The log Cabin

When I was five and a half years old, mom and dad moved into a two room log cabin, with seven kids.
By this time my older sister Lenora, had married and my little brother had not been born.
The kitchen had a wood stove for cooking, an oak table, and my parent’s bed, and in the living room there was a rocker, couch, and two beds. Four girls slept in one bed, two at the top and two at the bottom. The boys slept in the other bed, two at the top and one at the bottom. Sound a little crowded, you better believe it was. It was not much fun waking up with your sisters toes in your face.
There was no running water or electricity. We had and out house, which set a little ways from the cabin and the well, was located in front of the house. My brothers would lower a rope down into the well with a bucket attached to it and pull up the cold water we needed to drink. This water was also used to wash, cook and clean with. In the summer they would place our milk in the bucket and lower it in the well to keep it cold.
Dad heated the log cabin with wood, in a potbelly stove, in the living room and a wood cook stove in the kitchen. Mom cooked a lot of meals on that old stove. In the winter we had to watch out for scorpions, which would come into the cabin where it was warm. We had to check our beds before going to sleep, our shoes, before putting them on, to make sure there were no scorpions on the wood when it was brought in. These scorpions were pretty ugly and had a powerful stinger and if you got stung it would really hurt.
The cabin must have been built in the 1920’s. It had concrete between the logs and it was not air tight. On the inside walls they had put up what they called builder paper. It looked like black roofing paper. If there was any black paper missing off the walls, we would break down cardboard boxes and nail them up, trying to keep the cold air out. There wasn’t any insulation in the cabin. The roof was black roofing paper with small slats of wood attached to the roof to hold the paper on.
We lived in that cabin for nearly two years before dad bought twenty acres and built a new house.
When we moved out of the log cabin, a family of ten moved in. It might of not have been the greatest place we ever lived in, but we were thankful to have a roof over our heads.
I realized it didn’t matter where we lived or what the places look like, because mom and dad always made it a home.
They love all of us, and we knew it.




Nov. 14, 2009
by Vivian Foote