Written @ 9:10 a.m. on 2007-08-29
My Very Own Decrepit Cabin
All kinds of things happening. My parents have a cabin in the adirondacks that is little more than a shack. My dad is extreme-nature man, and we spent many weekends there chopping wood, shovelling snow, and hauling water up the dirt road in milk jugs. In the winter you can see a lake at the bottom of the hill, but in summer there are too many leafy trees obstructing the view of the water. I learned to hike, canoe, ski and play some kick-ass scrabble there.
A lot of family insanity happened there, too, and sometimes as a kid I thought that it was a prison to be there, away from my friends, and stuck in a small space with my often unhappily drunk parents.
My dad got a motorcycle, and my mom started working on the weekends, they both got older and lost interest in the extreme-nature livestyle. Sometimes you just want to turn a spigot, and have hot water come out. I understand.
Last weekend I went up to the cabin with my parents, and my sister, and the girls. We all squished into two bedrooms, and celebrated N.'s and my mom's birthday. No one had been there in years, and it made me very sad. There is an inch of black slime on everything in the cabin. The metal cabinets are rusting. The linoleum floor needs to be replaced. There is a sagging board in the floor of the outhouse and I am afraid, with my new found girth, I will be the one to fall in. There was a mouse in the mousetrap, which I can handle, but it had been given the opportunity to decay for several months.
Dead mouse, gross...pieces of rotten decayed mouse, vomit.
Just like a cheezy horror movie, the spiders had taken over and everything was deeply covered in years of sticky spider webs. The paint is peeling. The wood under the paint is rotting. Mother nature is reclaiming her woods, and our little excuse for a house in no challenge to her.
So, I got to cleaning. My mother has put knicknacks on every surface, which are cute, but make the place unliveable. You can't put anything down because there is a cute little ceramic squirrel and a rustic candleholder on every flat plane. Gah!
I had to have a talk with my dad,"What are you going to do with the camp?"
"I don't know,"he said,"Do you think we should sell it?"
"Well, it certainly would be like a death in the family to sell the place, but there are dozens of rotten, abandoned camps here that people have kept for sentimental reasons, yet don't have the time to use. It would be better to sell it, and have someone enjoy it. You haven't done a lick of maintanence in five years, I can see, and in five more there will be nothing worth salvaging."
"Well, I got sick here last year,"said Dad,"and the problem is there are no medical services here. I rode an hour in an ambulance to a cut-rate hospital. And your mom has her eye treatments, who would she go to up here? This is no place for old people. I'm just holding on to it for you children, now."
"I would live here if I couild, and pay you rent."
"You wouldh't have to pay rent. I'd be happy if you lived here. It's a ton of work to stay alive here in the winter, though. Remember, no one plows the road in winter, you have to walk in with your groceries on sleds."
So, long story short, I just inherited a cabin. SWEET! I want to move there. I want to see if I can survive a winter in the coldest place in New York State. There you go, Google fans, see if you can find where the record for cold temps is...that is where the cabin is. My ex has washed his hands of us, mostly, but of course, I imagine, would make it very difficult for us to move.
Then there is B. B. who's roots here in PA go all the way to the center of the earth. He would not be able to come with us. He doesn't do camping. I had a looooooong discussion about it with him yesterday. About my dreams, and how they are always put off because of my obligations to other people. College, put off for my ex. Tattooing, put off for the girls. Rafting, put off because of my ex. I WANT TO LIVE AT MY CABIN GOD DAMN IT AND I DON"T WANT AMY MORE PEOPLE HOLDING ME BACK FROM WHAT I WANT!
B, being the impractical angel that he is, says,"I love you. I want to spend my life with you. If I have to spend part of the week in PA and part of the week in NY, then I will do it. I will never stand in the way of your dreams. I am not your ex. I AM NOT YOUR EX! I AM NOT YOUR EX!"
It is very hard for me to throw a proper fit with someone like him around. He reminded me that I get off on angst, and I'm never happy unless I can be tragic, and that we are talking about a year or two down the road anyways, so WTF?!
He's always right.
What do you think about, in a year or two, moving to the adirondacks? Awesome, right????