Summer Highlights

Just some things I have missed......

 

Upper Peninsula

 

It has been over a month since our Michigan trip, and if I wait any longer I won't post at all, so I'm trying to pick the best excerpts from our two week trip.  We took a million pictures, and yet, it seems like we didn't take the ones I need- there is always somebody missing, or looking the wrong way, or too many of me- not the right pictures for this post in particular.

I am trying to find the right way to capture our summer trip home.  Home to Grand Rapids, home briefly to Lansing, home to the Upper Peninsual cabin on Lake Michigan that we first starting staying in when my twelve year old nephew was a not-even-toddler.  The first time we visited, my grandma was with us, Sylvia from Zoe's middle name.  Now, 11 years later, we're louder, bigger in some ways and smaller in others.  Four kids scramble up and down the stairs to the beach below the cabin and the toy room on the second floor.  My 91 year old grandmother holds my one year old daughter, sits by my 9 year old niece, and 4 generations of family fill the home.  We spend an evening digging through postcards from Sylvia's postcard collection that my mother brought with us, Aaron and Liam laughing at the soldier cartoons on the front, my sister, mother and I trying to decipher the names of relatives and the bits and pieces of my grandma's life we are privy to. 

This is not the going home of the house I grew up in, but I have been here enough times that it feels like home.  More importantly, it houses the people who feel like home to me.  My dad drives us to the nearby spring.  Aaron trades cooking tips with my mother, cooking with ease for ten people.  My 2 1/2 year old nephew, Connor, gives us glimpses of a year from now- just as he did quite accurately a year ago, a sneak peek at what's to come.

 

My parents used to take our family vacations here every summer- not to this cabin or this town, but to this area, somewhere in the Upper Peninsula.  My sister and I would complain that "we never went anywhere..."  I see Pastie signs and agates and t-shirts with bears on them, now,  with a level of familiarity and nostalgia.  I can stop for Mackinaw fudge without begging, since Aaron is the one behind the wheel (although I still haven't been to the Mystery Spot- we are waiting for Zoe to ask and have already decided that YES she can check it out-- a difference between me and my parents!!).  I understand, now,  my parent's urge, to make a home out of a vacation spot for us each year, and find myself repeating this for my daughter.  Already I can picture her next summer, old enough for longer day trips, a hike to a waterfall or a lighthouse, at our sometimes home.