The cabin wasn’t large. It wasn’t medium sized. It wasn’t even all that small. It was, to be accurate, miniature. The things inside of this cabin were normal sized; the couch was able to be sat upon without difficulty. The dishes in the small cupboards were adult sized, even if it took two servings of coffee from the dainty cups to equal one serving of coffee from the gallon sized cups I drink from at home. The beds were small, full, but that wasn’t such a big deal. Even my two children were able to share that small bed without too much trouble, at least the trouble was little after the initial trouble that caused one to sleep on the floor for some time. It turns out that sharing a full bed with a crazy-legged sister is actually preferable to sleeping with a pine pillow.
Outside the back door was a small landing. Some might call it a deck but to do so would be to bestow a sense of deck-like functionality to it. This deck had no more space than would accommodate a few pairs of kicked off shoes, and the railing was barely wide enough to hold slung over clothes that had been set to dry, or waders that had been peeled off on the landing and slung over the rail for lack of a better place to put them. Aside the deck there was a grill. It was not a Fire Magic, or a Viking. There was no sear function and no rotisserie and no thermometer. There was on and off and the quarter turn of the knob varied the flame from hardly there to full on incineration setting. It worked fine, and the two spare tanks of propane in a small wooden cabinet that someone had built for exactly that purpose gave some confidence that grilling was a good idea.
One step inside the back door and you’ve found yourself one full step into the kitchen. A few cabinets, a small stove. A sink, not seeming to have been manufactured by Rohl and void of any sign of a blue Shaw diamond, held just a few soiled dishes. The coffee maker was not from Technivorm, and it wasn’t even one of the five coffee brewers that qualified for testing from those squares in Vermont. It brewed a small pot of coffee, small enough to fit into the small coffee cups, which fit perfectly on top of the railing on the back deck, assuming the coffee lasted long enough to require setting down for a moment or two. The bathroom was off the kitchen, as in, the space from toilet to kitchen sink was perhaps four feet, including the thin wooden wall that formed the visual barrier. The shower in that bathroom was small, but large enough to scrub up without knocking the soap off of the built in fiberglassed ledge, so that was good.
The refrigerator was small, apartment sized, and the microwave was set on top of it as a sort of white radioactive crown. We didn’t pop any popcorn in that microwave, opting instead for the old fashioned popcorn that comes inside a pre-made tin pan, the sort that you shake over a flame while the aluminum foil cover puffs and fills with steam. I did this over a campfire, the fire that burned inside a small ring of stones about 40′ across the lawn from the cabin. The wood we burned was not particularly seasoned, and it came from no great deciduous heritage, but after considerable smoke there was flame, and once there was flame there was some shaking of the tin popcorn pan and at the end of it at least some of the popcorn emerged from the foiled pouch un-scorched.It didn’t matter all that much anyway, as the remaining popcorn was spilled in the small kitchen a few minutes after it was removed from the flame, the burnt bits of corn finding their way into the cracks in the pine floor, filling the cabin with the smell of burnt corn.
If the kitchen was approximately 6 x 9, that would put the living room which also housed the dining room somewhere around 14 x 16, not accounting for the staircase that bent up from one wall before turning and delivering the climber to the small loft where the two full beds were pushed squarely against the opposing sloped walls. The entirety of the space inside this cabin could not have measured more than 700 square feet. The small furnace was in the crawl space, which was accessed through a pine panel that was cut into the floor in the kitchen. I didn’t go down there, though I presume some of our burnt popcorn made the trip.
Two days in this cabin and no more. Grilling for meals and sipping small coffee on a small landing. Two rocking chairs facing the pastoral view. No trampoline. No pier. No swimming pool. Not even a lake, instead only a meandering trout stream filled with trout that vexed me. There were several 20 minute drives to town, where few shops offered fewer things that I wanted to buy. There was no luxury to be found. There was no space either. If I had wanted to escape to a book or to a magazine or to the bright screen of an iPad, I had no option under roof. The kitchen couldn’t handle much cooking, though the $99 grill performed well enough to cook some organic beef into burgers and to char the outsides of some organic hotdogs. The dining room table wasn’t large enough to fit four comfortably, so we ate outside on a wooden picnic table with no table cloth and no cushions. The smoke from the fire burned our eyes a bit, but it kept the mosquitoes away, so the end justified the means.
I spent two nights in a cabin that is smaller in its entirety than my single living room, and I was utterly content. My children numbering two take up as much space as four of the same sized children might, and they were content as well. My wife demands mostly high end everything, and yet, there was no complaining. And that’s why, the next time you look at a vacation home in Lake Geneva and think, Hmm, this place is just too small for me. Hmmm… I have three kids and there are only three bedrooms, I can’t imagine such a horrible inconvenience. Hmmm… This kitchen is nice, but it won’t fit my table that seats 14… Hmm… This deck is nice, but how on God’s green earth could I ever have my entire family on this deck at once when we someday plan to take that family photo, with all of the men in khaki and blue and the women in white? Hmm… This house is perfect, but how can I somehow live in something so below my primary home standard, where I have a rec room and a family room and a den and that side room that houses my computer?
Next time you think these things, just slap yourself for me. A vacation home needn’t mirror your primary home, it simply needs to feel like you’re on vacation from the moment you step foot on the deck that is really just a landing.