AUGUST 9, 2025 – The gathering had been in the works for a while. Our immediate family (and our sons’ families) would spend a few precious days this month at the Red Cabin on the northwest shore of Grindstone Lake in northwest Wisconsin. Joining us would be Kumar[1] and Emma, close friends of Byron and Mylène. This year marks the 30th anniversary of our move-in to the place where so many memories were to be formed.
Yesterday the big day arrived—as did our eight precious guests. Little could give me greater delight than to observe so much joy in the eyes and voices of this group—and their most eager and gracious host, my good wife Beth, who lives for such gatherings. Il est le raison d’etre pour le cabine rouge . . . though thanks to his Francophone parents, in another year, our two-year-old grandson’s French will far exceed my elementary grasp of that language.
For so many of us old time Minnesotans, Wisconsinites and Michiganders, the family summer cabin/cottage was an institution. When I was a kid, it seemed as though almost everyone—irrespective of financial means—in my class at Franklin Elementary spent lots of time at the family lake place. Each getaway was unique, but they all had much in common. No matter how rustic, the cabin/cottage was what drew three generations—grandparents, moms and dad, aunts, uncles, kids and cousins—together to fish, swim, go for boat rides, and play board games on the screened-in porch.
For our immediate family, the Red Cabin was merely an extension of this tradition—after retirement my Nilsson grandparents had embraced the growing trend of their day (1940) and bought lakeshore property and built a cabin. In 1995 Beth and I built the Red Cabin on land adjoining the far end of what my grandparents had acquired over half a century before. Through our sons’ early high school years, our summer weekends revolved around the cabin experience. Both sets of grandparents were on hand close by—Nilssons at Björnholm, Bogers at Windsong (along with cousins, aunts and uncles there and at Cha-Ro-Ke II)—and hardly a weekend evening passed without an extended family gathering around the dinner table or s’mores fire. All manners of outdoor activity consumed daytime hours when the weather was suitable, and plenty of indoor diversions kept people occupied in inclement conditions.
But all that changed as people grew older and apart. Windsong passed out of the family. Björnholm, once the gathering place for the Nilssons, was seldomly visited by anyone except its meticulous caretakers, my sister Elsa and her husband, Chuck. The Red Cabin? Visits by our sons became few and far between. Even Beth found reasons to limit her stays. Over time, I wound up making more solo trips. The voices of our kids’ childhood were long silent; the stir of their playful commotions reduced to photos on the wall. More by the year, the Red Cabin became a faded storehouse of retreating memories, a once vibrant place, it now stood in quiet loneliness much of the time.
Six years ago, the Red Cabin’s largely solitary existence was interrupted by a wedding extravaganza drawing guests from the world over. In my formal welcome, I opened with “Hello” in six languages. For the week, the Red Cabin beamed as it never had. Six months later Covid hit. The prospect of hosting visitors vanished.
Now six and a half years later . . . Beth arrived Thursday with a car full of victuals and a veritable Santa’s workshop of toddler toys in anticipation of our grandson’s second birthday celebration Sunday. Kumar and Emma arrived Friday in time for dinner. At nightfall, I met Byron’s family at the airport. They packed their gear and themselves into the car, and off I drove them, straight to . . . the Red Cabin. Cory’s family took to the same road about a half hour later.
We arrived at just past midnight. Beth had turned on the backyard lights to welcome us, and the inside of the cabin was aglow with the warm light of a dozen lamps. We heard chatter emanating from the porch. Then came hugs and greetings, soon repeated when Cory’s clan arrived.
A stiff breeze out of the south brought relief from the tropical heat and humidity. As we chattered away on the porch, despite the late hour, the Sturgeon Moon shone through broken clouds racing across the sky and the trees along the shore, swaying in the wind. The draw of this other-worldly scene was irresistible. Soon Cory and Byron, with Illiana and Kumar in tow, had changed into their swimming suits and were headed for the dock. Beth and I joined them—on the dock, not in the water, where the four walked together silhouetted against the shimmering surface of the lake. It was a magical moment, one as fleeting as all the sweet moments that preceded it over the decades, except this conjunction of time, place and people etched an arc of diamonds across my memory.
It was two in the morning before I slipped off to bed upstairs—the first of the grown-ups to do so. As I drifted toward Nod, the breeze dispersed the soft sound of lingering conversation back down on the porch. In the last seconds of consciousness, I smiled upon reflections of the day, content in knowing that for a time so brief, I’d stood in the light of the Sturgeon Moon at the center of the universe.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Kumar and Byron’s friendship dates to first grade. In August 2019 Kumar officiated at Byron and Mylène’s woodland wedding at the Red Cabin. Kumar’s parents are close friends of ours as well—joining us on many family vacations and numerous evenings around the card table. Most critical in my life, during the first four scariest months of my treatment for multiple myeloma, (Dr.) Ravi, Kumar’s father, called me every single evening after work and daytime on Saturdays and Sundays, to check on how I was doing. His words of encouragement were powerful medicine.
