What Is A PLace?

•  The cabin 
• My childhood home
• Big sur
• Forsyth 
• Bear valley
• Dodge ridge

        When I think about a place, a place I want to be it will always be our family cabin. The cabin was my childhood home every summer and every winter. It was a cabin up in Arnold California, that has been passed down from my grandma to my mom and my aunt. They jointly owned it. It was in the woods and the community was a very small community. There was only one grocery store, one cafe, one subway, one pharmacy, one gym and one doctors office. They also had some book stores and some good will stores but other than that there wasn't much else. It was such a beautiful and cute town, i loved it there so much.
       The cabin was in the middle of the wood. We had a bunch of neighbors around us but they where hard to see because of the thick forest. It was a typical cabin in the woods. Inside was beautiful. It was a three bedroom, two bathroom home. It was a two storied home that my grandpa had helped built. That why it was so special to our family! The upstairs had one bedroom that had a bathroom in it and then it had a very large living room which is where we had the pool table and our ping pong table. Also the dart board was up there. Down stairs we had the other two bedrooms and the other bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room. We had an old fashion fire place, which i loved. The rooms where all very big and spacious. We had a back porch and a front porch. I loved it, this home was the place i looked forward to going to every year!
       In the summer it was so pretty. Depending on how long we got off for summer we would spend at least one or two months up there. In the summer the weather would be any where between eighty-five to ninety-five degrees. I loved it, that is my ideal kind of weather! Our cabin was in the perfect spot as well. About a mile down the road was the first lake, which is where my mother use to take us there to swim when we were really young. In order to be able to swim there you have to own a cabin within about a mile or two of the lake. When you go there you had to sign into a book proving that you did live in the area. As we got older we switched from that lake to another one which was also only about a mile and a half down the road. This lake was so much better in my opinion though. Same as the other lake you had a card that you had to show at the entrance to prove that you lived within the mile or two radius. If you lived any father then you where not allowed to swim there. This place had everything you could want! It had a pool, food shack, tennis courts, volley ball nets, and when you would walk down the hill then you would end up at the lake. It was completely fenced in so the only way you could get in is by the main entrance where you had to show proof of that little card. Not only did it have all that but in the summer they had events for children and teens. Some of the events involved movie night or one of my favorite was teen night. Teen night was where only teens could go and you would just get to hang out meet new people, swim and play games all night. I loved this place so much! That is what we did during our summers out there.
          When it was winter break and we were out of school for about a month we would also spend a month up there. The winter just like summer was so beautiful. It snowed a bunch there so it was amazing! In the winter we would spend majority of the time up in bear valley which was only thirty minutes away. We would go skiing and snowboarding. The very first time my mom put me on a pair of skies i was only three years old. From the stories iv heard i was not a fan of them at first! Apparently i hated them and refused to learn how to use them. But my aunt convinced me to give them a chance and by the age of five i was a pro at skiing. I skied from the age of three all the way until i was about fourteen years old. When i turned fifteen i had decided to switch from skiing to snowboarding. I had watched my brother switch over to it and i wanted to try it, so i did. It turned out that i loved snowboarding more than i loved skiing. I have never gone back to skiing since. I will forever be a snowboarder. I used to look forward to winter break every year because it meant i got to ski or snowboard. It was a paradise, my sanctuary.
            This last year we had to sell the cabin. It was a very heart renching decision that my mother and aunt had to make together. It broke all of our hearts. With the economy getting so bad we could no longer afford to keep the cabin. When they found the buyers who we sold the cabin to was when it really became real to all of us, the cabin would no longer be ours anymore. It was something that was especially hard for me to deal with. It truly broke my heart. This was the home i was supposed to be moving into after graduating high school and i had plans of going to college there. I pictured my whole life in this house, raising a family one day in there and living there. It was one of the reasons i decided to leave California. It is something i still haven't come to terms with and i probably wont ever. I loved that place more than anything iv ever had.