Robby and I don’t have a good “How We Met” story… we grew up with each other… traveled on the fringes of each other’s groups with friends and acquaintances in common. By the beginning of high school we were best pals.
We didn’t date, however, until well after college. So that’s the story we usually tell… My grandparents had a cabin in the woods between Mesick and Manton. Both towns are teeny-tiny. The cabin was exactly between the two (if I recall it’s 7.5 miles from either village?) off the main road by a few and on what Grandpa called the Silver Crick. There was some debate about the difference between creek and crick when I was little… The crick was fast running and cold, cold all year long. Even in the worst heat of July the beer and soda would stay cold if immersed in the crick. The cousins (myself and my sister included) would wade in the water but it made your ankles ache. And you had to be really careful with your footing… the bottom had both mossy slick areas and hidden holes.
The cabin was built by my grandparents and uncles and aunts when I was very small. It was simple– A big great room with kitchen and living area, small bathroom, two square bedrooms over which there was a loft with big beds that ran into the eaves. Only adults got a bedroom. The children got the loft. The loft was accessible by a folding ladder. My boy cousins liked to “ride” it down by standing on it. My uncles liked to tease us and fold up the ladder trapping us upstairs. I loved the loft. It was great for pretending. There was, when it was just my grandparents and my little family, plenty of room to spread out my dolls and toys. There was a fan upstairs that seemed ancient to us. It had a widely spaced grill on the front with metal blades inside. You could easily take off a finger if you wanted to.
The February I was 23 my oldest friend, Melle, was getting married. We’d spent our high-school and college years with a group that had remained pretty tight knit. Melle and Liz and Mark and Robby and I. The five us had had many adventures together– skiing and trips to Robby’s Lake, movies, TPing, bonfires parties. As Melle’s Maid of Honor I asked her what kind of bachelorette fest she had in mind. Melle didn’t want the usual hen night. She wanted the five of us to get together for a weekend of skiing so that we could meet her Patrick.
My grandparents and my parents gave us permission to use the cabin. This was huge. We were giddy with the idea that we were old enough, responsible enough, to use the cabin without grown-ups. (My boy cousins had used the cabin for their hunting weekends– but they were older. And boys. And they killed things. So it didn’t seem on the same field.)
For a few weeks the phone rang incessantly as we shored up the plans. Melle would be bringing Patrick, of course, and Mark would have his wife, Heather, with him. Liz had a boyfriend. That left Robby and I. We were both horrified at the idea of being the odd man out so we made a pact that neither of us would show up with someone. Our plan was to be the counselors for Camp Melle’s Weekend.
I picked Robby up on the way to the cabin. That weekend was heinously cold. Records were broke. Scores of people died from the frigid temperatures. Still, we packed our skis in the back of my pick-up and drove merrily toward the north woods. (We stopped to gas up the car near Houghton and realized that my locking gas cap was frozen solid… a not-so-good samaritan suggested we use a lighter!?! to thaw it out. We didn’t. We used lock-de-icer. Yikes.)
Arriving at the cabin we found that my Uncle John, the nearest uncle (he was only 30 or 40 minutes away) had turned on the furnace and built a fire in the fireplace for us. He’d also plowed out enough spaces for us. (We still had to turn on the hot water for the shower… something I didn’t learn until the next morning when, like an idiot, I’d jumped in without checking the pilot first. YIKES!) We carried in our crates and duffels and groceries. We’d brought a load of firewood (yes, children, this was before we were banned from “importing” wood to the north woods…) so we stacked that neatly and tried to thaw out. Outside it would be dark soon– the woods were deep and thick even in bright sunshine. A gray, January day was no match for the treeline. We dreaded getting back into the cold truck to retrace the route in from the main road– we’d intended to put up markers… We easily convinced ourselves that, by the time our friends drove through, it would be too dark to see them anyway… and threw another log on the fire.
And we waited. And waited. And waited. Robby dozed. He was still on the night-shift at work so he was unused to being awake during the day. The hour for the arrival of the first wave came and went. The pony keg froze outside– we had to drag it in and let it thaw and discovered, later, beer slushies. (I still think there should be beer slushie bars…) We burned through most of the firewood we’d brought and realized, with the plunging temperatures, we’d need another load if we were going to keep the fire going throughout the weekend.
We watched television– I think the cabin picked up about 2 stations… and we scrounged for snacks. (Dinner was coming with Mark and Heather. As married people they were in charge of dinner. They seemed responsible enough for it.)
Robby and I talked away the hours and laughed at the history of dating the other had– and how noone ever quite measured up to each other. And then Robby kissed me. We were both surprised by it. I was stunned that he’d kissed me. He was suprised that he’d finally worked up the nerve. By the time our Mark and Heather arrived we’d agreed that it was right that we’d finally date each other… but that we’d keep it under wraps for the weekend. No since getting the rest of the gang riled up about it in case it didn’t work out.
In the meantime the guests of honor were snowed in on the west side of the state and our pal Liz had taken a wrong turn and gone off the road in Traverse City– she ended up, as only Liz could, at a party there and was well taken care of until daylight when she was able to finally get to us. By lunchtime on Saturday we were all together, drinking beer slushies, and voting for the places in front of the fire vs. the ski slopes. We bought a load of wood from a crazy man down the road and holed in for the rest of the weekend with board games and food and occasional snowball fights.
A week later he took me to see Schindler’s List (which, while not a traditional date movie, was very sweet because I’d mentioned how much I wanted to see it). And six weeks later we came out into the open with our pals at Melle’s wedding. We were engaged by May and married in November.
Tonight we’re going out on a date. We’ll talk over the stories from that weekend (crazy wood man will come up) and we’ll both try to remember some detail that proves Patrick was there– neither of us, 16 years later, can remember him being there and yet he was– that was the whole point of the weekend.
We don’t see nearly as much of Liz these days as we’d like– she’s in California with her husband and two children. Melle and Patrick and their three kids go to Family Camp with us in August and we see them occasionally throughout the year (we went sledding with them over Christmas). Mark and Heather fell off the face of the earth not long after we were married.
The cabin was sold out of the family. Which makes me sad. I wished we’d been able to keep it around to take Jack there someday and say, “This is where the Silver Crick ran cold and clear– so cold we’d have contests in summer to see who could stay in it the longest. Where Granny still road a low-rider motorbike back into the woods for autumn picnics and Great-Grandpa would fill our bellies with pancakes on Sunday mornings. This is where the platter brimmed over with morel mushrooms in May. Where Mommy and AunT would fall asleep under the eaves while the grown-ups played Euchre late into the night. And this is where Mommy and Daddy finally talked past all the stuff that was in the way.”
Hopefully we can conjure it all up for him.
