A CABIN IN THE WOODS
Though it was earlier than previous yearly spring visits to our cabin, Rod and I were both too impatient to wait any longer to make that visit. The lovely thing now is that we are sooo much closer, a mere 4 hrs drive away, vs the 24 hrs it would take when we were living in southern California. We had little to pack, we just threw a few things in the pickup, pretty much spur of the moment, and headed out last Friday afternoon. Rod was sure it was too early and that winters snow would prevent access to our cabin, but we were both happy to see such was not the case. Leastways, not the entire drive there, not up the grade, and not through little historic Molson, nor the last mile of the main highway past the lake. Once we set off on the private drive to our particular property however we both felt the beginnings of some qualms as, though mostly melted and muddy, the road did still have some ice and snow patches. As we neared our private drive we soon faced a driveway heavily laden with a good 2 feet of frozen snow, the suns warmth blocked by the tall, thick evergreens that line our drive. Barrelling through it in our 4 X4 was not a problem but we knew it might be a problem when it was time to drive back up it. As always, click once on these pictures, then click on it again, for a full pg close up. Much nicer!
We spent the next three days just enjoying our retreat. Our lazy mornings, awakening only when the sun came in the bedroom window, consisted of lingering over coffee for hours as we read books and magazines or the local Oroville newspaper we’d picked up, followed by long, relaxed breakfasts as we’d watch the Canada Geese strut and honk on the still mostly ice covered lake. It was wonderful to observe ‘our’ American eagles glide slowly across the sky, swooping down to land on the ice and nearby fir trees. I have to admit we’ve staked a rather proprietory claim to them, calling them ‘our’ eagles, lol, however I’m sure other residents in the area have done the same. We saw 3 this trip and are eager to spend more time at our cabin this spring and summer to see if the ‘whole family’, 5 or 6 of them at last years count, are still around.
When it came time to make our leave Rod took a good run at the hillside driveway. As we feared, we made it about 10 ft up the ‘grade’ before becoming highgrounded on the hard packed frozen snow! An hour of shoveling later, and another two botched attempts, followed by more snow shoveling, found me out ‘scouting’ another exit possibility as Rod continued to shovel the truck free of its snowy confines. Happily, phew, the property next to us gets more sun throughout the day so their driveway WAS clear, and we were able to cross down, over and up the rolling terrain to that driveway with no problems and were soon on our way.
Its hard in some ways, to explain the way we both feel when we visit our cabin. But I’ll try. All I know is there is no feeling quite like it. There is a feeling of ‘home’, of safety, privacy and utter peace that settles over us whenever we are there. I know it HAS to have something to do with the past many years journey we have been on. With the selling of our longtime family home in our little community, as our ‘prison journey’ began, the home we’d lived in for all our married life, raised our children in, and expected to remain in probably a good part of our ‘golden’ years, after ours sons imposed twelve and a half years sentence, and the beginning of a long odyssey in California, I recall the feeling of suddenly, alarmingly, being set adrift on an unpredictable, unknown, often wild and stormy sea. So much uncertainty lay ahead, that element of fear that comes with the unknown, wondering what the next years held for us all, for our young son in particular.
Holding firm in the belief we’d get through it together, I suppose through it all, the Cabin remained our last standing vestige of home, our sanctuary if you will. That no matter what else befell us, no matter what else lay ahead on our seemingly perilous path, our cabin in its remote setting, remained our “constant”, the one place we could and would return to, spring and fall, without fail, that offered peace and a place to rest and renew, our spirits, our very souls. Even our pictures and the recounting of our every visit to Corey seemed to bestow a discernable calm and peace upon him. He was always excited at our making those trips ‘home’, and the stories we’d have to impart once back and settled into our visiting room chairs.
Despite feeling immense gratitude for the lovely little white bungalow we felt so incredibly fortunate to have found and rented in Taft for the first five years, just a short ten minute drive to visit our son, and despite the beautiful home we bought and enjoyed in Bakersfield, not much further away, maybe a 40 minute drive to the Camp, for the last few years of the journey, neither gave us the same feeling of ‘home’ our cabin did. Even I must say, in our new and wonderful home here in Spokane, where we have finally landed, to resettle, to begin the next chapter on our life’s journey, I doubt we’ll ever feel here the same as we feel while at our little cabin in the woods.
"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer". ~Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
