As our car turned into the narrow dirt driveway my heart would race, knowing the memories I had and would make within the houses bright yellow exterior. We always tried to figure out why the house was called the Blue Willow, knowing it was never blue. Though the walls in the small kitchen filled with blue china of all shapes and sizes, perfectly aligned. In the morning groups of us waddled down the giant stairs squeezed into the bench and chairs surrounding the too-small kitchen table. We stuffed our faces with pancakes and orange juice to flock in groups to the mountain. Cars filled like suitcases, stuffed to the brim, with parents and kids ready for a full day of fun and freezing cold.

We always joked about the ghost that haunts the house, Artie, who used to live there. An old cast he had on his leg now hangs from the living room wall next to old pictures and wooden skis and poles. It’s a miracle we noticed when they changed the color of paint on the wall in that room to green. The owners covered every inch of those walls with every item possible. A large bar in the corner sits covered in license plates from every state and jars line the walls up towards the ceiling. Dad added a plastic chalice to the line that he won at the ski lodge for having the most Irish name, Felim McTague. I ran around the house taking pictures of the various animal heads and funny posters I could find, along with the nine bedrooms with walls of every color of the rainbow. We called them by their colors or wallpaper patterns, “the red room,” “the flower room,” or “the blue room.”

This was the safest and most comfortable room in the house. The crackle and smell of the fire feeling comforting along with the squeak of the springs in the green cushions on the chairs. The kids always got shoved up in the creepy attic. The bathroom up there is like something straight from a horror film. A bright red light that only turns on with a timer attached to the wall lights up the room. It’s glow making a bloody shadow on the wall beyond the white curtain of the shadow. The clicking of the timer is background music to the flow of the water from the showerhead. None of us kids ever stayed alone anywhere in the house during the night.

Seven people squeezed in a hot tub made for four and screamed song lyrics into the cold air, filling it with small clouds from our hot breath. We jumped out of the hot tubs and rolled around in the fresh icy snow and ran back in, doing chicken cutlets in the winter.

When the trip came to an end we took out the Blue Willow guest book. It’s stuffed with pages and pages of stories and lists of names of the people who visited. We looked back to our previous visits, laughing at the full pages of our inside jokes we came up with and wondered what ever happened to the ones that didn’t stick with us.