Two weekends ago Don and I drove up to northwest Michigan. For a while Sunday, we walked and drove around some old stomping grounds of mine.
For several years, my family spent two weeks a summer at this cottage at Crystal Lake, built by my great great uncle (my mom's great uncle). I was six years old the last summer we went there in 1963, the year my parents got their own cottage much closer to our home town.
I remember walking barefoot across the road to the Crystal Lake beach, and the heat of the blacktop scalding my feet. The sand cool on the other side. I think these are the same stones as the ones we left in 1963. I fell asleep one summer and got the burn of my life. I wonder if that was the source of my melanoma almost 30 years later?
Every day I would walk with some of my siblings a mile away from Crystal Lake to Lake Michigan.
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We'd walk past the Gwen Frostic house, "Melody in F."
Climb up the little dune and cross over to the big lake beach.The smell of the fine, soft sand is identical today, and it brings all the memories back.
I don't understand how it happened, but this space, this sand, these stones, this house, these smells, this sun in these birch trees, got into my very flesh, mind and heart as a little one, and it's still here.
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