My dad bought it the year I was born. He paid for it with money he saved from twenty years of working overtime at the paper mill. He used to say it was the only thing he ever bought that was worth more than he paid for it.
He died when I was nineteen. A heart attack. On the dock, actually. Fishing for bass.
Mom almost sold the cabin after that. She couldn’t stand to be there. For two summers, she didn’t even go up. Then one day in June, she called me and said, “I think I’m going to go open up the lake house.” And she did. And she’s gone every summer since.
It’s hers now. Completely hers. She pays the taxes. She fixes the roof. She planted every single flower around it. She painted the shutters blue two summers ago, by herself, on a ladder, which I yelled at her about for a week.
“Your father would have painted them blue,” she said. “He always wanted blue.”
