Cabin has become a labor of love

“So,” said my wife of 48 years, “what were your first impressions?”

We were sitting in the sun on the patio and thinking about a trip up to her family’s cabin in southern New Hampshire.

It would be a milestone trip.

My first visit to the cabin was precisely 50 years ago.

“Was it how short my father was?” my wife asked.

Nope. I knew her father wasn’t the tallest guy around. He and I had actually overlapped that summer of 1969 in Paris. He’d grown a beard. My hair was longer than it would ever be. And we got together at a sidewalk café, pretending to be boulevardiers instead of tourists.

So what were my first impressions?

Back in the States after a summer of adventure, a buddy and I crashed at my sister Linda’s apartment in Manhattan for a night or two before going our separate ways. He headed back to Gary via Greyhound, while I took the whimsically named Peter Pan Bus Lines up to New England.

It says volumes about my priorities that I was so intent on seeing the woman who would become my wife that my parents took second place.

The bus took me up to Brattleboro, Vermont, where — as planned — Connie and her dad showed up to take me the rest of the way to the cabin.

The family car was a little Ford Cortina, not the company’s finest hour. But it got us there.

And it told me something important: The girl I was in love with was not rich. Her dad was an English professor at a small college in Illinois. Her mother was an art teacher dealing with junior high kids in what she called “the clay-throwing period.”

But because there was this cabin in New Hampshire, it was distinctly out of the ordinary for a small town guy from Indiana. Old money? Not really.

The cabin had been built by Connie’s great aunt, who was a Latin teacher in Philadelphia early in the last century. That was back in the days before air-conditioning, when getting out of the city and heading for the hills of New England was about the best you could do.

The great aunt — Tante — never married. But she’d been the matchmaker for Connie’s parents and left the cabin to the young couple in her will.

I knew none of that, of course.

Consistently clueless, I watched the shadows of the forests go by and wondered what the heck I had gotten myself into.

At a place called Clinton Corners — not on any map that I know of — we made a turn down yet another wooded road. At the lake, we took a turn and went up the hill into what was by then darkness.

At a particularly sharp turn at the steepest part of the hill, I saw the signs. One said, “Frank.” That was Connie’s last name. One said, “Ellis.” I had no idea who that was but later learned it was Tante. The third said, “Kum Inn.”

And I shuddered inwardly.

My family had always made fun of names like that for cabins and vacation homes. Names like, “Thistle Dew” or “Bide A Wee.” Especially names with bad puns and fractured spelling. Names like, “Kum Inn.”

The good news is I got over that first impression.

For 50 years now, I’ve helped maintain the cabin with that corny name. I’ve swept it out. I’ve cleaned the cobwebs. I’ve swept pine needles off the roof. I’ve painted fresh coats of stain on its exterior. I’ve crawled around under it. I’ve cleared away summer and spring’s debris from the foundation. I’ve dedicated a chunk of my vacation to it.

And, like my wife, I’ve come to love the place.

Still can’t say I’m crazy about that name though.