The Lake House He Thought He Kept

Forty Six Years on Tamarack Lake

To understand what Don did, you have to understand what we built first, because the house was never just a house to me.

We married in the spring of 1980, both of us barely into our twenties, in the basement fellowship hall of the same Lutheran church where my parents had married and where Don’s had too. Nobody in either family had money. What we had was a two acre lot on Tamarack Lake that Don’s uncle sold us for almost nothing because the access road was bad and the land needed clearing.

We cleared it ourselves. Don ran a chainsaw those first two summers until his hands bled through his gloves, and I hauled brush in a wheelbarrow with our infant son, Sean, asleep in a laundry basket under a maple tree at the edge of the clearing. We poured the foundation with two neighbor men and a rented cement mixer that broke down twice in one August afternoon, and we framed the house one wall at a time as we could afford the lumber.

It was never a grand house. Two stories, a screened porch facing the water, a wood stove in the front room that we never once let go cold in the winter, and a dock that Don rebuilt every spring after the ice went out and took its usual toll. We raised Sean and our daughter, Eula, in that house. We taught them both to swim off that dock before they could properly read. Every Fourth of July for forty years, half the county seemed to end up on our stretch of shoreline for the fireworks display the resort put on across the water.

Don opened his own insurance agency in Alder Falls in 1985, a one man office above the hardware store that grew, slowly and honestly, into three employees and a real building on Main Street by the time he was fifty. He was good at the work. He knew half the county by their policy numbers, could tell you off the top of his head whose barn was underinsured and whose boat needed an umbrella rider. People trusted him with their families’ futures for a living. I used to be proud of that.

In 1998, when we refinanced the house to add the second bathroom and the back bedroom, the bank wanted proof that the mortgage would get paid even if something happened to one of us. Don, being Don, did not go looking for the cheapest policy on the market. He wrote us both term life policies through Timberline Mutual, the company he did the most business with, and named me as the primary beneficiary on his, the way any husband naming any wife would in 1998, without a second thought about it. Five hundred thousand dollars. He renewed that policy every time its term came up, right on schedule, for over twenty five years, because that was the kind of thing Don never let slip in his professional life.

I tell you all of that so you understand: nothing about that policy was unusual, or sneaky, or planned. It was the most ordinary piece of paper in our marriage. Which is exactly why nobody thought to look at it again when everything else started to fall apart.