It has been awhile since I last wrote about the Miner’s Cabin, and a lot has happened since we first started cleaning it out a year ago. Time for an update! Early this year, Dad got the electricity working again, and also got the stove cleaned out and in safe, operational order. Light and warmth are kind of important when it comes to being productive in the winter.
So, over the last couple of months, slowly and steadily, I got the bedroom closer to livable, and Sarah helped me get one of our bed frames set up. Mom and I brought a load of bookcases, a dresser, and my desk from our storage unit in Hermosa, which is helping with the organizing of books and boxes. 
Growing up, some of my favorite books were Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away, two treasures of children’s literature written by Elizabeth Enright. The stories got into my imagination, and I pored over them, again and again. The story was pure joy to read, and I think as I was reading I was the little girl who visits her cousin, Julian, and the two of them on their explorations end up discovering a mysterious, abandoned set of lake houses on the shore of a swamp. As they explore the old lake houses, and Portia’s family ends up buying an old boarded-up mansion in the woods nearby, they rummage through boxes filled with ancient “treasures,” things that spark their imaginations, things from a bygone era. I’ve felt some of that same excitement as we’ve worked on the Miner’s Cabin, cleaning up and putting back to use things that had been all but forgotten. 
It is exciting to put the life back into a dusty old cabin, to feel it start to breathe again, with windows open and sunlight streaming in, or with a blazing fire crackling in the stove. It is deeply satisfying to see the hominess emerge, as order and beauty return to the Miner’s Cabin. It is rewarding to see the forgotten things adorn the dusted shelves, Sarah’s and my artwork and photography mingled with ancient family photos, along with the drawing that Dad had done as a Christmas gift for Grandpa and Grandma years and years ago.
Old blue Mason jars we found in the cabin loft, sparkling olive oil bottles which I’ve collected, my great-grandmother’s old pincushion, precious shelf nick-knacks I brought from Illinois, old fox furs that have been in the Miner’s Cabin for a couple of decades, family crests, a framed family tree, a chamber pot, shelves and shelves of my books, and a whole encyclopedia that Grandma and Grandpa put in the log cabin – A pleasant mingling of old and new and just plain interesting.
A home should reflect something of the people living inside of it – How enjoyable, then, to be setting up house both with things that Sarah and I brought with us from Illinois, as well as with those things that are tied somehow to our heritage. Not only that, but the wood heat and lack of plumbing tickle my sense of adventure, to get a closer glimpse of the lives my great-great grandparents lived, as homesteaders in eastern South Dakota in the late 1800s. It will be a far cry from roughing it, but living in a 100-year-old cabin definitely has romance to it.
We enjoy repurposing and reusing, and on my agenda for this week is making brand-new curtains from some old white sheets I found while we were organizing and cleaning. Sarah and I have so many ideas for making this little place our home. Moving day can’t come soon enough! We can’t wait!
We saw a handful of antelope, which tend to be pretty reserved creatures, but we saw no burros. We looked and looked, and even drove a short ways down a few side roads, but saw nor hide nor hair of the little beasties. It was rather disappointing. So, since there were no burros to eat the package of Saltines, Sarah and I ate them.
The first little bit of springtime waked to the world on our windowsill – A beautiful paperwhite, a species of narcissus. My aunt gave the bulbs as Christmas gifts to the families, and ours bloomed, less than a month after Christmas. Springtime is just around the corner!
We’ve been working hard getting the Miner’s Cabin closer to inhabitable, and week by week, we make progress. The electical was looked at by my dad, Jess’s fiance, and some knowledgeable men from our church, so we’ve been okayed on that. Dad maintenanced the wood stove and we have raided the woodshed up at Grandma’s house multiple times. That old Miner’s Cabin is already becoming a cozy place to spend an afternoon or evening. Nothing warms like a wood fire, that’s for sure.
The fire was hardly needed yesterday morning, and before I got the cabin warmed up, it was warmer outside than in. Kashka, the black kitten, found her favorite sunny spot on the porch on top of a pile of old rugs. She basked as only a cat can. What a life a cat leads.
Finally, after lunch, Sarah and I set aside whatever we were working on and determined to enjoy the beautiful weather. We love to just start walking, finding ravines we’ve never walked through before, searching out the unseen. Sometimes the very process of seeing the connection between known places has the allure of fresh discovery. We headed towards the highway, stopping to marvel at lichens, old dead trees, pine burls, and other secrets of the winter.
When we got to the highway, our property runs down into a little hollow and when a person stands in the bottom of this hollow, the highway is fifteen or twenty feet above. In this hollow, we found a culvert we’d never seen before, with barbed wire over it to keep cows from getting through to the other side. We climbed under, of course, and clambered through the culvert. It is a good sized culvert, big enough to walk through it, bent over.
It was mostly dry, but snowmelt had left a few inches of water in one half of it. We could hear trucks and cars going overhead occasionally, and when we came out on the other side near the Firehouse, we sheepishly and with great amusement saw our mail lady delivering mail at a cluster of mailboxes on the highway. No idea if she saw us or not, but culvert crawling isn’t exactly a “normal” activity that post-highschool young ladies participate in, I suppose. But I find more appeal in culvert crawling than a what the culture expects that young ladies (or young men, for that matter) are to enjoy.
Song Dog Journal 