Dream cabin

So they started looking and found some land just a mile down the road from the farm where Marjy grew up. She remembers walking by the property every day on her way to school. "When I went to grade school, it was pasture land," she says. "There used to be cows here."

Although it was a long 40-minute drive from where they both worked in downtown St. Paul, they bought the land and built their dream log cabin. How hard is it to build a cabin? Daniel Boone didn't need much, after all: an axe, some trees, some mud. No big deal, right?

Not any more. Cabin design and construction have become a fine art. Marjy and Edward researched their cabin design for five years before they started. They learned, for example, a clever trick for keeping cabin logs looking like new.

First, good logs are selected. The Andersons chose lodgepole pine because it is a harder wood.

Then comes the trick. The wet core of the logs are drilled out and filled with insulation. This prevents the logs from cracking and provides better insulation.

"We have no air conditioning," Marjy says. "The logs keep it quite cool in the summertime."

To build their stone fireplace, they used stones they had both picked from farm fields as kids. Others came from a nearby lake.

The cabin is a showcase for Marjy's many antiques. Outside, on the surrounding 5 acres, she shows off her love of gardening.

Life in the country, in the lodgepole pine cabin surrounded by gardens, is a simple life, but one the Andersons would never trade for their old life in the city.

"I don't even have curtains in my windows," says Marjy. "It's a fun way to live. I just love it."

The stand-up-straight garden

Marjy Anderson loves to raise flowers, and she wasn't going to let a long-time battle with rheumatoid arthritis change that. When she and husband, Edward, built their dream cabin near the St. Croix River in Minnesota, they made a few adjustments to accommodate Marjy  little things a visitor might not notice.

In the garden, the beds are raised and wrapped in heavy planking. "The idea was to build planters that are chair height," Marjy says. Since she doesn't have to bend low on her sensitive knees or ankles, she can keep working for hours.

Another innovation sits on the fence posts stretching around the cabin. One summer, the split-rail fence looked mighty bare, Marjy thought. She wanted to put flower pots on the post tops, but how would she get them to stay? No problem.

"We took a screw and just drilled right through (each pot) into the post," Marjy says. In the fall, carved pumpkin heads perch on each post, held on the flower pots by filling the pumpkins with rocks.

Before Christmas, the pumpkins are replaced with small pine trees decorated with red berries. In spring, the cycle starts anew, with fresh blooming plants rooted in the post-top pots.

"It's something I can do because it's on the posts," Marjy says. "I can just stand up straight and do it."