The Cabin

The light of the sun was just coming through the windshield as we began the drive to the cabin. The air was crisp and cool, a little too cool, so we turned on the heater in the car and we held hands as we set off to the east, towards the rising sun. The bright pinks and oranges of the sky gave off a quiet and peaceful feeling as we sat warmly in the car over hills and by the farms that bordered either side of the road. As the sun climbed, so did the altitude of the land and so did our moods. You opened up your canvas bag and brought out two slices of homemade bread, a little jar of butter and another little jar of honey along with the knife and napkins that I keep in the glove compartment. I continued to drive and we talked about a tree’s seasonal cycle as you spread the butter and honey onto the bread. You lifted the bread to my mouth and I take a bite and take the rest from your hand. "Mmm. Thank you, Angel" I say, through the tasteful snack. We ate and talked as we naturally do and passed the time as the car roamed along the winding road. Further on we stopped for a while at a scenic outlook where I took a picture of you looking into a backdrop of mountains while holding a yoga pose. We kissed as we got back into the car and drove off up towards the cabin.

The cabin sat between the mountains nestled in a plain with a lake within view and of a short walking distance through the high tan switchgrass. Looking past the lake and between the mountain slopes we could see a small sliver of the sea just a slightly deeper blue than the sky was this day. We stopped and took a moment to breathe the clean dense air and listen to the breeze rustle through the grass. An eagle riding a thermal above us lazed in circles and we watched him soar; with it we could feel our tensions ebb away. You sigh a final deep breath, a relaxed look appeared on your face and then a soft smile as you catch my eye then you begin to gather things from the car and walk to the cabin.

As you walk to the door, the wooden sounds of your heels treading the porch, you take the key out of your hand and you feel my arm slip around your waist. One hand on the knob and one on the key you turn the key and open the door as you feel a kiss on the back of your neck. You soften your body and softly exhale. Standing in the threshold as you feel my hands touch you and the warmness of my kisses on your neck and shoulders through your shirt you feel lifted as I let go for a moment. Then you feel a soft grab of your behind and with it a push to enter the cabin.

We only realize how small the cabin actually is when we first look into it. No rooms, just a box of vertical dark stained timber with some modern advances like a real mattress and an iron stove in the middle of the room. The rest might as well have been from the Stone Age. The chinking still looked good from the inside, but an outside inspection was needed but not now, tomorrow, today we enjoy our rest and our closeness. You place your bag on a homemade table hewn from wood from the stand of trees outside, stirring up dust and I watch it twinkle into sunlight rays coming through the window as I turn to get the rest of our weekend supplies. From the bag, you bring out a bottle of Chardonnay and open it and fill two glasses. You taste the sweet sting and wait for me to come back in from gathering the rest of our things. You hold out a glass to me as I enter and watch me put down the bags immediately by the door closing it with my heel, shuttering the cabin walls and bringing a new onslaught of twinkling dust as I come to grab the wine.

“To you.” I hold the glass up

“To you, love” You hold up your glass.

Then we kiss lightly and then again deeply, tasting the wine on each other’s lips and tongues.

The wonderful thing about the cabin is that it’s bigger than it appears. After cleaning every corner and every spot with you we never impeded ourselves and we kept the work going until twilight when we started a fire in the wood stove. Its boundaries only extended to how much we wanted it to extend to and tonight it only extended to a log bed and a wood stove.

The wood stove hearth cast an orange flickering glow into the room as the embers still glowed from the earlier fire to heat the cabin. I sat on floor against the bed and you followed me sitting next to me and looking into the glowing coals and facing the window. You spoke after a few minutes of silence where we could only hear a slight wind against the window and the sound of the grasses bending against one another as they undulated like grey white waves in the moonlight.

“Tell me the story again, the one where I left you and the constellations fell from the sky so you built a rocket ship by hand and put them all back one at a time.”

“That’s a sad story for me and a long one to tell” I say to you as I still stare into the hearth.

“But it has a happy ending. I’m here now, aren’t I?” You nestle your head next to mine. “I love how you continued to build the rocket and never knowing how it would end up. How you put all your faith into something and never let it go and how you persevered through it and waited until I grew up. I had a lot of growing up to do, you knew that didn’t you. You should have told me that you know, you should have told me that, oh wait… you did tell me that I’m a fool…”

You shift your bottom scooting side to side a bit and feeling a bit of pressure ease from the floor.

“But, I didn’t listen, my mind was somewhere else already. I thought if I just went that way that my life would have turned out. What? We were so apart then, weren’t we? You were off in another continent and I was here with children, I had to decide. I was anxious.”

Your voice drifted off and we sat in silence the sound of heat rising through the flue gaining ground in our ears. We sat like that in silence as we mulled over the past two years and how we went our separate way with no words to each other. Those two years of never knowing and only hoping that the right moment came back. That moment of resolution and realization that after a lifetime of searching that we should only go after true gems and hold onto them tightly and let everything else fall away. That’s the key to it all really and sometimes it takes an internal fight and a fight with the world to get to that point.

The words fall from my mouth after my thinking “…That the only thing that matters is the spirit. It’s like looking at a photograph that I took of us and remembering that moment. What about that moment do I remember? If I think about it, think about deeply, I remember all of it, every detail but mostly I remember my spirit. I remember how the outside world would fade away. How we could entwine ourselves and become one and each moment was so in focus that every move by either of us was a signal to be responded to and responded to positively. Letting our spirits go outward until it was outside of us and we just let our hearts play free together. That thought kept me painting each star back into the night sky as I waited for you”. I looked to you and I could see forever into your eyes again, I know now what they mean when they say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. You twist over me and sitting on my waist you look into my eyes and I reflect the same deepness. That moment comes back into an instant and the world fades away again...”

The car packed, we drive off to west, a thin azure blue begins to rise just under the purple clouds coming in to cover the cabin like a blanket in my rear view mirror. Ahead of us is still a clear night sky still winking with stars and you begin to drift and close your eyes to sleep. Later in the sunlit morning you awaken and straighten yourself up in your seat. Yawning and stretching, you grab and take a sip from the thermos of coffee that sat in between our seats. It’s lukewarm now but you hold the thermos in your hands to warm them and look out the window. The mountains are now foothills and a farm here and there pass by as the cabin recedes from us. “Let’s not let the cabin go silent like it did, let’s go back next weekend and the weekend after that.” You say with determination and a brightness of someone announcing what they want for Christmas.

I look over to you and with all of the seriousness that my heart could bring to the moment I say “For you, Angel. Whatever you say. I’ll always do as you say, always and forever.”