The Cottage on Lake St. Helen, Michigan

Tags

ansochrome, Artesia Beach, Artesian well, Big Mo', Cottage, Cousins, Kodachrome, Lake St. Helen, Michigan

I recently found some old slides of Lake St. Helen and the Cottage.  This was Ansoochrome, not Kodachrome, thus the faded quality.  #lakesthelen

 

Long before I loved summer camp, I loved the cottage on Sunset Drive, about halfway between Artesia Beach and the beginning  of Lakeview Drive on Lake St. Helen in central Michigan.  Our cottage was unique from all the other cottages because it had an Artesian well in the front yard.

Good old black and white- Maribeth, Pam, Jill, Susan, and me sitting on the Artesian well.

We frequently caught hell from Papa for falling into the well’s freezing waters.  “That’s our drinking water,” he’d yell and haul us out by the seat of our pants.

My cousins have looked for that cottage but it has been rebuilt and if any family member knew the full address, he or she has either passed away or long since forgotten it.  We’d probably know the lot if we came upon it.  We must have traipsed up and down that hill about a thousand times each summer in the 60’s, gleefully running on the way down and grumbling irritably on the way up.

We caught minuscule sun perch off the dock using night crawlers dug from Papa’s petunia flower bed out back, along the dirt road.  There was no central heat, which meant plenty of mold and mildew grew between seasons but the fireplace at night smoked it out.  There was no basement or crawl space, which meant sometimes bait came through the tiles in the bathroom, which spared the flower bed.

There was a hot water heater that wound up like a screeching banshee each time it kicked on.  A green plaid hammock hung from the trees between our cottage and the next, beside the narrow sidewalk lined in beds of colorfully painted rocks, decorated by the five of us over the years.

Our mothers were sisters and we were their daughters, each a year apart: Pam, Maribeth, Susan, Nancy and Jill.  We could have been sisters.  We played, fought, and loved like sisters.  We shared clothes and mostly bathing suits.  I don’t remember having my own suit until I joined the swim team back home in South Bend, Indiana.  At the cottage, you just went to the hall cupboard, opened its birch door perfectly matched against the birch paneling, and rummaged through the cotton suits.  One size fit all, with ties at the shoulders, shirring down the front and elastic around the legs.

Our moms and Papa.  They wore the bikinis! Thank goodness someone used #Kodachrome.

We lived in those suits by day as we played in the sand, rocked on the hammock, floated on styrofoam rafts, water skied, played croquet, and walked to the Artesia Beach store for Big Mo’ candy bars.  We always walked there by the dirt road and came home by the lake, eating our candy bars and staring at the front yards of the other cottages as we circumvented their docks and mucked through the shores of those who hadn’t cleared out their weeds.

At night, we roasted marshmallows, lit sparklers, skinny dipped, played spoons, ate popcorn and raisinettes, drank sugary Kool-Aid from tall metal cups, and watched “I Love Lucy” on black and white TV.  But mostly we pestered Papa and put on skits and made the adults watch us.  I miss the cottage, and so do my cousins.  It was magical.  If you hear of a cottage on Sunset Drive with an Artesian well, please be sure to let me know.  I looked on Zillow and Google Earth and couldn’t find it.

The cottage around 1962.  More Ansochrome film, though I saturated it after scanning.

Nanny and Papa sharing an anniversary cake.  Oh Ansochrome, why were you made?

Leelanau Outdoor Center (LOC) Unlocks Potential

Tags

Character education, Leelanau County Michigan, Leelanau Outdoor Center, LOC, Maple City, Maple City Michigan, MI, Michigan, Outdoor education, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

My final post for 2013 is from Jen Murphy, MEd, Development Director of the Leelanau Outdoor Center (LOC) in Maple City, Michigan.

https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-62746-240-2

Jen says it best in her own words:  

“Three years ago, I was living in a warm climate working with at-risk youth and their families and felt that I wasn’t making much of a difference. Too much red tape. Too much to change.  And not enough support. I needed a different direction. I headed north.  

What I didn’t know when I left a home and career behind for this new adventure, was where I would end up. I started writing grants for the Leelanau Outdoor Center (LOC), a non-profit outdoor education center that serves over 2500 students each year and focuses on both character education and stewardship of the outdoors.

What’s amazing is that outdoor education is one of those things that often gets a “back seat” to everything else going on in the classroom. Schools today are expected to do a lot: improve student test scores, increase graduation rates, individualize instruction and provide character education at the same time. Due to the demands placed on teachers and administrators to meet student performance standards, character education takes a back seat. This missing component often leads to classrooms with students who resort to fighting with peers and arguing with teachers because they don’t know how to get along with others and solve interpersonal problems effectively. Just like the kids I had worked with for years.

Programs at the Leelanau Outdoor Center (LOC) are designed to fill in this missing piece. A typical program includes full accommodations and meals for 3-4 days. Students are immersed in a safe and open atmosphere that is removed from the pressures of school and home life, so they are free to focus on the lessons of leadership, communication, and self-confidence.  LOC also includes a variety of fun seasonal activities, such as hiking in the Sleeping Bear Dunes, aquatic studies, animal tracking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, canoeing, team building exercises, and navigating a high ropes course.  What student wouldn’t benefit from that! In fact, nine out of ten students attending LOC attributes their time here for growth in confidence, leadership, and their ability to communicate with others.

Let me give you an example of what I have the opportunity to see every day. A recent group of middle school students participated in an exercise that helps students to identify root causes of bullying. Once the exercise was completed, the staff leader asked the group what their school would be like if they brought skills home. After a few silent moments, a voice from the back of the room piped up, “It would be like a family!” And in that moment, I realized that I was finally working somewhere that made a real difference.”

Leelanau Outdoor Center in action:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViJcpG5sAWU

The Powerful Legacy of Tangible Books

Tags

Emmet Fox, Flint, H. Emilie Cady, Lake St. Helen, Lessons in Truth, Mary Baker Eddy, Metaphysical, Michigan, tangible books, Truth

Inscribe your favorite books, underline passages, and hold on to them.  They will tell your children, and their children, more about you than any photo album.  Thank goodness my mother never met a book too intimidating to write in, to bend a corner, to underline a passage, or scribble a thought.

A First Generation book from the 1940s beside a Second Generation book from 1986. Both are user-friendly.

When she passed away in 2001, at 64, my step-dad boxed up her metaphysical book collection and sent it to my sister.  Overwhelmed by memories, Susan sent the box to me.  I hastily absorbed it into my collection of similar books Mom had given me over my adult life. Each one is packed full of wisdom.  Every book is inscribed and many contain Mom’s left-handed scrawl of a random thought as she worked out its meaning.

Mom had been raised Catholic.  I often asked her why we were not Catholic, same as Nanny, Papa, my aunt, uncle and all our cousins.  She confided a longing for something different at an early age due to a little book she had read as a teenager. She never mentioned the name of this book or where she had found it, only that it had changed her life.

The little black book with a history, and its compatible hardware.

Recently, as I waited for my laptop to perform lengthy updates, a little book beckoned from the adjacent bookshelf.  I marveled at its delicate binding and content pre-dating a similar book by the same author Mom had given me decades earlier.  As I read her inscription inside the front cover, I realized this was the book.  I had finally found it.  Mom had penned, “… found in the book-case of the cottage my father, A.R. Mason, purchased on Lake St. Helen, in Michigan.  This was approximately 1950-51.  It was my first introduction to truth and my constant quest to use these truths that make us free. Dorothy Ann Mason Lincoln.”

The little black book’s inscription.

Her father’s cottage is mentioned in Memory Lake as ‘Papa’s cottage’. This log summerhome on tiny Lake St. Helen, in Central Michigan, delivered a childhood of laughter, pranks, skits, and sunshine to my sister, my cousins, and me.  I still dream of its artesian well, woven hammocks, rocky flower beds hiding fat night-crawlers, and the steep hill to the lake.  Its musty interior held many more treasures; a deer mount, faded upholstered furniture, bookshelves of hard-bound classics, and a defunct player-piano.  When I was ten, Papa sold all of it upon learning he was terminally ill.  Soon after, my sister and I began our years at summer camp.

Fish caught from the night-crawlers dug from Papa’s flowerbeds. That’s me in the middle.

My mother was fourteen when her father bought the cottage fully furnished.  She hadn’t liked the place at first.  Bored and disgruntled to be spending the weekend at the lake, instead of at home with friends, I imagine she had knelt on the large woolen rug, wearing saddle shoes and bobby socks, to examine the bookshelf.  There she had found this little book and began reading.

Memory Lake is a ripple of this memory which continues to expand sixty-two years later.  The little black book is inspiring, but not surprising because Mom had succeeded in her quest for truth and raised me on it. Instead, the surprise lies in the book’s existence.  It held the capacity to sleep for decades without updates, conversions,  or electricity to reveal a profound window to the past. I wonder, will someone find an e-reader sixty years from now with such a personal impact?  Most likely it will not power up.

Inscribe your favorite books, underline passages, and hold on to them.  They will tell your children, and their children, more about you than any photo album. 

* H. Emilie Cady is the little black book’s author and she is affiliated with Unity.  This is not the church I attended, nor the church affiliated with the camp in Memory Lake, so it is a fun coincidence that she was from Dryden, New York, the same one stop-light hometown of my first friend at camp, and main character in Memory Lake, “Nancy Roman”.

The Legend of Sleeping Bear Dunes

Tags

Dapine, Great Spirit, Lake Michigan, Made in Michigan, Manitou Island, Memory Lake, Michigan, North Manitou Island, Second Edition, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Tate Publishing, The Legend of Sleeping Bear, Wisconsin

George Vieira’s interpretation of the old legend is well-written and faithfully crafted.  He has graciously allowed me to re-post it.  The dunes play a key role in “Memory Lake; The Forever Friendships of Summer.”  Tate Publishing is launching the Second Edition this month and the new cover is a view of Lake Michigan from the top of the dunes. You can see it on their website:   http://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-62746-240-2

Please read George’s blog post below, or visit his page:   http://mishigamaa.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/the-legend-of-sleeping-bear/

The Legend of Sleeping Bear

Posted on August 10, 2013 by George Vieira

The wind breathes a song of ancient wisdom – only listen to the rattle of the ghost forest up on the dunes. It’s the story of Dapine, mother bear, proud parent of sharp claws and soft fur. Her cubs dancing on rolling Wisconsin plains, two brothers in the summer sun, animated by a boundless spirit. A bond unbreakable, unbelievable, takes us back to that terrible month when the sun hung too close to the Earth for too long.

Day after day, the leaves curled and the grass progressively turned orange. The forest was brittle and dangerous. Then one night lightning struck and set a dry patch ablaze. As luck would have it a fierce wind howled and blew the flames higher and farther, until the flames towered over the forest animals. Instinctively, Dapine ran for Lake Michigan, that immortal body, her cubs racing behind her, tripping over their young, clumsy paws. Though safe in the calm, placid waters of the lake, she saw in the thick black smoke the desolation and starvation that awaited her cubs once the fire died. Where they’d rolled and played and sweet honeycombs had bounded, charred nothingness would smolder.

So Dapine swam, desperate, one stroke at a time, towards Michigan. The journey was long and difficult, and the young cubs struggled to keep up, panting, tongues agog. On the second night of their journey, a great storm whipped the lake into a panicked frenzy. Hail pelted their thick coats; lightning made their fur stand on end. And somewhere in the wild waves she lost her cubs, their panicked faces illuminated by one last flash of light before being enveloped in permanent darkness.

Dapine swam against the tide for many hours in search of her cubs. She cried out their names, desperate, painful screams full of sorrow. But no answer. Exhausted, she turned back the following morning for the northwest shore of Michigan. Drenched and tired, she finally pawed her way onto the promised beach. At last. The sky was deep and blue, the green expanse of trees swayed in the wind. There was food, shelter, and water.

But no cubs.

All Dapine could think of was her cubs. She felt little relief or happiness in having made it alive to Michigan. Day and night, she faithfully watched the endless waves hoping to catch a glimpse of her lost cubs. In her many, fevered dreams, there they were, safe and warm in the old den, gnawing on the fish bones held between their tiny claws. She quickly grew wane and emaciated, her hair falling out in tufts on the soft sand.

Seeing Dapine, the Great Spirit was moved to tears by her story, from the veil of impartial observation to utmost mercy. As the earth shook and a hard rain fell, he raised two large landmasses above the waters of Lake Michigan in remembrance of Dapine’s cubs, North Manitou Island and South Manitou Island. He imbued the islands with their innocent energy, so that it would be a grand memorial to Dapine’s loss. She saw this, and like animals always do, knew right away what it meant.

And so with heavy sigh, Dapine closed her eyes and slept by the waves. It was then she felt a sudden lightness, her soul hovering over her own body. Carried by the force of the Great Spirit, she ascended up beyond the worries of the world, where in the limitless sky her cubs hopped from cloud to cloud in excitement, reunited with their mother at last.

Back down on earth, Dapine’s body turned to sand, more and more sand. In her place a great dune emerged, which from the Manitou Islands resembled a giant sleeping bear. The Great Spirit did this as a testament to the power of love, the story of Dapine and her cubs. Even today, the area is called the Sleeping Bear Dunes, and the story is written of on plaques and in books, never forgotten.

Yes, it is all true.

Tags

authentic, Great Lakes, Lake Michigan, memoir, Michigan, petoskeys, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Tori, Lori, Nancy, Susie, Cindy, Christie, Sarah, Me, and Mary (1976)

When I have the privilege of meeting readers of Memory Lake, they are surprised to learn how much of the novel is true.  “In real life there is another Nancy, a Christie, Lori, Tori, Susie, Cindy, Sarah, and Mary?”, they ask.  Yes, I reply, supposing they are an e-reader, because it is easy to miss the picture on page 3.

“My daughter’s name is KT, her best friends are Angela and Katie, my sister’s name is Susan, and the camp really exists though I changed its name,” I say with a genuine smile, because the honor of writing about them still lingers.  “Water spouts often form over Lake Michigan and the Sleeping Bear Dunes are huge.”  Few readers question the validity of the rest of the novel because its coming-of-age conflict and character interactions speak to the human experience.  We all need to overcome fear.  We all need to learn that putting on a smile, especially when we least feel like it, leads to real joy.

KT, Katie, Angela, and Lake Michigan (2004)

Whether you devour Memory Lake over a week-end, *”like an irresistible box of candy”, or deliberately spread it out, because like camp, *”you don’t want it to end”, please know it is 99% true.  The 1% is to keep the story flowing and to protect the sanctity of locations.

Petoskeys; Michigan’s state rock (fossils of prehistoric coral) also mentioned in “Memory Lake”.

* Quotes from reviews.

Could it really be that simple?

Tags

Grand Rapids Michigan, Lake, Lake Michigan, Lewis Carroll, Michigan, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, National Weather Service, Waterspout, writing

Aim for the finish line…

COULD IT REALLY BE THAT SIMPLE?   Fifteen years ago, I walked the beach of Lake Michigan with my mom.  We had just taken KT to camp and wanted to stretch our legs before enduring the long car ride.  “I am writing a book,” I said, feeling undeserved and timid.  As an accountant, military wife, and mom, what did I know about writing?  The whitecaps, steady breeze, and endless blue had coerced this secret confession.  Mom’s stride halted.  Her red lipstick tightened.  Her hands gripped my shoulders.  “Just finish it,” she punched, before resuming her stride.  As she walked away, all the steps in between seemed to vanish.  Could it really be that simple?

She died three years later.  We never discussed it again.  But, her three little words held a wealth of inspiration.  Through doubt, rewrites, and even a complete shift away from the science-fiction-fantasy opus I’d set out to write, to a different genre, I knew the goal.  She had set it for me.  I smile at the irony.  “Memory Lake”, the finished product, is set on the shores of Lake Michigan and involves the camp KT and I attended generations apart.

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, if you don’t know where you’re going, anywhere will do.  Therefore, in answer, “Yes.  It really is that simple.  Just finish it.”

Ahhh camp.

Tags

camp, daughters, friends, inspiration, memoir, Michigan, mothers, sisters, spiritual growth

Take the Journey to “Memory Lake”:

“Memory Lake, the forever friendships of summer”, 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Award winner, Inspirational category. 

Click the link to buy the book!

 http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Lake-Second-Edition-Nancy/dp/1627462406/ref=cm_rdp_product