Our new cabin, like the old one, is a true cabin, in that it's made of wood. And by wood I mean the stuff that comes from trees, not the stuff that is made of plastic that looks a lot like wood. Each plank in the walls and ceiling is a cross-section of a tree; you can see the grain, and the knots, and if you use your imagination, you can see all sorts of things looking back at you.
I spent thousands of nights in the old cabin, and so I had thousands of opportunities to discover all of the shapes in the wood. There was a car, a turtle, an owl, and faces of all shapes and sizes. Some of the faces looked a little evil, and could make the faint of heart sleep with the covers pulled over their head. Most of them, though, looked friendlier; I always considered them guardians of my sleep; I knew that I was safe from harm as long as they were there.
In time, even the scary faces became friendly through familiarity, and I found them as comforting as I did all of the other faces and designs. Very few things were ever hung on the walls at the cabin-- a couple of mirrors, a map of the lake, and a weird African tapestry thing that Aunt Betty Jo liked-- mostly because it just seemed wrong to cover the designs in the wood; they were much more interesting that anything we could have hung. Besides, we weren't sure that hammering nails into the walls wouldn't have hurt the wall-creatures; since they had us surrounded while we slept, we saw no reason to make them mad at us.
When we learned that the old cabin would be bulldozed, we tried everything to save it; our last offer was to buy the cabin, take it apart board by board, and re-assemble it somewhere else. Physically, that would have been a challenge. I have no doubt that we could have put it back together exactly the way it had been, though; that's how familiar I was with each and every board.
That was not to be; one of the things that made it tolerable was finding the new cabin. Wooden, inside and out, the way it should be. Being surrounded by wood gives me a real one-with-nature feeling that is getting harder and harder to come by, even in places where it should be easy-- like the lake, for instance. It was easier back when everyone else on the lake felt the same way, but those days are gone, and every time someone cuts down all of their trees just so you can see their humongous house, constructed of stone from some far-off quarry and landscaped with non-native plants, those days just get farther away. (I've never figured out why people who hate nature are paying so much to build a house right in the middle of it, but I guess for some people status is more important than anything.)
New walls mean new designs to find in the wood, though. Some are obvious, some not so much. Part of the problem is that my eyes automatically look at the places that always showed something; now, of course, those places show something else, and it's not what my eyes expect. This is not a problem for my wife; she can find a new face or design without trying. One reason is because the old images aren't as burned into her brain as they are into mine; the other is easier to understand: she's an artist, and very much visually oriented. She can look at a spot on the ceiling, and her artist's brain starts figuring out what the design most resembles; looking at the same spot, my brain is saying "Hey, wait a minute… shouldn't I be looking at a turtle? There used to be a turtle there."
I always knew I loved the look of our wooden walls, and the way they make me feel; I recently learned another reason. Not long ago, my wife-- the artist, remember-- decided that we needed a new color on the bedroom walls of our not-on-the-lake house. As an artist, color is very important… to her. Me, I'm not as picky; as long as the color of the walls isn't bright red, I'm okay with it.
She decided on green, and bought three cans of green paint. I thought that was a lot of paint for just one room, but it turns out that each can was a different shade of green. I know this because she told me; looking at them, I couldn't tell. But apparently one was a little more blue, one a little more yellow, and one a little more gray.
She opened all three cans, painted part of the wall with each, let the paint dry, and decided which one she liked best; that's the one we used. When we were done and the paint had dried, she decided that the color wasn't quite right. So, she put a few brush strokes of one of the other colors on our freshly painted wall, and asked me which one I liked better.
God as my witness, I could not tell the colors apart, even when one was painted right on top of the other. To this day I swear that the colors were identical, and she swears that the differences, while subtle, were obvious. Of course, she also admits that she has a keen eye for color, which is sort of like Superman admitting that he is fairly strong.
I couldn't argue with her decision, especially when I thought both choices were the same, so we re-painted. We've since painted the living room, and are now working on the dining room; after that, I think she'll want to do the bedroom again. And somewhere in there, we're going to re-do the kitchen and the den.
But the walls of the cabin are going to stay just the way they are. And for that, I love them even more. My wife agrees that the natural look is best for the lake; for that, I love her even more, too.