Our Nineteen Year Tradition
And the passing of time
We arrive at the cabin as we have each of the previous 18 summers, this our 19th year, families rolling up in vehicles, shouted greetings and hugs, adults helping each other unload while the kids try to escape into the woods or down to the lake before being conscripted into the forced labor of moving into a cabin for a week. We pack the refrigerator and the cupboards, move into our various rooms and bunks, and soon a group of us have collapsed onto the living room sofas while the rest head for the water at the bottom of the hill.
We are here. Another year at the cabin.
Our first trip 18 summers ago, my extended family consisted of my parents, my sister and I with our spouses, my two younger (and single) sisters, and the five oldest grandkids. We were trying something new, the thirteen of us, a week in a cabin as a family.
18 years later, there are 26 of us and one on the way. Maile and I have gone from late-20s to mid-40s. My parents, 50 years old when we started this tradition, are now closing in on 70.
The cabin has become a way of marking time, a measure of how the years are passing.
Three elementary-age boys run out the door, shirts off, sandals on, each carrying a handmade spear carved to a point with a pocketknife. I can hear them in the woods, dragging branches, shouting instructions, building their fort.
I am handed a torn piece of paper with a number on it: a handmade ticket for an air hockey tournament to be held by the younger cousins in the basement later in the week.
In the front driveway I can hear a pickleball game taking place, the plastic tapping of the ball, the cheers, the groans of defeat. Trash talk. Another game beginning. Laughter.
Through the windows of the cabin I can see three people working on a puzzle on the covered porch, intent, focused, chatting. Someone else is reading on the porch swing.
Maile is doing yoga in the woods. Someone is floating on a raft in the middle of the small lake, somehow there all by themselves. Teenagers race down the driveway in a golf cart, gravel spitting up behind them.
Our hectic and chaotic lives outside of the cabin week have diminished to these simple activities.
All those long years ago, when we first started our cabin trip, back in 2007, 2008, 2009 . . . those were some of the hardest years of my life. Maile and I were struggling to keep our heads above water. Three small kids. A business that felt like it was slipping away and dragging us under, both at the same time. A house we couldn’t afford.
A few of those years, I remember arriving at the cabin wondering how we would pay the mortgage that month. When we would ever sleep again, with our four small children waking in the night. Life felt like an exhausting dead end.
The troubles change as you get older. They’re certainly not easier. Just different.
But I also remember the beauty of getting away, even back then, the joy of late nights playing games and laughing, sitting on the porch and swinging, walking through the woods and remembering to breathe.
There has always been healing in these trees, in the rain on the lake, the quiet afternoons napping while the kids race around outside. There has been healing in laughing so hard I could barely breathe, playing cards late into the night, having heartfelt conversations by the fire.
Those little kids who were three, four, and five years old when we first started coming to the cabin are now 19, 20, 21. Sometimes I look at them and it seems impossible that so much time has passed, but then I see my dad, nearing 70, and me, nearing 50.
Where do all these years go?
There’s a new batch of young cousins now, no longer so young that we have to keep an eye on them all the time. I sit and watch them, wondering what they’ll be like 19 summers from now.
Nearly every year, Maile and I are ready to leave when the week is up. It’s a nice time of relaxation, but you can only take so many late nights, so many days sitting around, so many days living with 25 other people.
This year was different, and I’m not sure why. All I know is that, when we drove out the lane, we both looked at each other and said we weren’t ready to go. We wanted the week to keep going.
The rocks clattered up under the car, and then we pulled out onto the paved back road, and then we were on the highway, no one saying anything.
I think it gets that way as the kids get older. The sense that time is slipping away and so we desire longer moments with them. They are too old to chase around and too young to get married or leave the house officially— at the same time they are right on the cusp of adulthood. I get a sense during trips with them—“It’s not over yet, but one day it will all change, so let me stay in these moments as long as I can.” 🧡
I cried reading this. Fond memories of cottages. Of a cottage on Oxtongue Lake where we first went as a young married couple, then with a baby… such good memories of that week away, the loon on the lake, the summer rain storms that knocked down a tree and blocked the cottage road for a few days, the canoe rides, the fire pit and grilling steaks, mosquitoes… thanks Shawn for reminders.