Bucolic

The summer before I could drive, I spent a lot of weekends at the hunting camp my uncle owned.

The family was all pitching in to build a cabin and cultivating the acres surrounding. There were big feilds of corn, rolling hills of tress, and giant cliffs of clay. The kids would spend most of the time sitting on the treshold of a tall clay incline. Every so often we would roll down the soft, jagged hill to the bottom. It was like falling on rubber bricks; it hurt, but not that much. Nobody ever broke anything, but we did get some cuts and bruises.

Nights were spent out by the fire in front of the cabin trying to tell ghost stories or making jokes that only kids laugh at. The jokes where the punchline is basically a curse word. We would sleep in tents, or the RV, until the cabin was hospitable enough for our sleeping bags. One morning, I remember waking up, taking a deep breath through my nose, and feeling something vibrate. I did a farmer's blow and out flew a housefly. It buzzed around very perplexed.

The reason we were out there so much was because of my grandfather. He had bought the land before he died. In December of 1998, he died of pancreatic cancer. It was the first big death in my family that I was aware of. My Dad's father passed on when I was 2, and his mom 3 years before I was born.

The family really started to pitch in and come together after my grandpa's death. The cabin became everyone's project. Since I was still kind of young, I had no real use to the building process. I was still very close with my brothers and cousins at the time because of constantly staying over at grandma's after grandpa died. We were stuck together to support her.

I really wanted to grow up, and go to high school, and be cool. I wanted to stay indoors, away from the heat and bugs. Family is more important, even if it's as silly as falling down a rocky hill.