Fun Friday: Fathers Day Trip To The Cabin

Maybe you didn’t have the best relationship with your earthly dad. Don’t let that stand in the way of falling into the arms of your heavenly one! This Fathers Day, my prayer is that you honor the Dad who knows you best. He’s right here ready to wrap loving arms around you.  Run to Him…and be safe. 

My dad didn’t really know his birth father.  That man abandoned his family when my dad was very young. Sad, huh? At 16,  however, after his mother’s death from tuberculosis, my father was adopted by my grandad and grandmother.  – More on that story later.

Today, to celebrate Fathers Day, I present the legacy of my dad and my adoptive grandad. So…

Let’s pack our bags and go to the Cabin.

In 1949, my dad, Glenn, was only 18 years old. He was skinny and handsome with a wonderful shock of brown hair and dazzling blue eyes.  His adoptive father was much older, with horn-rimmed, round glasses and a wide smile. Grandad was an educated, adventuresome engineer, He  had a vision.

Dad and Grandad rumbled down dusty rocky roads, fording creeks and spinning tires on rolling hills. 

This was the countryside near where my father had grown up in a tattered shack.   This was Missouri countryside.  

The Packard stopped on a random hillside.  You could hear a spring-fed river “shirring” gently below the trees.  Grandad tossed a rock down the hillside. “That’s where I want the cabin,” he told Otho, a local handyman and carpenter. Otho (I am told) hitched his thumbs in his overalls, nodded in agreement,  and set to work cutting and planing local cedars.  Grandad and Glenn began to build.  

Two stories of native timber cabin began to cascade down the hillside. 

It’s never been called anything but “The Cabin.”  Even three year-old great great grandsons can lisp the word  “Cabin” and know it means  fun and family

My Dad finished growing up at The Cabin.   

I grew up there.

My three daughters grew up there. 

Now grandchildren, great and great great grandchildren grow up under the cedar beams, beside the river, too. 

Happy Fathers Day, to both my Dads (They room together now)

Thank you, for The Cabin. 

Daddy’s chair is worn, but it stays like many forever things at the cabin. Dad still sits beside it, in the center of his legacy of cabin, family and love. 

Oh, the books we read! My favorite was “Shepherd of the Hills.” Painted rocks, tiny toys, sewing kits and other bits of “us” clutter the shelves. 

“There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.”- Deut 1:31