Deep in the mountains of North Carolina, at the end of a rutted dirt road you’ll find a log cabin. It’s made of square logs chinked with mortar. It has a front porch, a tin roof, and a red screen door.
The cabin is featured in several chapters of my memoir. This is where I recovered from a broken heart. You’ll read about it in chapter 5 of Good Eye, Bad Eye.
Here’s a photo of the cabin, taken off Zillow.
I lived here from 1980 to 1982. When I moved in, I was 22 years old. It was my first time living alone. I spent a lot of evenings on that front porch, smoking weed and wondering where my life was going to lead me. I endured great loneliness here, but it was also a healing place. A place where solitude wrapped around me like a soft blanket. I grew to love the cabin, and thought I might never leave. You can guess how that worked out.
For decades the cabin has lived in my mind and heart. Over the years I thought about it in the way we remember a house we lived in long ago, a home that played a significant role in our life. The symbol of a past chapter.
Yesterday I had the chance to revisit that chapter.
I was in North Carolina for a workshop. I knew I’d be only a short drive from the cabin. Before I went, I looked it up on the county GIS property records and found the name of the person who bought the place years ago. I wanted to know who I might encounter if I went there.
When the workshop ended, I got in my car and drove the familiar country roads that led to my old home. My plan was to roll up in front of the cabin, lean out my car window, and snap a quick photo. I wanted a good picture I could share with you for the upcoming serialization of my book. I figured if someone happened to be in the yard, I’d say hello and ask permission to take a photo.
The moment I saw the cabin, I knew I wouldn’t be taking a picture. The front porch was literally stuffed, one end to the other, with clutter. Patches of bare dirt pockmarked the yard. The place looked unloved, unkempt.
I saw a car parked under a metal carport. I pulled in next to it. I’d have to do that anyway, in order to back up and drive out. For a moment I just sat there in my car, wondering what to do. I could hear dogs barking. I could feel the cabin’s pull on me.
Something led me to get out of the car, walk up on the porch, thread my way through the clutter, knock on the door. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish. I wasn’t sure what I’d say if someone answered.
Voices erupted inside the cabin, behind the closed door.
“Get the dog!”
“Bobo … quit! Hush!”
“Dammit!”
The barking grew frenzied. I waited, shifting from one foot to the other. Maybe I should go back to my car. Drive on out of here.
Several minutes passed while I considered whether to stay or go. I could tell, from the sound of it, that there was more than one dog inside. Dogs ready to rip me apart. And people who were struggling to corral those dogs.
The heavy wooden door swung open.
A middle-aged woman stood there, looking at me through the screen, leaning down to hold a dog by the collar. He wasn’t barking anymore, but he looked at me with suspicion. I could see the shadowy figures of two other dogs, big ones, lurking behind the woman.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother y’all.” I was backing away.
The woman didn’t look annoyed, just curious. I told her my name, then I said I used to live in this cabin a long time ago. I didn’t mention the part about a broken heart.
I expected maybe she’d smile politely and that would be the end of it. But she seemed in a mood to talk. She told me her name. It matched the one I’d seen in the GIS records. She said she and her grown daughters had moved here 15 years ago after her husband died. She introduced me to the daughters. One was out of sight, her voice coming from a far corner of the cabin’s main room. The other was sitting in a recliner near the door, peering at an iPad.
“That’s my baby,” the woman said. “She has Down syndrome. She’s 30. She’s always on that tablet. Say hey, baby.”
Baby’s head swiveled halfway toward me, but her eyes never left the screen. “Hey,” she said.
The woman and I talked for a good five minutes, like old friends. It astounded me how trusting she was, opening her door to a stranger who appeared out of the blue on a random Saturday afternoon, a stranger telling an odd story of wanting to revisit the cabin where she used to live.
The woman apologized for “what a mess this place is.” She said she was disabled and couldn’t get around too easily anymore. She said it was hard to keep up the cabin, that it needs a lot of repairs. A thought went through my head: This cabin is old. It’s worn out. It has been through a lot since I left.
The woman invited me to come back sometime. “We’ll clean the place up and get the grill going,” she said.
Then she had her daughter, the one I couldn’t see, write their names and phone number on a Post-it note. She passed it to me through the half-open screen door. The dog seemed okay with me by that time. I bent down and scratched his head.
Before I drove away, I took this photo. It’s the next-door farm. When I lived at the cabin, I never tired of looking at that view. The rolling green, the old house on the hill, the blue sky, the rusty gate. When I lived here, cows grazed in that pasture every day. They kept me from being too lonesome.
The scene looked exactly the way it was engraved in my memory, on my heart. For a moment, I drank it in. Then I drove away from my old home, bumping over the ruts in the dirt road.
I didn’t look back.
Reminder: Only free subscriptions to “Good Eye, Bad Eye” are currently available. If you subscribe now, you’ll have access to all my posts throughout April and May. On June 1, when the first chapter of the book drops, I’ll open up the paid subscription option. At that time, if you upgrade your sub to paid, you’ll receive a new chapter each week. The serialization will span four months, June through September.
Every once in a blue moon, I drive by the house I owned from 2001 to 2013. My favorite part of that house was that I ripped out a lot of sod and put in all kinds of raised bed gardens all around it and a bunch of butterfly bushes along the perimeter. The last time I drove by, I saw that they had taken out all the raised beds and put back sod. It made me really sad. The butterfly bushes were also gone. The craziest thing though, was that I had also painted a bunch of wine bottles just for fun and put them on metal stakes in the landscaping right around the house. Totally cheap art. The gardens were gone, but the wine bottles, faded somewhat by the sun, were still there.
Jeanne, that's powerful medicine going back to the place you once lived and that was so pivotal in your life.