What did we decide about the cabin?

There was a quarrel on the porch last night, after the children were down, and I am up early because of it.

It began with David, who had a spreadsheet. He has added up what this place costs us in a year (the taxes, the insurance, Earl, the propane) and proposed, reasonably, that we rent it out for four or five weeks in August and September through one of the websites and let it pay its own way. He had comparable cabins printed out.

Kate said she would not have strangers in my kitchen, sleeping under my quilts, and that if it was about money he could say so. David said it was about arithmetic. Ellen said the real trouble was that none of the three of them can get a week up here without negotiating with the other two as if it were a treaty, and that the Fourth, with fourteen people and one bathroom, is not a vacation for anyone over forty. Then Kate said something about who lives four hours away and who lives two thousand miles, and Ellen said something back, and Mark took the dog out.

R. got up in the middle of it, without a word, and went down to the fish-cleaning bench in the dark, and I heard the hose.

Nobody said the other thing, which is what happens to the place after us.

They left yesterday morning, all three cars, with the usual shouting about swimsuits left on the line, and everyone hugged everyone. Kate and David stood by his car for ten minutes talking, which I watched from the kitchen window.

R. and I sat on the porch last night and again this morning and have decided three things. I telephoned each of them this afternoon, oldest first, and said the same words to each, so that there can be no comparing of versions.

One. The cabin will not be rented. Not to strangers, not through a website, not for one week, as long as either of us is alive. David's arithmetic is correct and is not the point. R. said it better than I did: "It isn't an asset. It's where we are." We can afford it. If the day comes when we cannot, we will say so.

Two. Beginning next summer, each of the three families has a week here of its own, besides the Fourth, with nobody else's children in it and the two of us either out of the way or gone home, as they like. Each week is to be claimed by March 1. First choice goes in turn: Kate in 2024, because she comes farthest, then David in 2025, then Ellen, and round again. I will keep the calendar. Ellen said, "Of course you will."

Three. The question nobody asked on Wednesday, what becomes of it afterward, is ours to answer and not theirs to settle among themselves on a porch. We have an appointment with Rebecca Stannard in the fall and will put it on paper properly. I told each of them only that it will be written down and that they will not have to guess.

David was quiet, and then said he had only been trying to help. I said I knew that, and that his father had read every line of the spreadsheet and found one error, in the propane. He laughed. Kate cried a little and said she had been a brat. Ellen asked whether her week could be the last one in July.

What I keep thinking about is R. at the cleaning bench in the dark with the hose running and no fish. He does not hold it against them. He said this morning, "They're allowed to have opinions. They're not allowed to have the cabin yet."

The loons have one chick this year.

We signed the amendment to the trust this afternoon at Rebecca Stannard's, in the same room, with the same bowl of peppermints. June is in it now. She was not born when we signed the first time, and it has bothered me for two years.

And the cabin is settled, on paper, in a way that all three of them can live with and that none of them was asked to vote on.

R. read every page again. He found a comma.