Worlds Collide

I didn’t think it was going to happen. First the weird separation with Matt, and then Covid coming along and ruining any semblance of normal. Financially speaking, we’re in rough waters, although I wouldn’t say shipwrecked. Just pinched as one can get in troubled and interesting times. So at first the cabin wasn’t even open, and then we weren’t sure we could pull it off. So when we decided to go for it, that was when things started to sink in for me.

We are going to the cabin. 

THE cabin. The one place in my whole life that changes but never changes so much that it can’t be instantly recognized. My childhood home away from home. My mother spent her infancy here, and my grandmother. My great grandmother was pregnant with my grandmother when my great grandfather built it, walking along the main road for several miles as he told her ‘it’s just over the next hill because he didn’t want to tell her they had to hoof it around 10 miles from the bus stop to the cabin door. She was unamused and they purchased a car the following year.

There are albums of photos of them sitting on the sidewalk, on the docks, on the beach and near the very same walls we stood beside last week. These memories have been with me from the moment I was born, and grow stronger with each passing year. When my grandmother talked about heaven, she said it looked like the cabin. I’ve come to believe it’s where all Michaels can go when they pass on from this world. Where anyone who feels the magic of the cabin is welcomed after life.

The large oak table that dominates the dining room once belonged to my grandfather, who got it from his in-laws. It sat in their house for several years and my mother sometimes talks about her younger days sitting at it for birthdays. When it came to the cabin, I recall the head of the table as the place of honor. My grandfather sat there, and after his death, my grandmother as the matriarch. Then it passed to my mother. 

I did not announce any of this as I took that seat the first time. All who joined me that week had never seen the ‘head of the table’ before, nor understood it’s personal significance to me. So I watched them eat and tried to remember how my grandfather sat and wondered if he was thinking about bills just as I was. Did my grandmother sit here and imagine what the future branches of family might look like just as I was as well?

So many memories flooded my mind as we drove up for the first time along the gravel road to the front door. My childhood self begging to go swimming, to get my feet in the sand, to just stretch my cramped legs from the two hour trip. As I unlocked the door and let them all inside I wondered if they’d like it. This vintage cabin with it’s sagging boards and bare walls. The odd smell of natural gas and pine trees and fresh water, all combining to assault the nose as soon as you walk in. Would it feel too run down for them?

They seemed to like it, laughing that pictures don’t really do it justice. That much is true, the ceiling is loftier than can be shown in images, and there’s more space than can be described. It’s old-fashioned and full of older furniture and architecture. The flooring is an epoxy nightmare of brightly colored plastic chips that seal in the old asbestos flooring that had been chipping and wearing away for decades. It’s for the best, but the old dull blue floor was prettier. 

Everyone settled in and the kids spent time arranging their rooms just right, sorting out what was going where. And then they ran off into the water to discover Michigan’s most well kept gem of a lake. Brittney had gone crazy with beach toys and floats, there was no shortage of things to play with in the water, or just to float along on. I don’t think I saw any of them stop smiling once.

As I locked up the cabin that night and sent everyone to bed, I remembered those who came before me and wondered if they could see. If they could be proud of me for having brought the little family of my heart with me to show them our special place. We’re they keeping silent witness to their legacy? What could they possibly think?

On Sunday they met my parents, the faded and tired versions of the people who raised me now come to the twilight years. Vision had faded, minds become muddled, and bodies weak with age, they sat and talked and tried to recall names. They played music or swam, and I felt blessed to even have this much of them. They were once so strong and so brazen, fearless and clever. To see them wizened and struggling, and to know that it wasn’t so long ago that they could laugh and catch on with witty conversation hurt. But they lived, and even for a brief time they could meet.

****

The lake seemed to be the most popular point of the week. They took to it, at least during the first half, as quickly as I did. The sand bottom, the calm waves and then freshwater made it feel extra special to stand on the beach and watch them. To join them. I felt as if all my family for generations before me could see them all, and understand my strange legacy that I’m trying to build. 

There were all these little moments scattered throughout. R in his Pikachu onesie, curled up in my lap most mornings, just as I had with my mother. No technology, no real way to tell the age of those involved or what generation. A child in cartoon pajamas, snuggled under a blanket. 

They stood in the kitchen and cooked, they set the same table and then came to it, and were made mine. This is what my heaven will look like. 

We took the truck out one evening, and one by one each kid who wanted to got the chance to drive it. They were jerky and unsure, and I could see some of my siblings in them, peering over the steering wheel. Was that really so long ago? Truth be told, many of my blood ties sat on my dad’s lap as little more than toddlers to steer, and by 15 were driving to the store in the morning with an adult to buy donuts from the old bakery. But that was another world ago, and not even the bakery exists anymore. 

This was an echo in a new form, and it made me happy to be a part of it. The ice cream after was another part. That was the place we went for decades after hunting, and the kids sat on the new sign erected for the gift shop next door. I snapped a photo and already knew that would be one of my favorites. They could have been in the 80s with my older siblings, in the 90s with me. Ageless as everything else remains up there, somehow modern and yet wholly not. 

That’s part of the appeal. Cellphones and bluetooth speakers dot the place, but it still stubbornly remains as it was built with very minor cosmetic change. Is that it’s charm? Is that why it’s so easy to imagine my ancestors looking on? What might they possibly think?

***

I took the downstairs bedroom for the first time in my life. The room where the matriarch always slept. It's lost the status now that Jen and I prefer the upstairs rooms, but for this week, for this time, it was restored. How much like a homecoming this was. How different from every other trip I'd ever taken.

I remember this story I read in grade school where a young girl wakes up to find herself in her mother's body. It's night time in the story and she stops to look at her adult body in the mirror while everyone sleeps, moving her hands and feet to feel their size, the wedding ring flashing on her finger in the moonlight. 

I felt that way, not as if I inhabited my mother's body, but her role. Her place. A man slept in my bed. His children slept upstairs. Their cousins with them. This was my peak, my apex. My opus. The closest I will ever come to my dream. 

For all these feelings and thoughts, they remain tantalizingly out of reach. Always just an inch further than I can stretch. Never quite real, never quite fulfilled. But better than nothing, no? Better than nothing, then.

Years from now, will I be at that table with a new generation? Or will I sit lonely and alone, with only the ghosts of my past dining with me? 

What is family? And more importantly, who is mine?