Into The Woods

This past weekend, we went up to the cabin. Well, we went to a cabin. This one was called "Cottage Springs." It was a change from the last two years. The place we went to previously was called "Capone's Hideaway." Prior to that we made a yearly trek to the Sierras to a place with toboggans nailed to the wall which I'm sure had a clever name because it is the very nature of such places to have an appealing epithet. One that would describe the pleasant, convivial experience that takes place in and around those faux log walls. Each year when the snow begins to fall in the east, we start to make our plans to go to "the cabin."
This is the easiest possible contrivance for me, since this is how I grew up. My family owned a cabin in the woods. It was built on a plot of land by a creek. It was purchased from a parcel that was cleverly named "Aspen Meadows." It could be that this was the name that had been roughly translated from the roaming bands of Sioux warriors, but more likely it was the brainstorm of a real estate developer who hoped to make the location as appealing as possible to the potential buyers out there, wandering in the grove of aspen.
And so we built a log cabin, and it sat at the end of a path that passed two towering blue spruce. The front window faced a great, green expanse of grass. Nestled between a great pile of granite and a pine-covered hill, we felt the cultural pressure of finding a distinctive name for our mountain getaway. But we never did. We always referred to it as "The Cabin," so much so that an artist friend of ours carefully painted those words on a small wooden sign that we hung at the top of the stairs on the front porch when we arrived. We never gave it much thought after that. The big pile of granite? We called that "The Rock." There were those who constructed their "Whispering Pines" and "Ponderosa Crossroads" and felt the need to remind anyone passing by of their choice by erecting some elaborately signage. That wasn't us. We went to the cabin. It was a lot more relaxing than Pine Hills Bluff Lodge. Too much name. Not enough relax.