Michigan

Just spent a week in Michigan with my Loving Husband and my parents. Lots of family history there:

My great grandmother Ellen lived in Ohio and in the '20s, on doctor's orders (though I bet it was because Ohio sucks), went north for the summers because of allergies. My great-grandfather's name either escapes me or has never been mentioned to me. We have a historic map up in the house with the names of original homeowners on it, and his initials are apparently C.F. They bought a bunch of properties along Glen Lake in northern MI, by Glen Arbor, then a VERY small town. They had three children, one of them being my grandmother Margaret. There was a "big house" and several smaller cottages, like 5 or so. They all had names, like "Redwing" and "Birdie" or something like that. I will need to clarify these things with my mother, though I'm not too worried about the details at the moment because a historian picked my mother's brain last year and will be publishing a book about the homes on Glen Lake. The big house is Glen Ellen, after my great grandmother. My grandmother inherited the big house. There were 3 kids, and my great aunt Dottie and great "Uncle Did" inherited the other houses. There was even a "honeymoon cottage" across the street from Glen Ellen, one room, fit for oompa-loompas. NO honeymooner would want to stay there now, even if it hadn't collapsed in a heap of rotted wood from lack of use and care. I barely remember it, except for my mother telling me to stay away from it because it wasn't safe. Same goes for the outhouse attached to the garage, since they had a septic tank installed somewhere along the way.

Anyway, my grandmother married Fritz Krueger, whom she met at the Curtis Music Institute I believe, and they moved to Philly where he sang Tenor in the opera and she was a concert pianist. They even had a radio show together called "Mr. and Mrs. Music." They spent summers with my mother and my uncle at the lake house. My mom used to tell me about riding horses, playing with her cousins, sitting at the kitchen table with her grandmother, hiking the dunes (http://www.sleepingbeardunes.com/), watching sunsets over the lake.

My mother stayed in the Philly area and passed on her love for the lake to me and my three brothers. Now there are already 6 little ones, furnished by my brothers, being instilled with an inescapable draw to the house and the lake.

When I was growing up, my brothers were much older (especially much older than they seem now) and I have few memories of being at the lake with from about age 6 to about age 16. I do remember them burying me waist high in the sand dunes and having a good laugh before digging me out. I remember they spent their time sleeping and doing whatever else in the boathouse, and my parents rigged an intercom system to call them for meals (the lake is several flights of steps down from the front yard). We always spent two weeks there, and there were only a couple of years that it didn't include my birthday, up until I was in high school. My birthday is July 5, and I was told (and believed, for a while) that the fireworks on Lake Michigan in Glen Arbor were just for me!

More of my childhood memories involve my mother's cousin's daughters (aunt Dottie's grandkids), and I can't tell you if that means second cousins or cousins removed from somewhere. But I call them cousins. So, they were usually up around the same time, and I also sometimes brought my best-friend-cum-maid-of-honor with me. I guess my parents thought I deserved a playmate, since my brothers were each other's built-in buddies. Those are some of my most vivid childhood memories, and maybe it's because it was the same every year.

We would pack for a week beforehand. My mother would get out her infamous index-card-packing-list from the previous year to be sure we didn't forget anything. We would stuff everything in The Van (green pre-1987, gray and maroon post-1987), including the hammock, various children, and whatever dog(s) we had at the time, and drive off, always later than planned and with a few stressed-out parental spats. We would drive through the night until one year my mother got tired of that, then we would stay overnight at the Knights' Inn in Toledo, which takes dogs. I remember entertaining myself in the car, listening to my dad's CB radio, reading, listening to a Walkman, counting cars. One drive-through-the-night year, when my mother went to the back seat to sleep, my father let me sit up front and have a Coke and one of his Archway cookies. Suddenly I was a racecar driver, complete with squealing breaks and revving engine... the late-night Coke didn't happen again after that.

There were two tunnels through the mountains in western PA. My parents always woke me up for them. And I can still hear the sound of the wind through the little window that slid open next to my chair. And the grocery store in the "city" where we always had to stop when we arrived still reminds me of that desperate feeling of wanting to just be at the lake already. Swim in the lake, go out on a boat, lay on the dock and read, watch sunsets, hike the dunes, go to the Totem Shop and buy Minnetonka Moccasins.