A Dream House Found

When I was little, my dream house was huge. I still have a drawing of it. It had a roller coaster and a swimming pool and a big bedroom full of toys… As I grew older, I decided that I did not want that, and dreamed of something simpler. It wasn't until recently that I realized that I had already found my dream house.

My parents bought our cabin when I was eight, and I hated it. It was musty, moldy, ugly and ancient, and you had to plug your nose while you were inside. My parents slowly began to make improvements: a wood floor, a light golden brown log siding, a dark green shingled roof, big rocks along the shore… It's a little place, with a rustic kitchen that smells like pancakes in the morning and a main room with enormous picture windows. You cook your food in old little pots and pans, and you can hear the birds singing outside the windows.

The best part of the cabin is the yard. It's surrounded by trees, mostly deciduous, and you can walk barefoot in the hardy grass. The yard is littered with twigs. The front yard has a view to a placid, dark lake, and you can sit in the hammock and read a book, watching the motorboats race past and the dapples of shadow dance across the yard. The daisies often come around Independence Day, and I always look forward to them. Sometimes even wild forget-me-nots even show up in the yard. Dad always takes care to mow around the flowers so we have patches of them left to enjoy.

We do have a computer there. It sits in the closet-like entryway, next to the cranky washing machine and the softly humming furnace. I like to get up early and write there, watching the birch trees change colors with the rising sun and listening to the little old furnace hum and heat up the tiny room. It's a soothing, thoughtful place, and many a story has been gleefully concocted in that tiny room.

In winter, the snow blankets the world, shrouding it in a glistening, hilly cover. The lake is covered with a milky sheet of ice laced with snowmobile tracks. My brother and I often walk across the ice and find less snowy parts to slide on. The ice is not the best place to walk on towards the spring, though, especially when there's a film of water on top of it. My brother pointed this out to my dad once when they were walking near the shore. My dad said that it was safe to walk on the ice, and he jumped on it several times to prove his point. On the final jump, he fell through into the knee-deep muck. Humbled, he went home with Jack to change clothes. The boots were ruined forever.

Sometimes we try to roll snowmen in the deep, sticky snow, but this is a hot exercise, and mostly we stay inside. Evenings by the fire are the best. The snow blankets the cabin around us, as it often does from November to March, and we only have a few lights on. Dad plays piano, while my mom and sister make popcorn. My brother is usually plugged into the computer. I sit by the fire, drawing pictures, eating pumpkin pie, and plotting against the characters in my latest book. The little orange fire crackles cheerfully, and I look for the little green tips, which you can find if you watch it long enough. I soak in as much of the fire's heat as I can because my bedroom is cold at night.

We don't come much in the spring. My brother and I like to take rocks and throw them over the thawing ice. They sound like UFOs when they skid, and the hollow, haunting sound is quickly imprinted into the memory. I try to squish through the yard, even though the thawing snow leaves it saturated with water like a bog. Snow is strewn across the ground, and I wait eagerly for it to melt. Spring is still cold, but sometimes there are sixty-degree days.

Our house is much bigger. It has a pool, but that was a second grade dream. The entryway is not like a closet with a furnace and irritable washing machine; it is a wide-open space that displays the enormity of the house. The main room has a high ceiling and is too large to comfortably play piano in, especially if anyone else is nearby. I would rather play in my bedroom closet. People dissipate off to their little corners of the gigantic house, and it is rare that I see my own brother, although the computer had always been threatening to swallow him up. This house is too big to be familiar, and I find myself longing for an autumn breeze and the sight of red and yellow paper leaves…

We go back to the cabin this summer.