I didn’t grow up in the mountains but I had always wanted to live there in a cabin with our cozy patterned socks on from L.L. Bean with a fire always blazing in the hearth and everyone smiling around cups of steaming liquid. Always smiling. Always drinking. Always a fire or joyously chopping wood in the snow for the fire. I’ve always, apparently, wanted to live in an L.L. Bean catalogue.
We live in the mountains now but not in a cabin. Instead we live in Greg’s house where for the first two years there was a bike lock keeping the hearth locked shut. At the end of two years we were permitted to remove the bicycle lock for aesthetic reasons if we promised to never ever start a fire.
I don’t know if I’ve ever started a fire in Boone, come to think of it, except for when we had a bunch of bank statements and I burned them in a red metal radio flyer wagon in the driveway.
I never expected we’d still be living in Greg’s house after four years instead of on that tract of land I’d dreamed of with the gravel road leading up to it. And now that I’m talking about it, I seem recall telling my then 13 year old son that he’d have a four wheeler like his friends back home in Georgia.
The things we say to ourselves and others to ease the pain of a lived life. Endless hearth fires and hot cocoa indeed.
And speaking of fuzzy warm socks, my wife recently told me to stop giving her fuzzy warm socks for every occasion. She has a drawerful she never wears.