The Tilted Cabin

If walls could talk, I would be one of eleven. And I would have a lot to say.

The cabin that is my home should not have been built. There are laws on where and how to build and just by existing the cabin was breaking them. It was not the cabin's fault. It did not build itself.

Pairs of hands that belonged to many different humans built this cabin in spirts of activity over a span of a few decades. Their handy work created this wooden beast of a dwelling, which has been reported by many occupants to have "no right angles." I was there during creation, but not at the very beginning. At the very beginning the long, log-legs of the yet-to-be to cabin were dug into the muddy ground. The creators could have built a square or rectangle, but instead they started with an ill-proportioned octagon. These young humans had many dreams and this cabin was one of them.

Next came the floor. I was not there for that, so I can't speak much about it. I have always known this floor under me.

There are eleven outside walls. You might think the cabin giant with so many walls, but alas, the cabin is more a shack—a tilted shack on long legs, built in the bog of a temperate rainforest, on the northwest coast of the United States. At first there were eight walls and I was one of them, but a bathing room and second loft were added, which took down three walls, thankfully I was not one of them. Three walls gone and mourned and then six new walls added to get us to the current state of eleven—this math is not important to anyone but us walls.

I am afraid that you will think of me as something quite minor, a small piece of a larger whole of something too small to care about, but I have seen things that are beautiful, and I know something about life, even though the life I have is very different from the living creatures I watch.

I’m the oldest wall of this funny little cabin, which is placed deep in a bog, so the young humans could be surrounded by trees as they dreamed up their good futures. These youth pretended the great big world of gypsum walls was so far away. None of those humans who called this cabin home judged me for my lowly status as a wall of cedar boards and scavenged logs.

Eleven humans have lived within these walls: a worm farmer; a chocolate heiress; a true witch; a carpenter turned biologist who added the second loft and gave the cabin it's spiral shape; a soon-to-be author of preteen novels about dragons; a handyman who was not yet that handy; a fisherman; a teacher; a banjo player who was learning; a singer, whose one of many projects was a psychedelic rock band and a very mixed up girl who thought of herself as witch, writer, artist, medium to muses, but who really, really liked smoking in the doorway as she dreamed of future doings. These humans not only lived here, they called it home. Some lived together, some lived alone.

Humans stomp, burp, fart, sigh, clank dishes, walk in circles, breath in and out all the time. Walls do none of these things. I learn so much from the humans who called the inside of the cabin home.

“The cabin is our spaceship through the night,” the true witch once said.

“It’s our spaceship flying through time,” the mixed up girl added.

Many of these young humans were friends, people who chose to be together because they liked each other’s company. They bequeathed the sacred right to call the cabin home to each other. It had something to do with rent. Rent is the giving of important papers in trade for the right to be with time in the cabin. These important papers are given to the Lord, the landlord. I have come to understand that it is customary for landlords to believe that they own the trees, the ground, the mud as well as all structures— as if the ground isn’t going to own us all one day.

I remember a great proclamation given by the landlord during a Halloween festivity where everyone was dressed as things they were not. The landlord was angry because the renters were making too much noise.

“Why do you think I let you on my land?” The landlord questioned.

An insolent party-goer who was thankfully the landlord’s friend said, “Because some people farm potatoes, but you farm hippies.”

The landlord laughed ruefully. “But I could do something else. It would make sense to do something else, but I let you kids build these crazy cabins in the woods, to pay my property taxes, and give you some space to run around in. You are only young once, but I am not going to get in trouble for you. Now no more drumming, it’s a Wednesday night.”

There was never any drumming on Wednesday nights ever again.

Not every day was a holiday with hellos, laughing, singing, talking, food being served, farts, foot shuffles, moving of seats and the goodbyes that preceded slumber. Most days were normal days, days that strung together in a rhythm. I have witnessed many rhythms. There was the rhythm of the dishes, which are pulled out, topped with the food humans must eat so often it was astounding they could build walls let alone cabins. Dinners could be filled with conversation or filled with the sounds of eating, forks hitting the plate and sliding through the teeth. We walls appreciate different sounds and smells. The sounds hit us, bounced off of us. We absorbed the smells. They became part of us. Maybe we consume the dreams of meals through the waves of steam, oils, wheat and meat changing in composition through heat.

There was the rhythm of the morning, of waking creatures. Humans and felines woke with squished faces and squinty eyes. They yawned and went outside to pass their morning water in the cedars. Canines were quicker to wake and jumped up to great the day with happy, hoppy steps in anticipation of what was a normal day to their humans, but a great adventure to them.

The canines and felines that called this place home in their own languages had their own rhythms. The cats enjoyed the very beginning and end of the day, and usually started their murdering then. The mice enjoyed the deepest part of the night; any mouse who did not find that cloak of night to hide within, usually met a happy cat. One of my favorite creatures was Rufus, a proud canine of northern decent, who hunted mice in the neighbor’s field and slept on his back on a stinky couch placed right in front of me. The couch was deemed good for both humans and dogs. I traveled through the dark hours listening to Rufus breath. He was a happy dog in the morning and once he heard his humans awake, he would jump off the couch and wait with patience at the bottom of the ladder. He never jumped on his humans, he only greeted them with a happy dog smile, tail wags and a few twirls around to show he cared. I think I had such a fondness for Rufus, because he made this cabin feel regal and I enjoyed the sounds of his breathing.

The cats and the humans slept in the first loft, which is high above me, so I only heard their inhalations and exhalations when they were having a hard time breathing—which I have learned is called snoring. Humans accuse each other of snoring often. For me, the morning begins when the humans come down the yew wood ladder, which was handmade by the original landlord. The loft, the land-of-human-sleep, has always been a mystery to me. The humans only sleep down here when they are coughing so much they have to sleep on the stinky couch.

There is another rhythm that has happened, is happening. In the beginning everyone was young, with smooth skin and joints that worked without complaint, but as they gathered more time around them, they changed. I like change. This is probably because change is not in my nature. If a wall is a good wall it does not change. So to watch change is fascinating. Most of these large kids moved on before they were too old. They would rent and then give the honor of renting to the mixed up girl and then she would rent it to someone else. But she always returned. She was not creating little humans, which would cause her to outgrow the cabin. She was not getting a big job that needed her to be in white-walled rooms and look a certain way day to day. She was dreaming and smoking and loving. Her lovers moved away too, having their own little humans. She was sad when they left. She cried in the loft, and then sat on the couch. Sometimes she would pet the dog, if there was one, or a cat, but a few times she laid her hand upon me and rubber her finger tips along my boards.

I knew the mixed up girl best, better than she knew herself. There was a part of being sad that she was attracted to, or she would not have been sad so often.

But there was one sadness that was different. She was gone for a very long time, having people check in on the cabin and its cats. When she returned, Rufus was gone and she was very thin. It is hard for a wall to help or to know how to help. And for the longest time, I was unsure of why she was so sad.

“I know one day I will be less sad about my father’s death. I know that time will heal, but right now I don’t know why I am here, or what I am doing, or what is the point,” said the mixed up girl.

A female friend, who had very long blond hair and a deep voice said, “I don’t think that you will heal. You had to watch both your dad and dog die of cancer at the same time. It’s alright to feel horrible right now. One day, a while from now, it will just feel more normal to be broken.”

The mixed up girl was different. She was so sad. She filled up the cabin with her sadness. She slept, she cried, she sat and stared at us walls, but her stare did not feel kind. We could not feel or see her dreams.

It should be explained that we walls are more than what we seem. We have access to the place with no time, where all walls that have been and will be dream. And it is because we are the silent sentinels that we may feel dreams, see them as real beings. We may watch muses dance. We may feel possibility and enjoy what could be as if it were. We met our mixed up girl in her dreams often, the entire cabin floated with her in her dreams, in her ideas, in her notions. Together we journeyed in a timeless space as she cast her reveries.

But not anymore. The sadness became a state of being. The sadness made the air feel heavy and the boards sag. There were a few good days of singing and cleaning and then the oldest cat went missing and never returned. Our mixed up girl walked around the cabin meowing, calling her lost friend. She did this for four days. And then her desperation turned to such a deep desolation we of the cabin thought we might just sink into the mud. She left to do whatever she did when she left, it was something called work. She returned to try and cook, try and eat, but it was very hard for her. And our mixed up girl did not dream, did not wish, did not walk in the space where time does not exist.

“Our poor girl,” I said to the other walls.

“Our poor girl,” twelve walls said back to me.

When the landlord came down to the cabin and knocked on the door, we all knew something was wrong. It had been a long time since there had been any parties or gatherings and yet he still had a somber look on his wrinkled face.

“They are going to take the land,” he said to our mixed up girl. “It’s my fault. I made some bad bets and can’t pay the property taxes on this place. We are three years behind and they will foreclose in June.”

“That’s two months away,” the mixed up girl said with a sigh.

“Who every buys it from the county will tear everything down and put a McMansion or two here. I tried to sell the land, but the market is no good and the cabins on it make it worth less than the taxes say it’s worth.”

When the landlord left the mixed up girl called her old flame. The singer arrived bringing take-out and they sat on the couch and ate food from white boxes.

“I have that little bit of inheritance from my dad. I checked with the county and if I use all of it, I could buy the landlord another year to get ahead of the taxes. I could just pay all the rent at once,” the mixed up girl suggested.

“But there is still is a lot to pay, and if it doesn’t work out, then you will need that money to rent something else,” the singer said between bites.

“I love this place. It feels like part of me,” the mixed up girl said sounding very sure of herself.

“See if you can buy the land. Offer to pay off his taxes. See what he wants.”

“He mentioned that he would be able to get disability when this property was out of his name.”

“This could work for both of you,” the singer said, point his fork, which was full of food, at her.

The singer had lived with the mixed up girl, but had moved out, because he felt that she was blaming him for her mixed up nature. He still loved her. All the walls could feel that. But he left sooner than we all wanted, probably because he was afraid of all the sadness within these walls.

There was a moment when we felt the sadness break. There was a quiet, working feel in the cabin, as the mixed up girl was bathed in the blue light of her laptop computer. She was not just dreaming; she was planning. We couldn’t read her plans, because we were never taught to read.

And then everyone left. The cats went into crates as if they were going to the vet and never came back. Cloths were put in boxes, all the dishes were put away and the cabinets were closed. Everything was cleaned, even the windows.

When the mixed up girl closed the door, her suitcase in hand, we of the cabin wondered. And there was a lot of time to wonder. So many silent mornings passed, the days so long, with no dinners, just the sunlight fading, the air growing moist. The woodstove burned nothing. Even the mice were cold. We walls creaked with breezes, we moaned under heavy wind, but it was not the same.

There is of course a poetry inside every deserted cabin. The poem is written in the silence, in the time that passes so slowly, in the waiting for something other than the casual mouse or wayward ants.

And then, in mid-afternoon, in the middle of the winter she returned. She walked in laughing, the singer behind her.

“Thanks again for coming to get me,” the mixed up girl said to the singer. Her happy voice was like music to us all.

“You don’t have to thank me. So how does it feel to be a land owner?” The singer asked.

“I don’t own it. I’ll be paying on it for years.”

“You went fishing and then worked on a cruise ship and got this place out of foreclosure. According to the county you own every tree, squirrel and board.”

“Well let’s get a fire going, this place is a bit damp.”

“When do you get the cats back from your mom’s?”

“Tomorrow. She will be sad and happy to see them go.”

There were groceries brought in and put away, and dinner made, and wine drank, and the woodstove held a fire that warmed me to my insulated core.

When it was quite late, the mixed up girl showed the singer to the door. He seemed reluctant to go, but he did with promises to see her again. She kissed him on the cheek, but she had already moved him out. He knew she wanted to have some time with just with us.

“Well I will leave you alone to your cabin,” he said with a very endearing smile and walked the long path to his car.

She sat on the stinky couch and laughed at how much it smelled of dog. She might invest in a new couch. And then she put her hand on me and gently rubbed one of my boards with her fingertip and said, “This is not a normal cabin,” tears rolled down her cheeks, “you are not a normal wall,” she said with a laugh, “and I am not a normal girl, or lady, or whatever I am. I am not sure about owning you cabin, or even you, you funny wall, or you trees, or you ground. But I have earned or bought or put in the proper order the papers that give me the right to spend time with you for my whole life, and that is an honor.”

If walls could cry.