Now, I need to explain that I’m the youngest boy in the family, the fourth no less.  And I don’t care how old, how experienced, or how many accolades that a younger brother earns, his older brothers will always point out where the younger brother missed a step, where things weren’t done quite right.

Growing up, there was always the taking down a peg or two.  Like the old joke of the guy that won the Noble Prize and his brother said, “Well that’s fine, but its not very practical is it?”

As my brothers’ like to say, they aren’t complaining or criticizing…they are just saying.

Though my cabin isn’t anything fancy, but it fits me, and it fits my personality.

Two days before I closed was Easter, and I received permission from the owners to lead my family on a tour of the place.

Proudly, I lead the procession through the quiet streets of Detroit Lakes on the sunny day of spring.

We pulled up into the little rock lot and proceeded to show them around. 

Now in fairness, I had my older brother and sister-in-law go through earlier to get there opinion, and it met their standards.  He had been there when the inspector gave it the once over and the seal of approval.

If they didn’t approve of the purchase, they have never said and have been nothing but encouraging.

But they are one of three…

It took about five minutes for one brother walk out to the lake and see something that looked like a Christmas tree out on the ice and proclaim, “That is a bog out there.”  He proceeded to give the male relatives a lecture on the horrors of floating bogs.  About how it was going to float in, lodge against my shore, and make my shoreline unusable for years because, “You can only trim off about ten percent a year.” 

Not being able to take it anymore as he continued to intone very seriously how a bog can rip up a shoreline, I went into the cabin, where one of my sister-in-laws was leading a search through the cabin.

In one of the bedrooms, there was a tennis racket on the wall, and that meant one, and only one thing: the place obviously had bats.

Soon, the female members of the family were marching around the outside of the house, trying to figure out where the flying rodents were gaining entrance.

Standing on the deck, it was like some kind of nightmare – this cabin that I was buying was going to have a useless shoreline and was infested with flying, rabies infested rodents.

Great.

I was still a bit shaken when I went to the closing.  Once the papers were all signed, I looked at the people that had just sold me their cabin – who were visibly upset about having to sell it, and I asked very casually….so tell me about the tennis racket on the wall in the bedroom.

They gave me a quizzical look, “Our son played tennis.  There is a court about a mile away.  He would hop on his bike and go play…plus it makes a nice decoration.” Was the reply.

‘No bats?” I asked.

“Oh Gosh No!” Came the sharp and startled reply.

Driving around the lake, the ice was quickly breaking up in the late April sunshine.  The floating bog that looked like a Christmas tree on the ice was closer to the far shore and the road…and was in fact someones Christmas tree that was now falling through the fast dissipating ice.

Over a year in, there is still no signs of bats, or bogs.  I appreciate my brothers’ input and their opinions.  If this sounds like I’m complaining, or gripping, or bitter about the experience and their reaction…I’m not…I’m just saying…

Growing up, it was always fun to visit those Uncles and Aunts cabins, they weren’t anything that were physically special, none of them were mansions, none of them were on an exclusive lake.  But each of them were special because of the family and friends that would gather there, each of them were, and remain special, because of the memories.

I had a few friends in college too whose parents had cabins.  Those people, those memories are special too.

In some ways, it should come as no surprise when I forked over the cash to buy my own little piece of the Minnesota dream, a little cabin out on the lake.

Now, truth be told, this isn’t very special either.  It is old by cabin standards.  Built about 1920, it is 92 years old.  And it shows in some regards.  It is a simple design and construction, as you would expect of the times.  Northern Minnesota was still, in some respects, virgin territory.  It was seeing the first and second generation of immigrants get old, mature, and build lives.

But it is solidly built.  The floors are a little warped and the roof is old, but it still stands.  The original part of the cabin is three simple rooms, two bedrooms and a big area that is open and houses the kitchen, dining room, and living room.  There is a small room too, that might have been a nursery or a bathroom.  The prior owners used it for wakeboard storage.  In the year I’ve owned it, it has doubled as first storage, and now an office.

One friend doesn’t refer to it as ‘my cabin’ but as ‘my campus’ – because it is in fact three buildings.  A little one stall garage (that is finished on the inside  with knotty pine and has two beds in it.  Officially, it is storage…unofficially it is a guest house.  There is also a little garden shed with a leaking roof that houses an assortment of odds and ends (lawnmower, recyclables, and garage odds and ends).

The cabin itself isn’t in its original shape.  At some point in time, they added running water and a gas furnace.  I know this because there is a little addition off the back that houses most of the running water (bathroom) and butts up against the kitchen, which has the other running water in the house.

The interior of the cabin is knotty pine, the old stuff.  A little darker than the stuff that is popular today.  But it matches my tastes and my dated furniture.  It isn’t fancy, but it is comfortable.

It is the outside though, the lake side, that is what sold me on the place.  A big deck fronts the house and is only a couple of yards from the little drop onto the beach and into the gently sloping shoreline.  At the end of my dock, the water is only about waist deep, which is just perfect to the myriad of nieces, nephews, godchildren and friends that frequent the place.  From the long old wooden dock you can see crappies and sunfish laze about in the water.

Hopefully, a place where years of memories can be made.

I think she was a little shocked, well, more than a little shocked.  During a recent hospital stay, a nurse came in to help my Dad with some simple task and she was taken aback.

“You look just like Mark!”  She replied in surprise.

Dad feigned all of his mock shock and anger and replied that he felt insulted.  Truth be told, he found the whole thing pretty funny, and pretty amazing.

Though almost fifty years my senior, Dad was older than most folks when he and Mom and me…and my little sister for that matter.  To be quite honest, I’ve never thought of the family likeness.  Growing up, each of us seemed so very, very different.  We rant the whole spectrum in body shape and size, political views, and even religious differences.

To be sure, there were no twins in our family of five.

And yet….

Anyone that looks at a family picture leaves with a smile on their face, “My goodness, but you all look so much alike!” is a common refrain.

We all respond with shocked silence.

And yet, as with anything, there is an undercurrent of truth to the comments.  While our body shapes might be different and our height ranges from the low of 5’10 to a high of 6’4, that isn’t much of a difference.  Our faces all have similar features, part from Dad, but you can see Mom’s features in us too.  Trying to split out what feature belongs to who is a fools errand.  We are who we are and it is pretty clear looking at pictures you can see who our parents are (eerily, if you place a picture of little sister at her first communion about the age of seven, with Mom’s first communion picture and grandma’s first communion picture…all about the same age, though decades apart…the resemblance is uncanny).

But I digress.

I have to be honest, in some ways, we get along like oil and water.  We each have a stubborn streak and a sharp, though very different, senses of humor.  We each have different tastes in food and clothing.  Each of us has a different set of risks.  Each of us, though brothers and sisters had distinctly different ways of growing up.  Politically, we range from the very conservative to the extreme liberal…and some have ranged back and forth on the full spectrum and back again.  Each of us sentimental – though usually about very different things.

But it isn’t the differences that bind us together, it is the similarities that bind us together.  A sense of the land, born of a rearing on a farm.  Each of us kids has a strong sense of family, as much as we fight, should we face with a hardship, we can count on the help and aid of our brothers and sisters.  Each of us has a strong sense of duty to be active in our communities, to try to better ourselves and our posterity, because that is the only life that we knew growing up.  Each of us has a stoic sense of humor that tends to baffle those around us.  All of us are introverts and happy use a smile or a frown instead of words.

And each of us, as much as we sometimes roll our eyes at our Dad and his old fashioned values and ways of doing things, also see the greatness in the man, in what he’s done, and what he stands for that make those same things that we laugh at…are often the traits that we most admire.

We are oil and water alright, but more importantly, we’re blood.