Fire!

The view from yester year.

We returned from campmeeting in Maine on Sunday evening and right now I would normally be writing about that trip.  But alas, something much bigger occurred that made campmeeting pale in comparison.  This past Saturday night was the end of campmeeting.  I had (finally) showered the girls after their meeting and gotten them to bed and had gone over to the snack bar to see if I could get something to eat - - they always open it up after the last meeting and you can get a great deal on a grilled cheese sandwich.  I had ordered three (I swear, not all for me even though I probably could have eaten them all).  I meandered back to our tent where Duncan, my parents, and Shawn were hanging out and chit chatting as we do every evening after the kids are at last asleep.  I opened the flaps and someone, I don't know who, maybe Duncan?, says "Nova Scotia burned down." Or maybe it was "The cabins burned down." Either way, I knew what they meant but I thought it was some joke.  My mom had her phone on the speaker setting and she was talking to Uncle Charlie.  And it was true.  It had really burned down. There are no words to describe the feeling that comes over you.

The place that we affectionately call "The cabins" came into our family decades ago.  It's located on a little Island called Isle Madame which itself is on the bigger island of Cape Breton (Brady's middle name) in the province of Nova Scotia.  My mother's father was born on Isle Madame nearly 100 years ago which is undoubtedly how it all started.  Around 1970, my grandfather and his sister purchased two houses that were across the driveway from each other on over 100 acres of land (which is MUCH cheaper in Canada) and shortly thereafter the tradition of us spending every summer there began.  Ever since the summer of 1976 when I was six months old, I've been there every summer...of course, until that streak was broken last year with the imminent birth of Colby.  My grandparents, my mom and her three sisters and then their husbands and eventually the 10 grandchildren (of which I'm the oldest) have experienced the greatest memories of our lives at that wonderful place.

The main cabin, thought to have been built in the 1940's that my grandparents, the Copsey family, and our family, the Braces, resided.  This is where we also ate all of the main meals.

 ,

The second cabin, which was built in the 1800's, housed the Walls, Cases, and my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Dar (until their deaths).

I know people often wondered how it was possible that we could have 20 people living up there together for two or three weeks and get along so well.  But we did, we do.  We really truly love each other and each year as we left we would always daydream about what it would be like if we could just live there together all the time.  The 10 of us cousins bonded in a way that I don't know that many other cousins do because we had this special place.  And now, the 10 cousins have 16, soon to be 17, children of their own.  We've also lost a few with the passing of Mimi and Pampa but their legacy lives on as we continue to treasure this place and yearn for the months, weeks, and days to pass until we are up there again.

One of numerous cousin pictures taken on the front steps over the years.

It would take me hours and hours to recount all the things that make the place so special.  When the 10 cousins were in our younger years, our favorite thing to do was to play pranks on each other...this was passed on from our parents.  We would put salt in each other's beds, dump water on people's heads we crouched on the roof over the front door, put logs in the driveway at night so someone would have to get out of the car to move it and then we'd spray them with water guns.  The list goes on and on.  One of my personal favorites was when Ricky, Alison, and I had come back from town (so I must have been in my late teens) and the younger kids started pelting us with eggs when we got back.  Rad threw an egg at my white pants which cracked and made a mess.  I didn't care about the mess but that darn thing HURT.  I was pretty mad.  I had gotten some milk in town and I took that thing and dumped it on Rad's head as payback. Looking back, I realize that was $7 down the drain but it felt good, doggone it.  

My grandfather died in 1988 and after he passed away, my grandmother didn't want to stay in the room they shared anymore so somehow Alison and I ended up in their room, which was the nicest of the bedrooms, for a few years and we really felt like we hit the jackpot.  There was a king size bed and its own bathroom (although with 19 people and three bathrooms, people are bound to come in there a lot to use it).  I'm not sure where it came from but we managed to have a little TV (we don't generally have a TV in Nova Scotia...no cable or Internet to this day) and every afternoon we would try to watch some of our soap operas whether it was All My Children, One Life to Live, or General Hospital.  At that point, both of us were hooked on soaps and we obviously didn't have DVR's recording things back home so we tried to be sneaky and get in some viewing every afternoon.  I'm not sure if anyone caught on or not.  I guess they'll let me know after reading this!

Another one of our favorite things to do was to play hide and seek with our cars.  We would split up into two teams..each team commandeering a vehicle.  One team would "count" while the other team "hid" somewhere along the road that our cabins were on.  The road used to be just dirt and it's very long and has all these little dirt roads off it that made great hiding places.  The team that was hiding would park and then move branches and such to try and disguise the car.  I tell you, it is kind of an adrenaline rush when the car that is "it" comes near where you are with it's headlights shining but fails to see you.  Kind of like Maria in the Abbey!  Sadly, we don't do hide and seek anymore because people don't want to get their cars scratched up.

In 1996 we made the decision to move one cabin across the driveway next to the other cabin and build a connector between them.  This is why many of us still refer to it as "the cabins" even though technically there is only one now.  This mean all of us were together under one roof which did make things a little chaotic at times.  I remember one time it was Aunt Toni's birthday (which is August 11 so we are usually there for it) and we were going to have a little party for her.  We kids were a little rambunctious this particular day, running all over the house, being loud, who knows what.  When questioned, we said we were just trying to have some fun.  Finally, Uncle Terry had enough and yelled out. "That's IT!!  No more FUN!  It's time to start the party." Apparently his parties are quite boring.

Our backyard fire pit which is now all scorched.

This fireplace is basically all that remained.

Since I don't have the time to go into detail about all the memories of the cabins over the years, here are some bullet points of things that stand out:

• Playing barbies with Alison on the landing
• Cindy Crawford poster in the boys' room
• Bats (and not the wooden kind)
• "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine!"
• Mafia
• Listening to the shutters hit against the side of the house as you lie in bed at night
• Paying Shannon or Rad to do my dishes for me
• Trying to make meals in the world's tiniest kitchen that services 35+ people.  No garbage disposal, no dishwasher, etc.  Many people have bathrooms bigger than our kitchen.
• Family Feud & The Newlywed Game
• Dutch Blitz with Alison, Kelly, and Rad.  Rad was finally beaten two years ago, I think.
• Never being able to find a pen
• The drawers in the hutch would always get a little stuck when you pulled them out.
• Just the sound of the door opening and closing going into Mimi and Pampa's old room.  I can hear that sound clear as a bell in my head right now.
• Games, games, games.  Uno, Scattergories, Skip Bo, Clue, Settlers of Catan, Phase 10, Apples to Apples, Aww Shucks, Rook, Trivial Pursuit, Rack-O, Balderdash, Stratego, Rummikub, Pit, 
• Shannon making up completely ridiculous answers for Scattergories
• Reading in bed at night with Alison when we had the room on the second floor. We always brought big piles of books.  
• Boyfriends having to sleep on the little bed in the "room" between the two upstairs bedrooms of the main house.  Duncan recounted finding dog poop on that bed one time.
• The list in the kitchen that showed who was cooking and who was cleaning up each day. The women cook and the men clean up.
• The two cabins combined had seven bedrooms and some people had the same one year after year. But sometimes things switched around, if someone didn't come one year or something, and I realize that I stayed in five or the seven bedrooms.  Never stayed in Lori and Charlie's room or Mimi's new room.

Despite this tragedy, we have much to be thankful for.  Nobody was there so nobody was hurt or killed, the six small cabins were amazingly untouched and we have insurance.  It will take a lot more than a measly fire to break up this Latimer clan.  Praise the Lord!

We'll be back!!