Chapter 2 - Susan and I Bought the Cabin When Emily Was Six
The cabin cost us $91,000 in 1994.
Which felt like approximately nine million dollars at the time.
Susan was thirty-three.
I was thirty-five.
Emily had just finished kindergarten.
We already had a house outside Madison with a mortgage we could barely tolerate.
Buying lake property was irrational.
Susan wanted it anyway.
Her parents had rented cottages when she was little.
She believed summer required:
water,
mosquito bites,
cheap popsicles,
children falling asleep exhausted.
I thought summer required:
air conditioning.
She won.
The original cabin was barely fourteen hundred square feet.
Two bedrooms.
One bathroom.
Tiny kitchen.
A screen porch that leaked whenever rain came from the west.
But it sat on seventy feet of shoreline.
The first night, Susan opened a bottle of grocery-store champagne.
Emily drank apple juice from a plastic cup.
Susan raised her glass.
“This stays in the family.”
I said:
“We haven’t made the first payment.”
She kicked me under the table.
Over the next twenty years, the cabin became where our family remembered itself.
Emily learned to swim there.
Broke her wrist falling from the dock at eleven.
Brought her first serious boyfriend at twenty.
Not Mark.
Thank God.
Susan turned fifty there.
My father spent his final Fourth of July there.
Then Susan got sick.
Ovarian cancer.
Stage III.
Surgery.
Chemotherapy.
Remission.
Recurrence.
During her first remission, she insisted on replacing the rotten deck herself.
She made it about:
nine boards
before admitting she needed help.
Mark Dawson helped finish it.
That mattered.
Emily had married Mark two years earlier.
He was steady then.
Worked as a commercial electrician.
Quiet.
Liked fishing.
Loved Emily.
And unlike several men our daughter dated before him, Mark did not treat her parents’ cabin like:
free resort property.
At first.
He asked:
before bringing friends,
before borrowing the boat,
before staying when we were not there.
His father Ron came occasionally.
Ron owned a small HVAC company and knew enough about houses to be helpful in dangerous ways.
He could fix almost anything.
Also believed a person who fixed things earned:
authority.
When our old mini-split died, Ron installed a replacement at his cost.
I tried to pay.
He refused.
“Family.”
Susan hugged him.
May you like
That word began doing more and more work.
---
