Kruger Kids: Our last trip to the cabin

My parents are selling their cabin. The sale closes in a few weeks, so we took our last trip up there to enjoy the spot, claim our stuff, and remember the fun times we had up there.

The whole family (minus Kelly, Eric, & Joshua) came up Friday night for dinner.

It was fun to see everyone and reminisce about the cabin, but once everyone left, I had a full-on-ugly-cry-meltdown.

This cabin isn't just a place where we used to go on vacation, every piece of it holds a memory of our family, most of which revolve around my Mom. We're not just selling an amazing vacation spot, we're selling my Mom's dream cabin, every piece of this place has her fingerprint on it. The walls are covered with her quilts, she hand-picked the furniture, nothing went into this cabin that she didn't personally choose (often after searching for & re-finishing it).

So, forgive me, this is going to be long, but I want to memorialize a few memories of the cabin:

Back before the cabin was built, we used to cross-country ski up to "the property" where we'd sit in a snow bank and eat our lunch, before we skied back out. For several years there was back & forth discussion on if we'd actually build something on the property. As kids, we were voting for a cabin, but we would have been happy with a picnic table and a bathroom.

The cabin was built in Canada, they then bring the logs down on a flat-bed truck and assemble the whole thing in one day.

It turns out that the logs are the easy part, we (Dad) then spent months working with sub-contractors to get the interior walls, plumbing, and electric installed.

The first time we stayed up at the cabin, we came up after the toilet was installed, but before most of the electricity was installed.

So, we painted most of the rooms in the evening, using a shop light plugged into the one outlet on the main floor. The next morning, we woke up to discover what a terrible job we'd done, with giant spots that we'd missed in the middle of the wall.

The next year, we had to go back & do it all over again too, since the log walls shrink as they dry out, we had to go back & paint all the rounded spots where the drywall had been covered with log the summer prior.

We spilled nearly an entire gallon of paint on the sub-flooring in the hallway outside the kitchen.

My Mom & I spent months looking for this corner cabinet. For whatever reason, my Mom had an idea that the cabin needed a RED corner cabinet by the kitchen table. We searched every antiques shop we could find. Somehow (probably through the antiquities underground) my Mom heard about a corner cabinet in a shop in Puyallup, so we made the trek down to find this cabinet. We took it home & started to paint. Mom had a very specific color in-mind for the red that she wanted on this cabinet. Unfortunately, the color that she wanted was only available in a really expensive exterior paint that she was't willing to pay for, so we bought a regular indoor paint in the deepest red they offered. After three or four coats of the interior paint, the cabinet was still pink and Mom went & bought the expensive stuff.

One of the first times Keith came up to the cabin, he picked me up at the airport after my trip to Hong Kong & Sri Lanka, and we went straight up to the cabin. I slept the entire weekend and Keith ended up hanging out with my family the whole weekend without me.

We would sit around the table for hours, drinking hot chocolate, and playing Nerts or backgammon.

For the first year, it seemed like we spent every waking moment up at the cabin working. We sanded & painted every one of the blue pieces of trim around all the windows, doors, ceiling, and floors. It was over 200 pieces of trim, not to mention the corresponding green trim on the outside.

We took the Jr & Sr High kids up to the cabin several times. The first time we took them, we got about 8 inches of snow over the weekend. We found that if you kicked the tree, the very top would wobble, and then an avalanche of snow would come dumping down on your head, it was pretty awesome (at least you'd think so if you were 13). The snow was intense, it took us over three hours to get home (once we finally made it to the road).

The Pink Room was my room. I picked the color scheme, Mom made me the quilt, and I painstakingly stenciled the wall decorations.

Of course, since this was the only room in the cabin with a queen bed (except my Parent's room), I very seldom actually got to sleep there. If anyone who was older, married, or with children came with us, I gave up my room & ended up in the loft.

I also did this stencil in Jared's bunk room. Being a bunk room, he actually got to sleep in his room most of the time.

Mom took a class to make this double-wedding-ring quilt. I'm not sure if she was planning to make a full quilt at some point, but I know that she found it so frustrating that she quit after making these four circles and never tried that pattern again.

The fireplace was always a focal point of the cabin. When Erica would come, she'd wrap herself in a dozen blankets, fill the fireplace with as much wood as it would hold, and sit eating popcorn, as we all waited to see if the fireplace would melt from the heat. This seemed to be a popular thing, many, many people seemed determined to fill the fireplace as full as they could, just to watch the temperature rise. There were times you couldn't see the wood for the flames.

We would sit around the table for hours, drinking hot chocolate, and playing Nerts or backgammon.

I can't remember if Mom embroidered this tree or not, I think she found it at a garage sale, but she did make the frame. I got to help with the "distressing" of the wood, it's pretty fun to whack raw wood with a hammer for no real reason. Mom didn't really love this picture, but she saw one like it in the background of a TV show once, so she decided to keep it around. It was on TV, so it's got to be good, right?

This cabin has the most well-stocked pantry you could ever imagine. The original idea was that we would stock the cabin over the summer, and then in the winter we could come up and only need to bring a few fresh items. Mom was also afraid we'd someday be snowed-in for weeks, so we needed enough food that we wouldn't starve. Neither of these ever really came to pass, but Mom kept the pantry over-stocked just in-case.

After Keith & I were engaged, we went up to the cabin for New Years. Dianne, Eric, Jeff, & Elsa also came. Baby Nora screamed her little head off the entire time we were up there. It's a wonder Keith didn't take his ring back & high-tail it out of there.

Doug & Kelly got engaged at the bridge by the lake.

Mom had a very strict “chaperone” rule for the cabin. In-order to go up there, you had to have at least one married person present. It was a totally arbitrary rule that applied across all ages and groups of people. So, when Dianne was 30 and single, she had to have at least one married person present; said person could have been my friend who got married at 18, but married is married. As we got older we fought this one tooth & nail, but her response always was "What will the neighbors think??!?!" Because of course, I'm sure that the neighbors were all doing a ring-check as we came in.

Darcy loved the water, but just to wade in, he was too chicken to swim. Once, in the summer, I threw him in the pond to cool off. Apparently, I threw him in a little too far, by the time he climbed back onto the shore he'd melted into jello.

When covered with snow, the deck was the perfect jumping-off place into the snow.

For the first few years, we bought a salt-lick to keep under this tree for the deers. I don't think we ever saw a deer, but I'm sure they loved it.

Dad is selling the cabin with most of the furnishings included. So, we spent part of the weekend deciding what was important enough to keep and what we would be leaving behind.

You know that scene in the 2nd "Father of the Bride" movie where they are moving out of their home? Everyone is taking mementos, Annie is saving leaves from the tree in the back yard, and her little brother takes the doorknob from his bedroom? It's really sweet, but kind of pathetic at the same time? That was my weekend. Trying to decide what we could actually use, while wanting to keep everything since each piece of furniture & decoration has some memories attached.

This lamp used to be in our living room at home. Mom took the opportunity to take some of her less-favored items up to the cabin & re-do the living room as well.

This lamp was also a long-time part of our family room. It seems weird to know that we won't have it any more, but it's not really all that attractive and no one really wants it in their home.

The curtains on the main floor originated in Dianne's apartment. She bought the fabric to make curtains for her apartment, Mom liked them so much she bought the same fabric to make curtains for the cabin. But, she couldn't find enough fabric at the store for all the windows, so she stole Dianne's curtains as well.

Mom made this quilt especially for the cabin:

I think she started it as a Christmas quilt block for her City Stitchers quilt group Christmas Block exchange. She liked the pattern so much, she ended up making an entire quilt for the cabin. This whole piece is appliqué, which means that every single piece of fabric was hand-sewn on to the quilt.

These crockery jars were a constant on the windowsill by the dining room table. They held: regular M&M's, peanut M&M's and banana chips, respectively.

Mom could not resist blue glass, anytime she saw anything in an antique shop in blue glass, she had to buy it for the cabin. Most of them were clustered around the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom.

This is our "new" propane tank. The original tank was about three times as large. Mom wanted to paint it. We were supposed to paint it a dark color so that it would blend into the forrest (our original idea was to paint it like a giant Tylenol gel-cap). So, we painted it as a forest green submarine, complete with port-holes. Each member of the family had a port hole, including Erica and the cats.

I know that it's great for my Dad that the buyers are taking the furniture, and I certainly don't want the bother of packing the place up & finding a new home for it, but it is sad to leave so many memories behind. For the new owners, this is just stuff, but for our family every piece is a part of our family.

Before we headed home Sunday afternoon, we wandered over to Heli's Pond.

This "pond" was originally the rock quarry created when we re-did all the roads in the community. It's named after the wife of the original owner/developer of the area.

Parker got to find his first ever GeoCache. Granted, we were cheating, since we've found it before & didn't even have our GPS with us.

But he found it pretty cool.

My Dad has been talking about selling the cabin for years. We never really thought he'd do it. In the past year or so, we've been more encouraging of the idea, I know that the cabin has been a huge burden for him with all the repairs and maintenance needed, they never go up to enjoy the place. But now that we're preparing to lose the place, it's striking pretty hard.

It's not just that we're losing a rather awesome vacation spot, right at the time of our lives when we could start using it the most, it's that we're losing one more piece of my Mom. My Dad hates clutter, so every time I come over to their house, it seems like he's taken down another photo, or boxed up another knick knack from the shelves. I can't blame him for it, 45 years worth of clutter can drive a person insane. But, each of those knick knacks, and the 40 different photos on the mantle are all a piece of my Mom, something that she found precious enough to display year-round. I feel like we've already lost her, and now we're slowly losing all the things she loved. The cabin is just one more. My kids won't ever know my Mom the way that I did, and without the cabin, I have one less thing to point to when I try to describe her.