Public Auction

In 1984, my parents built an A-frame cabin on ten acres of land in Union County. It was finished on my dad's 60th birthday. He told us when he built it that someday it would be passed on to his children. We thought that was a long time off but it turned out to be only about a year later when he learned he had a brain tumor. The cabin was deeded to me and my siblings before he died at the age of 62. After that, Mom usually went with us when we went to the cabin. She died in 1993 at the age of 66.

After our parents died, we kept the cabin and made memories there with our families, either separately or together. Every spring, my two sisters and I went together to houseclean the cabin and get it ready for another season. Sometimes we did major projects such as installing a shower, dry wall, painting, digging a ditch, cutting firewood or other things. A weekend with my sisters was always a lot of fun.

As the years passed, we added in-laws and grandchildren to our families and they grew too large to fit into the cabin. We started renting other people's cabins where we could all be together. Our own cabin was used less and less.

Last summer we decided the time has come to sell the cabin. We are getting older and the upkeep is getting to be a burden, especially for something we don't use much anymore. So we agreed to sell it. We signed a contract with an auctioneer to have a public auction on May 23.

This weekend we went to the cabin with my sisters to do the last annual spring cleaning. The sale signs went up a couple weeks ago and we were pleasantly surprised to find the box of sale bills attached to the sign was empty. We refilled it and began to discover there seems to be quite a bit of interest in it. We will be having Open House three Saturdays in May before the sale but this weekend we had five sets of visitors even though it wasn't an official Open House.

The big questions are: Who will the buyer be? How much is he willing to pay? We'll find out on May 23. It will be bittersweet when we drive away for the last time after the sale as I will lose my last connection to my parents. But the memories we made there will be ours to keep. Time moves on and we need to move on with it. I hope the cabin will provide a place for another family to make memories to keep.