My father’s status on the extra board had one major advantage. He scheduled his own time, and was able to arrange a whole month off — with no pay of course — to come up and prepare the cabin for winter. We were overjoyed, even though we knew that most of his time would be spent working.
He brought up a trailer-load of books, supplies, and more furniture, including our kitchen table. We then moved our picnic table and benches back out to the grove, for more al fresco dining. Most welcome of all were the chairs — real chairs with backs on them. Mother wrote several times about the chairs, mentioning in one letter that, “We want some chairs badly … they would be a blessing.” Only someone who has lived for weeks with nothing but beds and benches to sit on, can fully appreciate the luxurious pleasure of leaning back in a chair — even if it was just a plain, unpadded, oak kitchen chair.
In addition to furnishings for the front room — which we would finally begin using once he made it livable — he brought up our Columbia wind-up portable phonograph and records. At last we had entertainment, even if it was only the dozen or so familiar disks we had listened to countless times in the past. After the long hiatus, however, they were all new to us. I’m sure little creatures in the grove were surprised to hear the new sounds floating out our window — songs like “Wreck of the Royal Palm,” “Springtime in the Rockies,” “A Poor Tramp Has to Live,” and Al Jolson’s hits “Mammy” and “Sonny Boy.”
John was particularly happy when he saw his cot on the trailer. The only time I can remember my father miscalculating on a carpentry project was when he made the bunk for John, the first week after we moved. He fastened the boards which held the mattress by nailing them in from the bottom. This might have been adequate had John only used the bed for sleeping as intended; but with so little space and furniture, we both used it heavily — especially when cooped up on rainy days. Our jumping and bouncing soon pulled the nails loose, and Mother wrote, “The Bunk is the ‘bunk’ now. The boards have come out and been re-nailed so many times that the nails won’t hold any more.”
Above all (both literally and figuratively) Daddy began with the most urgent job — the new roof. John and I were able to help a little with that, but only on the lower and flatter lean-to section. We daubed tar over the roofing nails and carried things up and down the ladder.
He then started rehabilitating the main part of the house, which we referred to as “the front room.” With no ceiling, there was an unobstructed view to the roof rafters. A ceiling would not only provide storage space, as a newly created attic, but also would make the house easier to heat during winter. Turning once again to the old barn for materials, this became daddy’s next major project. First he salvaged some long, straight, seasoned logs for the beams. He put these in place two feet apart, alternating so the thick end of one log was adjacent to the thin end of the next.
To manage the heavy logs and pieces of timber singlehandedly for the high work, he arranged a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, to hoist and hold them aloft, while he secured them in place. Once the cross beams were installed, scrap lumber from mangers and partitions in the rapidly-disappearing barn became the new attic floor boards.
In brief respites from his building projects, we all went for walks in The Big Woods and pointed out the timber trees we had located, as well as our wild strawberry patch (sans early spring berries), Juneberry, and pincherry bushes. The chokecherries were ripe and ready. Daddy chuckled as we innocently took our first mouthful and quickly spit it out in disgust — our mouths puckered forever-more, and the berries’ graphic name no longer a mystery….
One of the many stories he told us about his father’s hired man, Lars, was how he would fill his mouth with chokecherries at one end of the field he was cultivating, and spit out the hard seeds all the way to the other end as he walked behind the cultivator, then repeat the process on the return trip.
Daddy also managed to work in some fishing on one of the nearby lakes, and he and John caught their limit of northern pike. This provided a welcome change in our diet, although our neighbors had occasionally dropped by to share their catch with us.
Naturally, Mother was not idle during the remodeling phase. She presided over the canning and jelly-making operation. In order to preserve our plentiful wild berries, Daddy had brought her cases of canning jars. John and I helped pick raspberries, pin-cherries, and june-berries from bushes in The Big Woods. On jelly days, we all loved the rich, intoxicating aroma of berry brew that filled the cabin, wafting out into the grove through open windows.
Mother ladled the cooked berries into clean muslin sugar sacks, tied them with string at the top, and hung them from knobs on the kitchen cabinet doors, allowing juice to seep through and drain into the bowls underneath. Throughout the day and overnight, the purple-stained bags dripped away, until only seeds and skins remained.
The next morning, she measured equal parts of the strained juice and sugar into a large kettle, and stirred the mixture while it simmered slowly on the woodstove. She knew it had reached jelly stage, when it fell from the spoon in a brilliant, glossy sheet.
The final step was pouring the ruby-red liquid into sterilized glasses, and then topping with a thin layer of melted paraffin to seal it. She set each batch of five or six glasses in a row on the windowsill over the washstand. They colored the morning sun shining through like stained glass, flashing our fingers in glowing red light as we reached toward the cooling jars.
The next day she added more paraffin before placing a metal lid on each glass. John and I helped carry them down to the cellar shelves, adding them to our growing bounty — to be used “once the snow flies.” Our expanding food supply, along with Daddy’s recent weatherproofing projects, relieved some of our trepidation about winter approaching — at least for the moment.
The condition of our all-important little-house was deteriorating rapidly, so after the roof, Mother’s next priority was a new facility. As the first structure in their long-term building replacement program, daddy bought brand new lumber and screen for the project. His improved design featured two openings, complete with hinged lids to help keep flies out, a rather uncommon refinement. Screened vents under the peak of the roof offered ventilation, and a coat of primer sealed the wood, but still allowed the grain to show through. He used the same location with its handy well-worn path, but deepened the original hole in the ground. Certainly we had the finest facility in our neighborhood.
The replacement structure had a slightly larger footprint than the old one, so daddy had to chop down a small oak tree growing a little too close to one corner. He completed the finishing touches the day before he had to return to Minneapolis. As we made our nightly trek down the path the following night, we saw eerie spots of mysterious light glowing from a distance, like a group of glowworms or fireflies. They did not move, however, and upon closer inspection, we discovered they were luminescent chips of wood from the oak tree he had cut down. They were so strange that all three of us wrote about them in our next letters — and enclosed samples in case he didn’t believe us, trusting that we were not violating any obscure postal regulations.
Clear skies for his entire visit allowed the work to proceed, but offered no opportunity to test our new roof. Soon afterwards however, a torrential downpour provided a worthy trial-by-water, and Mother, in her understated manner, wrote “It is nice to have a tight roof.” But I’m sure he would rather have enjoyed it with us — savoring the sound of raindrops on new tarpaper.
Determined not to waste any wild fruit, mother made chokecherry sauce — which, even when cooked with copious amounts of sugar, hardly qualified as desert. The inedible seeds inside each fruit were another story, but Mother forgot to warn us about them before John took his first large spoonful. His reaction was memorable enough for me to describe in my next letter. Daddy later wrote to John, “Ruth told me you took too big a bite of chokecherry sauce the first time you tried it.” After that experience, John’s view was that even a small bite was too big, but Mother wouldn’t hear of wasting any free food, so we learned to eat the sauce slowly, and became adept at intra-oral seed extraction.
Mother got double-duty out of the firewood needed for canning, by using the oven for baking at the same time. Our little stove turned the house into a sauna on hot summer days, driving us outdoors to the cool shade of the grove on those afternoons. But we could always smell the gingerbread, sugar cookies, or rice pudding baking, as if we were in the kitchen — a hint of our supper menu that evening. The only advantage of our cabin’s flimsy construction (for the summertime) was that it allowed the heat to dissipate rapidly, once the stove cooled off.