A Place We've Gone Every Year for the Last Eighteen Years

We are here for less than fifteen minutes and already a handful of kids are running out the back door with fishing rods, and three teens are sprawled out on sofas, reading books. Somehow, another has already fallen asleep.

All around us the kids are shouting and playing, and I can hear someone squeal and jump into the lake at the bottom of the hill. The youngest of us, a 3-year-old named Finley, giggles and runs from a cousin who is chasing her.

If this year has taught me anything, it’s that life goes on, even in the face of impossible circumstances.

* * * * *

The kids fish off the pier or run with homemade spears through the woods or swim out to the middle of the lake, arriving at the floating dock as if they’ve found refuge in some deserted island. The morning sun sifts through the trees and shines off the water, and the birds sing from the shadows. Wasps float like dandelion seeds around the eaves, their weak shadows circling on the deck.

The cabin is situated in a kind of bowl, just uphill from the lake, so that when I sit on the back swing, I can hear what’s going on in the house and also hear the shrieks of children catching fish or chasing each other in kayaks. Clouds are captured here, in this depression, and blue sky snags on the trees. Memories from our eighteen summer trips to the cabin rise like a mist in the morning air. Close my eyes and it could be a hot July week from any of the last ten years. Or fifteen.

* * * * *

The days always start slow as people emerge one-by-one from the bedrooms, waking to the smell of breakfast my mom has made: pancakes or French toast or eggs, over-medium. Teenagers are in bed until 10 or 11. We allow the weather to dictate the middle of the day: swimming in the lake or pickleball in the driveway or, on rainy days, movies in the basement. Finally, dinner, singing the prayer together, the chaos and chatter of 25 people eating and laughing and reliving the highlights of each day.

In the evening, a fire in the firepit, s’mores, and bedtime for the younger kids, the announcement of which is greeted with the protests of someone unjustly convicted of some crime they don’t recall committing. Eventually, parents slowly creep out of bedrooms that now hold sleeping children, and there are games until midnight, laughing so hard our insides hurt. Lucy playing guitar quietly in the shadows of the room. Falling into bed, exhausted, happy.

* * * * *

So much has changed over the years. Those little toddlers we used to wrangle into their cribs every night are now cousins in their late teens and 20s, talking about what they’ll do this fall: run their own businesses, head to college, move to New York City. Finish high school. Get their driver’s license. And there’s a whole host of kids that didn’t even exist back then, new universes wandering the world who will have their own lives, their own traditions, hopefully gathering with their own grandchildren long after I’m gone, these cabin days a distant memory.

I was 29 the first year my family came to the cabin. Now I’m 46. Maile and I had two kids that year—now we have six. I was knee-deep in the middle of a sales job that was giving me anxiety and digestive issues. Now I spend my days writing, something that felt like a pipe dream.

Nearly two decades have passed. Life is almost unrecognizable. The potential for life to change beyond what I could ever imagine is both one of the most hopeful things in the world and one of the most sobering.

What will life be like twenty years from now? I can’t even begin to imagine it.