Back at our house, cold beverages were hard to come by. I kept our perishables in an old propane fridge we dragged home from a friend’s hippie homestead south of town but never actually turned on, because everyone said that the propane pilot would suck all of the oxygen from the house and kill us. So we stacked the vegetable bins with blocks of ice from the store, turning it into a semifunctioning new-fashioned, old-fashioned icebox—cool enough to keep smoked meat and dairy from spoiling. Fish or chicken, not for long.
Starting as we did with zero connection to modern life, we added back amenities as we could afford them, at an inching pace. At the end of the first summer, after Aaron took out a bank loan for the five thousand dollars the telephone company required to run a line down our long road, we got a phone. I sat up late one night talking to my mom, the spiral cord wound around my body, and I remember trying to correct her semantics, to get her to call our place a “house.” Her habit of calling it a cabin drove Aaron crazy. “It’s a house!” he insisted. The distinction seems ridiculous now, but I got his point. A house is a primary residence, a cabin is a secondary seasonal one, and his feelings for this place demanded primacy. We were unapologetically dramatic about it—being, after all, still in our twenties.
“I don’t mind cooking without running water,” I told my mom. “My kitchen’s kind of like the kitchen Grandma grew up with on the farm in Buckman.” She was not impressed.
“Sure, it’s great if Aaron’s doing all the water hauling!” she said. “What happens if you’re out there alone?”
My mom thought I could conquer any urban mountain and rule any office kingdom, but she doubted my ability to haul water; that pretty much summed up the fretful stance she took to my growing self-reliance. She must have forgotten that I had minored in women’s studies; I wanted to haul water.
I didn’t know how to tell her that I felt like I’d been given the chance to pass through a wormhole into an older, wonderfully unspecified time. I tried to persuade her that we weren’t thinking small; we were dreaming big.
My dramatics brought about the opposite intended effect. Being a mother—and being my mother, for whom the details of modern domesticity reign supreme—she tearfully confessed: “I’d happily call it a house and not a cabin if it weren’t what it is…which is more like a hovel!”
I glanced into the kitchen, cataloging the things that would look awful to her: my gross open bucket full of compost; my black-bottomed pans fired sooty from the hot yellow flames of the propane burners, which unlike her, I ran on high; the rough wooden windowsills whose burrs caught on the dishcloth and couldn’t be properly wiped; my favorite rusty peeler. I imagined her standing beside me as I cooked, watching from the wings as I rinsed out a bowl with a dribble of cold water, wiped it, and used it again—because I didn’t have hot running water—and the woman who believed that everything had to be sanitized in a 145-degree dishwasher looked crestfallen. She didn’t even have to be present for me to feel her thoughts bubbling up in me. I knew what she’d say: Rust! That’s not even sanitary.
Okay, I thought, this was perhaps not where she imagined her daughter living upon graduating from college—a rough-hewn log cabin with gaping floorboards out in the Two Inlets State Forest. Not only did it lack power and refinement, but it also lacked distance from the town from which she had so dramatically fled with us in tow, a town to which I—to her puzzlement—had so enthusiastically returned.
I forgave her the digs about our house. The place wasn’t her style. But I couldn’t help but scowl into the darkness at her for moving me away when she did, for deepening my nostalgia, for complicating my life with this need to go home to this place that held little hope for my future employment.
“It just feels like home,” I said meekly.
“But it’s not even the same Park Rapids you grew up in. You were a town kid.” And then she sighed and said with more tenderness, “Honey, home will always be wherever I am.” I knew exactly what she meant, that home was me, Bob, and Marc, sitting around her table, eating her pork roast, her spaetzle, her gravy.
I worshipped her pork roast, but after we hung up, I thought, No, I’m sorry, Mom. Home will not always be where you are. My home was a place. The proximity of where we sat, just twenty-five minutes from my hometown Main Street, mattered to me. I didn’t yet know exactly why, but it mattered a great deal.
—
“Hey, Aaron, will you take out the buckets under the sink?” I pleaded. “They’re full again.”
“Sure—but don’t you want to get outside?”
This was one of Aaron’s constant refrains. He didn’t understand how I could stay inside the dark house all day while the sun was shining outside, when the tasks of the garden were calling. Habit, I guess. Odd for a girl who had moved to the woods, but I had always considered myself firmly an inside person. I’d never been very nature curious. My directionals were always better in malls than they were in the outside world. I was really good with up, down, right, and left; north, south, and the rest never really took.
Initially I rebelled against this call of the wild. Like a turtle coaxed to stick out its head, I pulled it in more tightly and curled up defiantly in a big chair with my book. Eventually, our way of life forced me to leave my chair to go to the edge of the woods to dump pots of frying oil, to the herb bed to get thyme, to the garden for a hot chili pepper, to the shed to get oil for the lamps or wood for the stove when it grew cold. To the outhouse to pee.
Sometimes on these forays I’d pause and look at the creek that encircled us. The widest part had to be a mile across, but it was no swimming hole (unless you liked gambling your limbs with snapping turtles). It was more like a nature preserve, the geese and swans and redwing blackbirds holding court by day, the wood frogs and splashing beavers and crooning wolves taking over at night. I sat down in the grass under one of our birch clumps with my cup of coffee, the trees’ papery bark flapping like loose skin, the flickering sunlight warm on my arms, and it felt good to be small. Just an inconsequential animated speck in the great big woods. The animals were doing their own thing. The birds swooped down around me in gangs to peck competitively at the ground, oblivious to me. The dandelions opened up with the sun but pulled in their yellow arms at around dinnertime, hiding their blooms just when I was getting ready to go looking for their greens. Every plant in the garden had its own companion look-alike, a weed that had sprouted next to it in an attempt to pass detection: feathery fronds among the carrot tops, purslane under the round potato leaves. They were survivors.
I finally understood why so many locals called their houses a “place” and why they would give it a name, as if it were a living being. The interior and exterior walls of our rough board-and-batten siding were rightly, fluidly, connected.
At times, the boundaries needed enforcing.
Standing in the kitchen one morning, I felt a tickle on my ankle and looked down at the gaping floorboards at my feet and into the sand beneath the cracks. There, a sharp spire of green leaf jauntily rose. Was that a blade of grass? No, the leaves were too thick and too stiff.