Dan's Living Room

I had a friend named Dan. He was an original person. Dan lived in a cabin in the forest in Southern Oregon. It was not a large cabin but it was adequate to his needs. It was one of those charming cabins made from cleaned logs and a shingle roof and a natural wood interior decorated with older but carefully chosen furniture. The first thing you noticed when you entered was the natural scent of cedar.
Since the cabin was limited in space and since Dan lived there by himself, he installed the bathtub between two sturdy log rafters eight feet off the floor. The cold and hot water feeds and the drain rain up beside the ladder. When you took a bath you were either alone or among friends.
The walls were decorated with pleasant framed pictures of outdoor scenes; a bird on a branch; a fawn drinking water from a stream and a large older painting of a group of cowboys gathered around a blazing fire underneath a starry sky. One cowboy was seated, playing a guitar and the rest were merrily singing along under the full moon.
I visited Dan late one day at the height of the summer. Summers in Southern Oregon could be surprisingly hot, often over a hundred degrees. On this occasion Dan had moved most of his furniture outside into the flat little clearing in front of the cabin. There was his original Craftsman sofa with maroon upholstery, two overstuffed chairs, the nearly antique coffee table and two floor lamps all perched happily on the striped Navajo rug. The final brilliant touch was the framed pictures hanging by nails on the immediate surrounding trees. On closer inspection I found that the pictures had all been changed to indoor scenes; a chocolate Labrador lying faithfully beside a pair of gnarled boots, a still life with fruit and transparent bottles, and a large painting of urban sophisticates drinking martinis around a fireplace.
The whole scene was so brilliantly whacky that I couldn’t bring myself to lessen the mood with raves or compliments and so I just joined in with the company already seated there and enjoyed the rest of the evening under the stars in the most fabulous living room I’ve ever been in.
My only regret is that I never got the chance to take a bath.