Cabin

Every year for Thanksgiving, we went to our Grandmother’s cabin near Lake Arrowhead. There was no phone, no TV, and not much heat other than what you got from the fireplace, the stove and the scary gas heaters in the bedrooms that were put in during the twenties when the cabin was enlarged. The heaters had ceramic grilles that were broken and hanging. The blue and yellow gas flames licked and blackened the white clay over the years making it look very alien to our Southern Californian eyes. You turned a little crank in the pipe that fed the gas to the heater and then stuck a lighted wooden match in a hole in the side to ignite the flames. Sometimes the gas hadn’t been on for a season so it came slowly thru the pipe. Sometimes it came with a burst of air and the match blew out and another had to be lit. We were always wary when we went to light it, arming ourselves with a fist full of matches (definitely a job for the older kids). Wooden kitchen matches were prized at the cabin; they were the source of fire and warmth and food preparation. We used them for counters when we played Tripoly - we never had real poker chips up there. We had many, many decks of cards - some with all 52 cards - those we kept together with rubber bands after carefully counting them two or three times. We stored them on the mantle “out of reach” - safe from sabotage by the “kids”. The rest went into the coffee table drawer for the little kids to “play” cards - they had vast quantities of them with all kinds of pictures on the backs from winter scenes to golden retrievers to my grandmother’s fancy matched roses that were once very expensive KEM plastic coated cards. My Grandmother Nana taught me how to play canasta with those rose cards on the floor of the bedroom we shared when I was little in Ohio. I remember laying out the rows of red sevens with the last one placed slanted across the bottom and the power of freezing the pile with a black three. I can no longer remember how to actually play the game, but I still look at red sevens and black threes as cards with special powers.
Matches lit the big stove in the kitchen and mom always did that first thing when arriving at the cabin. She’d leave the oven door open with the flame on and it would slowly heat up the kitchen. We’d all bring in our boxes and paper bags of clothes and the food stuff, in a hurry to inspect and stake claims on our beds in the back rooms, the same rooms our Mother had shared with her school friends when they came up for holidays. Then, if it was still daytime, we’d rush outside to collect pinecones, twigs and to greet our rocks. The rocks were huge boulders by the garage. Actually some were pretty small, but they were huge to us and one rite of passage was to be able to climb up the largest of them and sit on its top. We centered most of our play around them. The twins became wild animals and those rocks were their lair. One of the boulders had a crack where you could hide secret things or brace a branch to use as a support for the roof structure of a fort. We sat on them and listened for the squirrels and blue jays and the air moving through the pines. After we conquered our rocks, they shrank in size and we traveled on to find other, larger boulders to tame.
The rocks were next to the garage. It was old and leaning, probably built in the 20’s and filled with the remnants of Grandma’s past. The cabin itself was furnished with a hodgepodge of everyone’s leftovers which supplemented a core of items originally intended for a vacation spot in the twenties and thirties. Going through it piece by piece you could retrace the ever changing story of their lives and mark the turning points - Divorce, death of an aunt or uncle, downsizing to a smaller house. Things handed down that could not quite be discarded found a home there. They all retained some history some spiritual meaning, which made rummaging through the pile in the garage an almost holy experience for us as kids. They seemed like curious relics of a lost civilization,”Whose was this? What did this do? Who is this guy?
The kitchen was equipped with a complete set of fiesta ware which my grandparents bought down in Laguna Beach. We thought they were magical plates, in all different colors and we fought over who would use the deep magenta one and who got stuck with the yellow or pistachio green ones (this was back when they were just pretty old dishes and not valued antiques). The cups and bowls broke and disappeared and finally only the big serving plates were left for Thanksgiving dinners. Coffee and tea was served up in fat white diner mugs, probably PAPA got them at a discount in some sort of deal. They disappeared and were replaced with a set of thin “normal” cups which simply do not compare. There was nothing like having coffee or tea in one of those heavy mugs in the chill of morning while waiting for the fireplace to spread warmth. Another item unique to the cabin’s dining table was the spoon jug. Filled with more spoons than our young minds could count – and we each had a favorite that we relished for our personal use. The first person up made the fire and boiled water, then the next guy started breakfast, number three did the dishes...we played poker with matchsticks to determine the order. The last guy could sleep in of course.
Every year we went there for Thanksgiving. Four days away from TV and phones and rock ‘n roll records (though later on when I had my own portable stereo I would take it along) There was a HUGE old radio/record player (78 rpms of mostly Frank Sinatra) we would lay by it at night trying to tune in a rock in roll station from San Bernardino. The sound came in intermittently and crackled voices sang and told us what was going on in the “real” world down below. It was frustrating and tedious work occasionally rewarded by a snatch of a favorite top ten tune we basked on the rug drunk with success. Mom would spend the holiday weekend writing out her Christmas cards...she was the great communicator and she took it upon herself every year to write newsy personal letters to each recipient...and the time away at the Cabin was perfect for that. She did it every year over Thanksgiving sitting at the picnic table in the breakfast nook off of the kitchen. It was a little converted porch with windows on three sides and a back door, which we kept in constant operation running in & out with pinecones, injuries, damp & soiled clothing, tales of adventures and arguments to settle. She would be there writing at the table looking out at us or down the road to town, stopping to prepare food or go by the fire to read for awhile or come out to go on a hike with us. The cabin was the one source of continuity for her - things changed, parents left, but that place remained the unbroken thread that wove in and out of her life. We return to it singly or in groups over the years bringing new friends and spouses and our children.