Cabin Lights

In the few moments I could recollect before falling asleep, I saw the boardwalk at night with all the cabins lit up. It was the summer of 2001 and I was fifteen years old. I envisioned sitting on porches while listening into the night the voices from other porches that could be heard over the chirping crickets and loon calls amidst the silence of nature. Nights were dark in the woods and so made the cabin lights all the brighter, all the more meaningful, as if to say, ‘indeed, life is in here.’ Those reverential days I would sometimes walk the boardwalk at night, eavesdropping on the very same porch conversations that soothed a quiet night. I would hear talks of who should marry whom and who wore what ghastly clothes to dinner that evening. As I would walk past, those on the porches would wave fondly to me, gossip halting for a temporary indulgence in community. I would smile and wave back, maybe say, “Goodnight.” The stars hung like moaning diamonds, trapped in sticky molasses. The loons called sporadically, lonely, earnestly. Crickets chirping. Frogs wailed. Murmurs. The sudden, unnatural outburst of laughter and then all’s quiet once more. The strange peace of it, I found enthralling. There was something in it - some expansive memory that reaches into the farness of time and now transcends my experience and becomes happiness, though I did not know it was happiness then. The simplicity of nuanced habitation in the greatness of nature. Freedom with a measure of comfort. That is happiness. Cabin lights piercing through the darkness. Voices lasting into the stars. And so shall we remain forever. That is happiness.