Golden haze of nostalgia (family cabins).
July 2023: Full moon in Capricorn
My family is down at the lake. I’m itching to get down there too. So much of the last few weeks have me sentimental about summering at my grandparent’s cabin. I’ve been trying to replicate the feelings of those summer cabin weekends my entire adult life. With the home we saved for, the jobs I’ve taken, and the way I choose to stay a Michigander. Those feelings were so good, so pure, wrapped in a golden haze of nostalgia that only time passing can bring.
Because of course there were disagreements between my mother and her mother-in-law we were all sitting through, scarfing down ham sandwiches to get out of the dark log cabin kitchen of tension and back into the open air and sunshine. There were long-term resentments bubbling beneath the surface between brothers, illnesses tiptoed around, and gossip amongst sisters, click-clacking like the waves smacking the fiberglass sides of the Bayliner.
It’s the magic of being a child, those familial disagreements are there but you don’t see them. They wash off you like the crisp water of the lake when you surface after a cannonball. Get back to scoring who had the best one off the raft. Have the neighbor teach you how to ski with the old wooden ones they’ve passed down for generations. Change out of your wet suit into your sweats, walk through the yard picking up kindlin’ for tonight’s bonfire.
We think if we could just abolish the tensions between one another, then the cottage would be more enjoyable. We head home at the end of it, sun-wiped and amiss from all the things that were not said in the quaint communal spaces of cabin life. We say the cabin would be better if we could all just get along, if “they” hadn’t shown up.
It’s not the family member. Not really. Not the history between us. Or maybe it is, and we eventually all work through it or avoid it, find moments of happiness that keep us coming back after we recoup back home. Maybe we just need a break before we return to the cabin once again with a renewed spirit, a new outlook, or a forgive-and-forget mentality that we can genuinely put behind us. There will always be a disagreement, a misunderstanding, a tension between family members.
And, if we’re lucky, there will always be the cabin to hold us amidst it all.
To remind us that it’s bigger than the argument. Not just for the kids but for us too, as we were once kids blissfully unaware of anything that was not the cannonball competition, the wooden skis tied together with a rope, the waves lapping around the boat we napped on.
The golden haze returns, just as you remembered it.
The stories the cabin holds.