Our Cabin

Mom and Dad weren’t able to build our cabin the first year.  Dad had to teach school in the fall, and Phillip was born the first of December.  After Grandma and Grandpa Russell's cabin was finished we stayed with them, which was a lot better than camping in a tent, especially for mom.  Not only did she have a new baby to take care of along with Keith and Gale, the following summer she was pregnant again.  Linda was born November seventh, and life was busy with four children all under five years old.

It was fun staying in Grandma and Grandpa's cabin.  The kids slept on a small, double bed, squeezed in one end of the trailer. Keith and Gale would sleep with their heads against one wall, and Phillip and Linda would sleep with their heads against the other.  Of course, this meant that everyone’s feet met in the middle.  This made the perfect recipe for lots of friendly feet fights.  Gale put the soles of her feet against the soles of Phillip’s feet, knees bent, and they would see who could straighten out their legs.  It was lots of fun, pushing and wiggling, trying to be the winner.  Keith always won, and sometimes Gale, but Phillip had strong legs and he could hold his own pretty good, especially when Linda got big enough to join the fun.  One sure way to make Phillip give in was to tickle him.  He was the most ticklish little boy in the world!  If anyone even touched him under his chin or arms he would curl up in a ball, giggling so hard it made the rest of us laugh, too.

The summer of 1959 Grandpa Russell worked too hard again, and this time he got so sick he nearly died.  He was in the same hospital as mom when she delivered Linda.  Little by little he got his strength back, and then he and Grandma went back up to the cabin. 

Dad and Mom decided to take a little easier route than building our cabin from scratch.  There was an old apartment over an adobe garage in Mesa that Grandpa didn’t want anymore.  When they tore the garage down Dad dismantled the apartment and put all of it on a big cotton trailer, then pulled it up to the cabin.  That was a tricky thing to do.  The roads to the cabin were not very good, and the trailer was big and heavy.  Coming up from Globe it didn’t look like they were going to be able to get the trailer up one steep part of the road, but eventually they made it.

 Dad poured the foundation for the cabin, but Grandpa did most of the work of putting  it together.  A man named Mr. Finley came over and  built the fireplace for us out of big cinder bricks.  The foundation under the chimney wasn’t very good, and as it settled over the years, the chimney began to lean farther and farther away from the rest of the cabin.  Eventually a gap about an inch wide opened up between the wall and ceiling.  Then Dad had to shore up the fireplace, to keep it from falling all of the way over.

Our cabin wasn’t very big and it didn’t cost very much money to build, but it was cozy. The whole north half of the cabin was the front room, with the fireplace on the north wall.  There was just enough room on either side of the fireplace to squeeze in a double bed.  The south half of the cabin was divided into three tiny rooms; a  little bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a very small bathroom. 

There was a big porch in front of the cabin, looking towards the road.  Later, in 1963, Dad poured a small back porch, and he let us kids put our hands into the soft cement to leave our prints.   Then Dad screened in the back porch and put a bed on it so he and Mom could sleep outside and enjoy the cool evenings. We used to sit on the bed and look off over the hill into the tops of the trees down by the creek.  It was like looking into a sea of shimmering green, and was the prettiest sight in the world! 

The walls inside the cabin were paneled with light, wood grained pine. The floor was dark red-brown linoleum squares.  There was a white enamel wood burning stove in the kitchen because there was no electricity at that time.  It sure could make the house hot, but it felt really good on cold mornings. Over the fireplace Mom hung a special painting that Grandma and Grandpa Russell gave her because it was a picture of Sweden.  It had been painted on a board without a frame, and was the scene of a small stream with swans swimming under a bridge.   Little Swedish children played in front of green trees around a tall flag-pole with a Swedish flag fluttering in the breeze.

On the wall opposite the fireplace mom hung a painting of a bowl of orange poppies.  Each poppy had a big black center, and one day we discovered that the middle poppy looked like a puppy dog with big black eyes and orange, floppy ears.  We could never look at that picture without seeing a dog instead of flowers after that. 

Dad screwed a hanger into the ceiling in the front room, from which he hung the kerosene lantern at night.  Every evening, as it began to get dusk, we would all pile onto the creaky old bed on the back porch.  Supper would already be over, and the kids washed and in their pajamas.  Then Mom would sit in the middle of the bed and everyone else piled around her while she read stories to us from some very old storybooks a neighbor gave us.  They were stories about a Laughing Brook and rabbits and quail and other forest animals, and all their adventures.  The stories were sweet and simple, and we loved them. 

As it grew dark Dad would get out the kerosene lantern and we would watch as he pumped a little button on the side, then opened a small door, struck a match, and lit the lantern.  It always scared Gale just a little bit.  She was afraid the whole lantern might explode, but it never did.  Then Dad would carry the light into the cabin, hang it from the hook in the ceiling, and we would all come inside, kneel down to have family prayer, then jump into our warm, cozy beds by the fireplace.  How we loved being at the cabin!