I sat down and started writing an essay. Writing a good, though-out essay--thought maybe I could post that here. My blog needs a niche, or reviving, or something. And wouldn't it be interesting to be able to sit down and read intelligent and thoughtful essays that were good and thought-out?
But I gave up quickly. I didn't even take the photo for this post. It's one my uncle Niel, who's building the fence, took and that my mom sent out. Didn't take it, didn't load it up.
It's a picture of the Corner. Bertelson Corner is a piece of land on Big Turtle Lake in northern Minnesota with three tar-paper cabins from maybe the '40s, a wash house, a boat house, a tool shed, and a pump house. It has a regulation-size badminton court and a shuffle court that no one's used for years (but that I've always been dying to try. Once I brought this up and somebody said the stuff to play was probably in the former-boat-house-now-tool-shed and I was sent to look but couldn't find anything and was terribly disappointed), two aluminum canoes, a speed boat and a pontoon boat, and an great big Windstream trailer that must be from the '60s. The Corner is a time capsule--the chairs and tables, the pictures and the old magazines lying around. There's a fan in "the House"--the biggest of the little cabins--that has a green tag hanging off of it. "If you take this," it says, "make sure it's back at the Corner by July 1958. --Dad."
I was surprised about how happy I was to be back here. I came when I was little-little, and didn't come again until my second sister was in junior high and I was 11 or 12, and the three of us (with my mom) came up. For a long time I felt like I had missed out on the Corner because of that little gap. But when I was getting an update on my second cousins--the ones that were younger than me, young enough to not consider ourselves the same age, are starting (and finishing up!) college, the baby who wasn't born yet that first trip back is in sixth grade--I realized I have been coming for awhile.
It's usually walking across from the cabins towards the lake--under the trees, across the short grass--that I start to wax reflexive. I think about the last time I'd been there. I think about how old I was then, what I was doing. The Corner was bought by my maternal great-grandparents, and my grandma and her sisters spend time in the summer up here together. Since I got here on Friday, I've been listening to them talk about the cabin they would rent before the Corner was purchased. Listening to them talk about the people they know or knew up here. Listening to them tell stories and laugh and laugh, and realizing they all have a sense of humor and love of life, like when they were younger (I think I realized this when my grandma told about how her mom sent her and her sister outside with some cleaned fresh fish to put them in that side of the icebox that opened from the kitchen and from outside--it was dark, and when they opened the little door, there were these two hands sticking out to scare them--their mother's hands). I think about myself and how I've changed from Corner visit to Corner visit--how much more they must do that than I. Thinking about year to year, not just back ten or fifteen years. The other day, we went on a drive, my mom and grandma and great aunts and I. We went in to see the place of a man they had known who had passed away. The now-owner drove in while we were there, getting out of her car, wary. My grandma explained we had known the former owner and introduced the group. "We're from Bertelson Corner," she said, "been coming here since 1925..."
