Yummy Apple Crisp!

End Of An Era

The End of Dad's Ice House

We decided that it was finally time to dismantle the old, green ice fish house of Dad's that had been sitting behind the garage up at the lake for the past ten years or so.

Mark said it was the first one that he and Dad had built in the driveway of our old house on Palm Street. They made it a particular size so that it would fit in the trailer to haul up to the lake, and Mark said that they had used it many times. We found the old, green sleeping bag inside that was the one that Mark slept in while on Boy Scout camping trips, but the mice had taken over things, and so that was the end of that sleeping bag.

According to Mark, Dad also built other ice houses, but this is the one that held all the memories.

We found a drawing of a man's face (on a board on the underside of a built in table) in the ice house. For a moment I wondered if I might have drawn it sometime in the 1970's, but then I asked Katie, and she also thinks she might have been the one. To me it looks like Jesus, to Katie it looks like Jack Sparrow.

There was also still a mouse living in the ice house and, as the walls fell down, she scurried out.

It took us two trips to the disposal facility in Aitken to get rid of all the wood, insulation, and such. And then as we finished tossing the last of the garbage into the the huge bins, a mouse popped out from inside the trailer! Was it the same one we saw before? Before we could do anything about it, and what would we have done anyway, she climbed over the trailer hitch and scampered to the underside of the car. I'm such an animal lover that I worried the whole way back, wondering if she was okay. I hope she didn't fall out onto the highway, but then we just decided that she hitched a ride back and then found a new home in the woods ...

We didn't mention to Dad that we'd torn the old house down. He might have understood at the moment, or he might have started to worry. Either way, there's no use ruining a nice visit, and today we had a really nice visit.