Where The Trees Know My Name

This is where the trees know my name. I borrowed the phrase from Geronimo. When he requested to be allowed to return to his homeland he expressed the need to return to where the trees know his name. I plan to post a blog regarding that specific subject but for now let me tell you about the place where the trees know my name. This cabin sits on a mountaintop and when you are there you feel like you are in another place,in another time, somewhat separate, even elevated from the rest of the world. Sitting on the front porch you have a million dollar view. I will post a photo of that a tad bit later. This cabin and the ten acres on which it sits are very special to me. Nine years ago, while reading the classifieds my Dad and I read about this place for sale. It was very private and only accessible by four wheel drive. We went to look at it. It wasn't completely finished and would require lots of work. But it was an awesome place. When I left Dad's headed back out of state there really wasn't a specific plan of action in mind. Really, I didn't spend much time thinking about it after that. And as usual, my Dad surprised me when he called to say that he'd bought it to make it his deer hunting lodge. The next time he called, he indicated that he'd actually bought it for me. The deal was that I'd have to pay the taxes and related expenses for completion as well as upkeep. WOW....thinking at the time....my Dad bought me a what? Where? Why? As a true daddy's girl, I gratefully accepted and didn't question the issue to any great length. Within six months, the motive was slowly and surely revealed when my Dad asked My Honey, "what do you think of a girl who's daddy buys her a cabin on a mountain to get her to move back and she's still living in the city?" Well, as most of my Dad's well thought out plans as well as some of his "spur of the moment" plans do somehow seem to work out over the course of time. Two years after he bought "my" cabin, My Honey & I moved out of state to live there. As you may remember from my 4-21-08 post "!00 Random Things", #49 , I lived in a cabin on a mountain for two years without running water. HA ! My Dad worked on the cabin from the beginning. He finished the inside back room complete with cedar trim. During that process, much to my dismay, he had an accident with a saw and cut off one of his index fingers. I grieved for his lost finger. My Dad always had such nice hands. To this day, I look at that beautiful cedar trim and think of my Dad's big, beautiful, hardworking hands. He built wood steps off front and back porch. The cabin has such sentimental value to me. It is the place that you feel like you are sitting on the top of the world. It is a place of beauty, peace and solitude. It is a place where you retreat to when the real world becomes to much to bear. The grave of my constant companion of 13 years is on that mountain. Maximiliano, a German Shepard loved the cabin and running around the 100's of acres of timberland which belonged to a paper mill company. There is also, other meaning to this special place. My grandparents and great grandparents were country folk from those mountain ridges. There are letters telling of how it took their people 8 days to come to this area from Wolfe City, Texas in a covered wagon. The road that runs in front of the property has memories galore from my childhood. Back then it was a dirt road with lots of hills and curves. We went on picnics. We swam in the creek. We explored the woods and an old lead mine. We took long drives on weekend through those lands. We were around there horseback riding. We even went on 20+ mile trail rides there. Often my grandfather, Pop led those expeditions. For more reasons than I can remember right now, that cabin on the mountain is my only way to ever go home again. For nine years, I've worked hard to hang on to it. I've worried about it whenever we haven't lived there. I remember sitting on the tailgate of the truck a few years back with Brother Bill (not a preacher or really my brother, but a close friend for 32 years)talking about how now we are living the future that we'd worried so much about as teenagers. We laughed and said, of all the things that we'd worried about that in reality very few of those things ever came to pass. Well, sometimes, what you worry about does come to pass. We haven't lived at the cabin for five years and even though we go to check on the place, we've always worried of "what could happen" to it in our absence. May 1, 2008, I arrived to find that a storm had taken off one section of the roof during a rainy week. There was damage inside from having it exposed to rain. The first box I tried to pick up in the attic fell apart in my hands. Suddenly I realized that I'd found our old home movies from the 1960's that I'd been looking for for years. They were wet and ruined. I'd been thinking a lot about those movies, especially since my Mom had died unexpectedly in 2007. I was heartbroken. This past Sunday, My heart was broken again when I arrived to find that the cabin had been burglarized. I arrived just before dark and was looking forward to sitting on the porch to enjoy the beautiful sunset. I noticed immediately that lights were on in rooms that shouldn't be. I carefully approached the cabin and was not sure if the people who'd invaded my unique, private and personal part of the universe were still inside. I've been lucky in life to never had experienced this before. I'm hurt in a way that many wouldn't understand. My next blog will tell the rest of the story but for now I feel too "traumatized" to go into it. I don't want to blog about it until I've had time to sort it out first in my head and my heart. I will tell you that I was armed and was angry and wanted to stay in the shadows of the woods to fire off a warning shot or two to see if I could flush out the people who'd broken into "my" cabin but I used the good sense that I was given to back off and call 911. Then I had to go back down five switchbacks to the bottom of the mountain to go pick up the sheriff's deputy whose patrol car wouldn't be able to make the trek up the mountain to the place where the trees know my name. Think about it, do you know the place where the trees know your name. If you do, enjoy it, honor it and somehow protect it.