Sandy Hevener

We were totally unprepared when our daughter announced she was leaving her husband and moving into a log cabin south of Charlottesville. He was kind and intelligent. We loved him. They had a very nice home and good jobs.

The words of my father-in-law echoed in my head.  "Things sure look different from the inside than they do from the outside."  And I reflected on what others said when I made a similar "whoa, don't want to spend the rest of my life doing this," decision at the same age.

The directions she gave to the cabin were familiar. Thirty-some years earlier, a young man had given me the same directions to see the log cabin he was helping restructure. Two old log cabins scavenged from other places provided the core for it. He’d invited me to see the work underway and I was dually impressed with the log cabin’s omniscience and him.

Log cabins built in the days when glass was at a premium are notoriously dark inside. In this one, large windows replaced squinty ones. High white ceilings bounced light through rooms. An unusual custom window filled a space normally chinked to avoid cutting the logs for a standard one. A stone fireplace with a huge stone sun wasn’t quite finished. He said someone else was building it.

Then a young woman in a long skirt walked up holding a small baby. He introduced her as Francis. She smiled sweetly and started telling him what to do next. I excused myself and headed to the car wondering why he’d invited me to see the cabin. I’d assumed he was single, as I was then.

When my husband and I arrive, what had been an open field in front of the cabin is now a small forest of tall pines. The cabin is exactly as I remembered it and so is the large white farmhouse in front of it. The landlord lives there. Our daughter introduces us and she says she raised many children in the house. One of them, a lady of about thirty, is there.

Finally I take a deep breath, mention my old friend’s name and ask if she ever knew him. She says no. I ask about the fireplace and she says her husband built it, but she’d hired some college students, graduates and others to work on it. “I think they were trust-funders, wanted to work with their hands,” she says.

Sitting in the cabin today, I hear echoes- echoes from my past and from unknown people many years before. And I hear whispers from the future and my daughter’s life.