Saving Grandma's Cabin
Candy's hair-brained idea to keep her family history intact.
Categories: Westward Home
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2008
Anybody looking at the rotten foundation logs, the caved in roof, the shoved in southeast corner of the cabin would mark it for demolition. Unless, of course, the old log building represented a piece of family history. Even then a rational person might think it was beyond repair and salvage, would throw up his hands and walk away.
Nobody ever called me totally rational, and that is how a project known in my family as "Candy's hair-brained idea" began.
During the early spring of 2003, ranch hands using a big tractor with a dozer blade pushed in the corner of the cabin so they could ram a drill through a too-small gate. I saw the damage when I drove by on the way to town. For a few weeks, it gnawed at me that the total destruction of the cabin seemed eminent. I lamented the fact to my husband. "We ought to save it," I told him, and he raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps he figured it was idle talk on my part.
But then Steve made a mistake and took me with him to a fertilizer sales dinner, and I found my opportunity. The manager of the ranch was at the same dinner. I walked over to him and asked the vital question: "Could I have that old cabin?" He looked at me as if I'd gone daft. Undaunted, I added, "It was my Grandma's homestead cabin, you know." Obviously he didn't.
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