Irony, Laughing, and Coiled Angst at a U.P. Cabin

Daily writing prompt

What makes you laugh?

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There’s laughing at funny things and there’s laughing at irony.

I found this picture yesterday while, yes, cleaning my office for the ten thousandth day. This is why it takes so much time, the irony factor.

In the picture, I am drinking a beer while sitting in a rusty chair on a screened in porch. My feet are on the window ledge and I’m looking out at Gulliver Lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I am on the first true vacation that I ever took as a single parent. There is a similar picture of my then ten-year old daughter in the same chair leaned over reading a book. I don’t remember if we arranged to take these pictures or they just happened. People didn’t run around with phones then, just, in our case, little disposable cameras picked up at the grocery on the way to the cabin.

In the picture, I look relaxed, maybe even carefree. I am in a beloved place, a place I visited with my parents many times. Everything in the one room cabin was familiar and dear to me – the round edged refrigerator, the curtains with tulips along the bottom, the plastic shower curtain and the tiny, wrapped bars of soap, the sound the screen door made when it slapped shut.

We played hearts on that porch and maybe checkers. We ate dinner at a tiny table. I want to say we slept well and ate donuts in the morning, but I don’t remember that part. It was, after all, forty-two years ago.

I do know that there had been a trail of angst that followed me on the six-hour drive north and that the angst was curled up in the grass behind the cabin waiting for me to get back in the car to go home. Hard, thick, complicated things waiting at home. I remember all that, all the dots to connect, and maybe it’s not laughing that I’m doing, maybe it’s just smiling and shaking my head. Looks can be deceiving but so comforting, especially decades later.

I love this picture, though. I’m going to put it on my wall.