Shangri-La-La
Maybe it’s old age or maybe just the onset of senility, but lately I’ve been waxing nostalgic, remembering nearly lost memories from the long ago past, wondering sometimes if they’re accurate or simply how I’d like to remember them. A few days ago I was driving the backroads north of here, almost to Canada, when I found myself turning off on Mosquito Lake Road, a curvy stretch of blacktop I used to use getting to my old friend Melinda’s place. She and her biker boyfriend were living in tents and trailers while they built a rickety cabin board by board, added old doors and recycled windows, all one entire summer. I would drive up to help but Paul, her Hells Angel beau, mostly wanted to drink beer. Which we did.
Somewhere around early fall we put the roofbeam up and they finished the roof before the rains of autumn and winter arrived. Melinda had bought the land cheap after the loggers had clearcut her property and the hillside behind which now, with the rain, sprouted springs and creeks, making her homestead a muddy mess. Like myself with my shack and cut-over land, she loved the place, warts, stumps, mudslides and all. She cut firewood and lived alone when she caught Paul sleeping with a waitress down the road and she kicked his sorry ass out once and for all.
Every few years I’d journey back through time and space to visit, but eventually the trips ended and we communicated mostly by Christmas card, once a year, a few paragraphs, she’d married Robert, her mother had died, she got a job driving the Bellingham school bus, she’d built an addition, Robert was found dead in the river after fly fishing, she’d retired, she was pruning bud for a cannabis grower in town, stuff like that, but we kept in touch if barely.
I had a hard time finding the place now, maybe 30 years since the last time I’d walked the log across the creek to her Shangri-La, but finally I found a bridge she’d built, made me nervous driving onto it, but it held and there, tucked into the shelf between the woods and the creek, sat her cabin. A horse munched contentedly in its pasture, flowers filled the property with color, the cabin had been remodeled and looked like a pastoral dream with cedar shakes, paned windows, brick chimney.
Thirty years you can transform a muddy homestead into a reflection of yourself. Melinda certainly had. She squinted at me hopping out of my car, said who is this? and finally satisfied herself I was who she thought I was. We sat by the creek awhile, toured the property, caught up our lives, watched the hummingbirds and bumblebees work the flowers, savored for an hour or two the distances we had traveled. Nothing feels much warmer than old friends. And nothing brings a smile faster than knowing they did okay despite the setbacks. Melinda lives in paradise. And ya know, beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder, despite what they say, it is the beholder.
Hits: 87
Tags: A Short Trip Down Memory Lane, Old friends in Old Age