat ride on this sailboat. Both of my sets of grandparents lived at the lake, only .7 miles apart. I spent the summers of my childhood tramping back and forth between “Grandma’s” (my mom’s side) and “Grandpa’s” (my dad’s side, distinguished from Grandma’s because there was no Grandma there anymore). More of my memories are located at the lake than anywhere else.

In 1992, my parents bought this cabin. They were tired of bunking at my Grandpa’s house and thinking ahead to a time that they might want to build a retirement home. It was a great cabin — one big kitchen/livingroom/diningroom, a tiny bathroom, and three tiny bedrooms. Okay, two of the bedrooms were small (smaller than Tim’s room, for those of you who have seen it) and one was tiny. Really tiny. Since my sister was also pretty tiny at the time, she got stuck with that room.

Actually, my dad had spent time in the very same cabin when he was a kid living at the lake. He lived about a tenth of a mile up the beach, and his best friend Nate lived in what was to become our cabin. Or is it that our cabin is the one in which Nate used to live? I don’t know.

We spent 12 amazing summers in the cabin. We used it well. It weathered the flood of 1993 (when the water rose to the bottom of the concrete stairway in this photo) with hardly a scratch. During high school, it repeatedly housed 5 or 6 of my friends (in addition to my parents, my sister, and sundry other folk who happened to be in the area). It survived the summer after my freshman year in college when Hunter, Andrew, and I lived there and never slept. It made it through the next summer when Amy, Angie, and I all got jobs at the lake and lived “Life in the Fast Lane”. It survived my sister’s parties and my husband’s cooking. It was the command center for my wedding. It survived a lot.

But it isn’t going to survive the next week. The retirement home my parents have been talking about for 12 years is about to materialize, and that means that the cabin has got to go. It’s going to be bulldozed on Monday.

In fact, when I was there this weekend, the demolition had already begun. The contractor wanted to get some of the landscape done before he actually rips down the cabin, so they did this and this.

Whoa.

Intellectually, I know that the new house is going to be more of the same, except better. It will have more than one bathroom. It will have enough beds so that my sister and her boyfriend and Will and I and my parents can actually sleep there. It will have air conditioning. It won’t have a washing machine in the kitchen and a dryer in the garage. It will have a heater. It will be great. And it will still have the same dock. And boats. And deck. And trees. And lake.

But it’s hard. I guess I put a lot of myself into places. Places like Iowa. And Olaf. And most of all, the Lake. So many of my most wonderful and beautiful memories are housed in that crappy, run-down, falling-apart cabin. I know those memories will still exist when the cabin is gone, or at least I hope so.

In the same year that my parents bought our cabin, my grandparents ripped down their cabin (though they called it “the cottage”) and build their retirement home. And though I wish I could say I still remember that cabin vividly, I can only catch glimpses of it in photos and in dreams. It was a great cabin with a loft and the greatest screened-in porch ever. But beyond that it is fuzzy and generalized in my memory.

I really hope that I can retain my memories of our cabin longer than I retained the ones of Grandma’s. I hope I can tell my kids about the cabin. I hope that I can make them understand the beauty of the many many summer nights I spent there.

Here’s to the cabin. Cabin, I’ll miss you.