A jug of wine, a jigsaw puzzle and thou.
How different that familiar phrase – “a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou” – might have been had poet Omar Khayyam been thinking about going to the cabin for the weekend.
You must always have games, the right kind of games, and communal occupations to get the true cabin experience.
Jigsaw puzzles come to mind, or cards and board games (and no, they are not “bored” games, as some electronics-toting youngsters might believe. They were games you play with people right in the room).
These might be called “old-fashioned” games, but I don’t believe they’ve ever really gone out of fashion at the cabin … or, to cover the languages of all four of our Lake Superior shores, at the cabin, the camp or the cottage.
When I was a kid, getting away to a cabin for a week or a weekend meant getting together with your siblings and parents in a laugh-around-the-table way that we often neglected at home.
Puzzles stayed on the table all week, the calm relief at night after playing hard outside all day until we sunburned. It was the old days before good sense, after all. Or the puzzle might be the life-saving distraction if it rained so hard we couldn’t even fish. (You can always, of course, “Go Fish” if somebody brought the cards.)
As for board games, they still give me a great feeling of hope and nostalgia. The nostalgia is obvious; the hope is that I’ll really get time to play that new “Dogopoly” game I got for Christmas.
This issue turns out to have a nice blend of possibilities and nostalgia.
Upper Peninsula writer Lesley DuTemple takes us to the one-room schoolhouse in Copper Harbor. It only had four elementary-age children in classes for the just-ended school year, but it has the support of the entire town. Maintaining a school in a small northern village certainly gives the community both a sense of pride and the knowledge of a future embodied in its children.
Two of the newest lodging options by the Lake turn out to be throwbacks to my own childhood (and maybe even a bit further). New hostels, once only for “youth” and now for everyone, have sprouted in Grand Marais, Minnesota, and in Thunder Bay. Mike Creger introduces us to the concept and the hostel-keepers bringing budget-friendly options to those who want a feeling of community on their overnight stays.
In another story generating a great hope for the future of Bayfield, Wisconsin’s agricultural traditions, writer Clarie Duquette spends time with both the old and the new owners of Apple Hill Orchard. They’re not talking apples, though. July is sweet cherry-picking season, and this will be the new owners’ first year hosting the regulars who come to harvest their own baskets of the tasty “alternative” area fruit.
Finally, a writer new to us, Deborah J. Mann, brings us along as she discovers a community formed by the love of a lighthouse. Rescuing the Rock of Ages Lighthouse on Isle Royale in Michigan started as one young man’s mission and has grown into the shared goal of people from far reaches joining into a volunteer preservation society. There’s something so right about working to protect and care for a piece of our collective history that helps to keep our Big Lake mariners safe.
As you can see, we’ve packed quite a lot into this issue, but no worries. We’re heading into summer, so you can take us along on your way to the cabin to enjoy between fishing, puzzling and cribbage.
Or we hope thou can sneak a little backyard time at home with the magazine and a slug from that jug of wine.