When I was very little, my mom would take my brother and me “Up North” to visit Roger and Caroline. My earliest memory of being there is from about three years old – sitting under their kitchen table in my new bathing suit. I remember it, because I loved the button on the bottoms.
Roger and Caroline lived in the middle of a square mile of land in the Upper Peninsula. To get to their house, you’d park your car by the road, move the giant log gate across their “driveway” and pull as far off Rte. 2 as you could – the goal was to get your car out of sight of the road, but not get it stuck on the track. We’d walk the half mile or so to their one room house, attempting to avoid the giant puddles left in the ruts from their cart, and hang out for a while before turning around (with the cart) to go get our camping gear we’d left behind. For me as a child, it was magical - nothing but trees, and no one but the five of us for as far as I could see. Everything was so green, and smelled different, and was so quiet.
Their home was at the far end of a field. In those days they still had cows and chickens, in addition to their massive garden. The garden was bigger than our apartment, and had so much food in it. The house was really more of a shack. It's one room contained a bed, a small wood burning stove, a counter, and a rocking chair. Their cooking stove was outside, as was their refrigerator – which was a terrifyingly deep hole in the ground. They lowered food into it in buckets, and used a pole with a hook on the end to get it back out.
We would camp in the field, and hang out for a long weekend, or even a whole week. The only thing I really hated was the outhouse. It was dark, and smelly, and horrible. I was always afraid I would fall in. There were sometimes bees, and always spiders. It was nightmare fuel.
When I was about five, Caroline had a baby, and Roger decided they needed a bigger house. He and my mom’s cousin poured the foundation, and Roger hand milled the lumber with his chainsaw. The glass for the windows was reclaimed from somewhere (I can’t remember where). Their new house was essentially a giant barn, with a loft over half of it. A big double-barreled wood-burning furnace was in the center of the floor, and they finally had a kitchen inside, with a big-ass wood-burning stove. The house was raised off the ground, so you could see right under it, to help keep out snow during the treacherous U.P. winters. It was the first house I’d ever been in where you not only didn’t have to remove your shoes upon entering, if you liked your socks, you’d keep them on forever.
The garden was moved nearby, but the cows & chickens became a thing of the past. In the mid eighties, they became vegan – not for philosophical reasons, but because they didn’t want to eat what they couldn’t grow, and couldn’t be bothered to keep livestock anymore. The new outhouse was a goddamned palace. It had windows on three sides, an electric light, and the vent pipe was so high there was no smell at all.
Roger was a former English teacher, and he instilled in me a love of language. They didn’t have a phone, so we’d write them letters. He would write back on the reverse side to conserve paper, and he’d correct the letter on the front. I loved getting letters back from him, because I always tried to make them perfect, and his corrections were a way to measure my skill with the written word.
The visits dropped off as I went through high school, and became an adult. The last time I was up there was ten years ago, with my own daughter. Roger and Caroline were old, but they welcomed us the same as they had a decade before. They fed us oatmeal with rhubarb & maple syrup, showed us their ten-year revolving composting set-up, gave my daughter a woodchuck skull, and had long conversations about everything from serial killers (he taught John Norman Collins) to Six Feet Under, to how to make maple syrup.
The last time we saw him, they were in town for Roger to go to the VA for medical care. He looked frail, but good. My mother got a letter from Caroline on Tuesday, letting us know that Roger had passed away on October 2nd. There will be no service, and Caroline will be scattering his ashes in one of his favorite places on their property.
I feel guilty for not having taken my daughter to see them more, for not visiting or writing more. I am lost, and heartbroken that I will never get to talk to this amazing man again. With no memorial I don’t even have a way to talk to anyone about how awesome he was, so I wrote (a tiny portion of) it out, and posted it here.
tl;dr Roger died, and I'm sitting here crying.
Submitted October 10, 2014 at 07:36PM by thisbuttonsucks http://ift.tt/1waXZ29 offmychest
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