By Elinor Wright

    The telephone rang one Sunday afternoon at the home of Marion and Lynda Roberts of Ocilla, Georgia.  It was in the fall of 1988.

    “You got yourself a cabin in northern Minnesota,” the voice said.

    It was not the news they expected after having made a low-ball bid.  “We had just bought our first new truck,” Marion said.

    “And a brand new TV,” Lynda added.

    It all began in the summer of 1988.  The extended family was staying at Driftwood paddling up the Bowstring River when they stopped for ice cream at Anchor Inn.  From Gin and Bud Kitterman, they learned of a one-room cabin for sale on the south shore of Little Sand Lake only a couple of miles away. 

    Out on the lake later that week they spotted the For Sale sign and stopped.  Lynda looked through the window and exclaimed, “It’s all bathroom, no bedrooms!”

    “It was a rash offer,” Marion remembers, “- not that we didn’t relate to it at once - .”

    “It was a situation requiring quiet discussion, diplomacy, and gentle persuasion,” Marion remembers.

    “We were trying to convince each other,” Lynda said, “but we both knew what we wanted to do.  After all, everyone needs a lake home of their own, don’t they?”

    Marion summed it up, “We’ve never been sorry.”

    Marion said, “As long as you don’t walk away, a conversation will keep going.”

    From their south shore vantage point, when they see the Northern Lights, they call their north shore neighbors on Sand Lake to come stand on their dock with them.

    Lynda added thoughtfully, “We became part of each others dreams here.  Once you live on a lake, things and people just seem to float on in, find a place, and belong right here.”  They haven’t had too much success nurturing Georgia peanut bushes up here, but they’ve successfully transplanted southern hospitality.

    They had a delightful beginning when Judy and Butch LaTrace opened up their cabin that first spring.  Lynda and Marion arrived to a clean cabin with fresh-filled hummingbird feeders and purple violets on the kitchen table.

    It would be difficult to find anyone who lives in the country more than the Roberts.  They know the swimming holes and the fishing spots and the hunting areas and the blueberry patches and the best places to find pliable birch bark.  They pick wild flowers on the way to the Spring Lake Store, count hawks in the fall on Hawk’s Ridge in Duluth, listen to the bluegrass musicians in Blackduck, visit the black bear in Orr, hike the Lost Forty, eat Betty’s Pies east of Two Harbors and attend church at Sand Lake Alliance and afterwards share a Libersky omelet at Barney’s.  They decorate tables, build Mexican Trains, plant memorial gardens, each flower mentioned by a verse in the Bible, and invite friends to dinner at 6:07 on certain week nights.

    Lynda expressed her concerns for the area:  “We don’t want things to change much.  We want Bird’s Eye to stay Bird’s Eye.  We like Rice Lake to clog up with wild rice every fall.  We’d hate it if the Big Island sprung a condominium.”

    Lynda, the philosopher, says, “Everyone we know up here lives a wild life in one way or another.  There’s no escaping the connections that tie us together.  People to people.  People to creatures, too.  Yesterday I photographed a fawn on the Dora Lake Road.  As it lay hidden in the tall ditch grass, it looked directly at me.  It trusted me.  ‘That’s a mistake’,” I thought.

    “Have you thought about how the deer become wolves, skittery field mice become quiet swooping owls, tiny silver minnows turn into blue stalking herons?  Up here in the north country, there’s no escaping the cycle of life and death and life again.” 

At first their bedrooms were a pop-up tent and a van, their dining room was the picnic table on the deck.  Still they’d have 15 people there at a time.  Marion notes that with a sandpoint well “it took seven to eight minutes to fill up the toilet.”

    The Roberts did most of the work expanding their cabin themselves.  It is a personal expression of what matters to them.  Together they changed “cramped and dark” to “enlarged and brightened.”  They built cabinets, painted and sanded and oiled; they plumbed and electrified and screened.

    “More than the dream cabin,” Lynda reflects, “we were assembling a life we had dreamed of.  We could not have imagined how much this place would mean to our families despite the distance.  Our sons hunt here, and Mark their younger son worked with Jack Minehart, a neighbor across the lake, learning to build birch bark canoes.  Our grandchildren swim here.  Our families meet here to fish and picnic and explore interesting places just to keep close, to have fun, and to remember together.”  Whenever their kids talk about getting together, they talk about coming up to the lake.

    Both Lynda and Marion are teachers.  They teach every day, retired or not.  Their closest Georgia neighbors say that when the lights are on late into the night at the Roberts’ it’s because they’re helping a high school student catch up on his calculus assignment, or easing a –careless? –unfortunate? –reckless? kid out of a jam or helping a senior prepare for the entry exam at U.G.A.  Ocilla folks nod their heads and say, “The Roberts’?  They never give up on a kid.”  Who wouldn’t want that on one’s tombstone?

    There’s more.  Marion and his state champion tennis teams; Teachers of the Year Awards (many), traveling circus trapeze performances! Lynda has become our own Betty’s Pies:  coconut cream, blueberry, pumpkin, plus pumpkin bars and peach cobbler.   It would be easy to go on and on.

    Perhaps those years as a teacher helped form Lynda’s motto:  “You just take everybody for what they are.” 

    As their friends leave, you’ll always hear, “See y’all next year.”

    Who in Sand Lake township wouldn’t want neighbors like them?

1985:  stayed at Sioux City Resort

1986, 1987, and 1988:  stayed at Driftwood Resort

1988:  Also, ice cream and extended our vacation by staying at Anchor Inn