Prairie Lily

"But the log house was finished. It had only one room. Before winter they would add a loft for him and his sister to sleep in. Inside there were shelves along one wall and a sturdy puncheon table with two stools. One of these days, his father promised, he would cut out a window and fasten oiled paper to let in the light. Someday the paper would be replaced with real glass." – Elizabeth George Speare, from The Sign of the Beaver








The view from what had become the outdoor 'collection,' as Chase liked to call it, was always beautiful.  A long series of old wood stairs led down through the opening of a pine stand and onto what had become something of a restored prairie, then a dock for the 'marine' boat.  It had been nothing more than an old sandy beach held in by a line of rip rap rocks, especially fortified at the corner where the boat waves crashed in the hardest and tended to undercut the soft soil.  Two maples grew in the back corner and provided slight shade, but otherwise, it was full sun, flat, and Chase had always remembered the great walks with dad through Brices Prairie near Lake Onalaska which became a tributary to the main channel of the Mississippi at La Crosse a few miles downstream.  "This could become a prairie, right here," she had said the first time out loud, but really nobody had paid full attention to what she had in mind.  Two years later, plant by plant, a rock here, some grooming there, from the landing at the stairs down to the lake edge, had become a perennial prairie and the pontoon boats that made their pokey way counter clock wise around the lake began to slow down a hundred feet out, and Chase took great pride as she sat up on the deck, below the cover of overhanging pine limbs, under shade, a slight breeze carouseling around the cabin, in the fact that she

had her own little Sand County Almanac. She took notes in her pad in pencil and would walk down to check in among the purple prairie clover and butterfly weed she set in spread clumps near the rocks for the monarchs to lay their eggs, clip petals from the spiderwort and lay them in a thick book to flatten then pin, as best she could to a flat cork board with notes underneath.  Over those two years the cabin had been for sale on and off again, depending on the season and so she had contrived a way to plan new and larger restoration projects so that some day, no matter the price of an offer, there would be no way mom and dad would consider the option.  She pulled out her collections and notes and invited Lily to draw up at the corner of the deck. Dad had noticed that the work Chase was doing was becoming more serious and dedicated. The rocks to either of side of the steps leading to the cabin become blooming ground cover, asters, lupine and wild indigos. "Next year I would like to live here full-time and work on my collections year round," she had said casually in passing.  The distant drone of a speedboat passed from the other side of the lake.  Some of the kids from two cabins down were paddling along the bay. "Did you hear the loon cry this morning?"
   "One of the problems with your plan, wait, two problems, wait, sorry, three problems with your plan are that you go to school in a city with other kids. The cabin is for sale. And then there's the issue that neither mom or I work here."