Shirley Hathaway’s children once accused her of always cooking on high.

Today the berry jam she makes in the kitchen of Palouse Divide Lodge on an Idaho mountaintop simmers slowly for an hour or more until it thickens naturally without benefit of commercial pectin.

Back in the day, when she was a working mom with a young family and a demanding career, she came home from work and threw a quick dinner together with every burner turned to high. Edible, but not great …

Retirement, and an old ski lodge, ushered in a new menu for living.

“The richness in life is what you take from your environment and your friends and feeling good inside about the work you do and the people you meet along the way,” she says.

Lane and Shirley Hathaway both had varied careers. She was involved in several businesses. He was a schoolteacher, operated restaurants and, finally, worked in real estate.

When they married, their children were grown and they were able to plan for retirement at a fairly young age. That came in a comfortable home on a golf course in Bend, Ore. She was 52 and he was 59.

They played golf every day. After a while, she recalls, “we’d wake up looking for something to do … we were not happy being retired.”

A friend wanted to sell a ski lodge that had gone bankrupt. They drove up to take a look, thinking it would be a nice family retreat and that getting it back into shape would keep them busy.

“We came to look in the middle of the winter and fell in love. No one had been here for two years. We were hip-deep in snow. But, when we saw that view, we knew this was the right place for us. It just felt good.”

They moved in a month later. The lodge, surrounded by 60 acres of forest land, sits on the rim of what was once the old North-South Ski Bowl. The remnants of the old ski lift still straddle the ridge a short distance from the lodge.

This one-time ski resort was built in 1939 as a WPA project and later used as a ski-jumping training facility for Washington State University. It went through a succession of ownerships before the Hathaways bought it in 1999.

They spent a year and a half repairing the main buildings as well as clearing land for a garden, landscaping around the lodge and improving the driveway and private access road.

At first, they planned on creating a home for themselves that would also serve as family getaway for their children and grandchildren. Then a friend from nearby St. Maries asked if they’d open the lodge for a quilt group’s weekend retreat.

“We asked what they’d needed,” she says. “We had a building big enough for them, we fixed up some beds and they came a few months later.”

After that, as word got out, the phone began to ring and, she says, “we were in business.”

In 2006, they expanded the main lodge to include a conference center, gift shop and sleeping rooms downstairs for 36 guests. There are more private cabins, one with a 360-degree view if you’re willing to climb a steep staircase.

I’ve stayed in the main lodge for weekend retreats with quilting friends. If I don’t want to sew or play cards, I can go out on the wrap-around deck and simply soak up fresh air and the peace of an evergreen-studded mountain top.

If I’m lucky, a few deer will come to drink in the pond or Junior the Moose with tromp down the hillside to bathe and drink at will.

Downstairs, the library shelves are lined with books. It’s a cool retreat on even the warmest days. At night I climb into a small bed fitted with flannel sheets (even in the summer) and topped by a homemade quilt. Outside my open window, crickets and frogs in the pond serve up a bedtime lullaby.

My cell phone doesn’t work. If I had a Blackberry, it wouldn’t work there either.

The television in the lodge dining room is tuned to a New Age music channel. If I want to take a walk up a woodland trail, there’s a shaggy yellow dog that will keep me company.

Twice a day, Shirley and Lane fill the dining room with the fragrance of home-style meals. If you don’t eat your vegetables at night, you may just find them in a stir-fry the next morning at breakfast along with baked apple-studded oatmeal, scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits and jam, fresh fruit in season and all the coffee you can drink.

Once, Shirley tells me, they both worked hard each day to provide for their families. Now, she says, this lodge, and the guests it serves, is a work of love.

“We have met so many wonderful people and we are so enriched by them that we don’t think of this as work,” she says. “It’s a new adventure every day.”

Like many folks who’ve reached a certain age, they’ve had health problems.

Still, she says, “We hope we can do this for many years to come. This is a way of life. We don’t know if we could even find this happiness anywhere else.”

She doesn’t cook on high anymore.

“I cook slow now and I savor the flavors. It makes a big difference …”

Linda Bryant Smith writes about life as a senior citizen and the issues that concern, annoy and often irritate the heck out of her now that she lives in a world where nothing is ever truly fixed but her income. You can e-mail her at ljbryantsmith@yahoo.com.

If you go …

Palouse Divide Lodge P.O. Box 55 Princeton, Idaho 83857 208-245-3552 www.myidaholodge.com