Summer at the lake

This summer we got in a car, towed our teardrop trailer with six bikes around the country for five weeks, and got back just in time for school to start. It's been an adjustment getting back home after so long, but now our friends seem to remember who we are, our fridge has food in it again (not just beer and condiments), and we are used to washing all the dishes and doing all the laundry and mowing the lawn (well, maybe not that, yet.)

We are glad to be home. But we feel the ache of our heart being in multiple places at once. We've never felt the distance of family like we have since our oldest was born five years ago. Our children need us, they need good schools and a church community full of kids, but they also need grandparents. Both our families are immovably planted states away from us and we feel the distance more and more.

Since we became parents, we have been drawn in the summers to the lake where one set of grandparents live. My husband grew up in the eastern upper peninsula of Michigan in a bay that sits just to the side of Lake Huron, the second largest of the Great Lakes. The eastern U.P. is so close to Canada that your cell phone will sometimes fritz into roaming and think you've crossed the border.

I try to explain it to people who think we just jet off in the summer to our family's lake house with our supposed yacht (non-existent), but in reality it's an indescribable kind of twilight zone that isn't quite Canada, isn't quite United States, isn't really anything like any other place I've imagined in our country - or anywhere for that matter.

The communities there were hit hard by the recession in 2008 - nothing like an economy tank to make you reevaluate your first/second/third/fourth vacation home - and these amazing lakeside cabins and properties are empty except in summer. In most other places in the country, they would easily be multi-million dollar homes, but here they are just passed down in the family until they realize that nobody visits enough and they are forced to sell for a quarter of its worth. None of these homes are good investments anymore because there's no market demand and nobody will buy it.

But it wasn't the recession that shaped the area's culture. That was established long before and is unchanging, even now. The locals are a funny combination of Canadian isolationism (just leave me alone in the woods), classic Midwestern hospitality (come in and eat some casserole, honey dear), and vacation town luxury and pomp.

The summer crowds bring classic lake culture vibes - you know, where the collared pastel polo shirt is king. Everyone has a boat, the "front" of your house is always the side facing the water (not the side with the front door), and the foot uniform is Sperry's with no socks.

But it's also back-woods culture, filtered down from their northern neighbors, where everyone knows how to talk about what's being caught in the back of the bay right now, nobody locks the doors of their house or their car, and extra-odd people abound: like the neighbor who is known for hauling around fresh roadkill and making stew out of it that he'll bring to you when you're sick. There are mice in your kitchen but it's no big deal because you can pee in the woods and that counts for something, right?

When a place holds your children's grandparents, and the only living great-grandparents left in both families, it's important to pack up and drive the distance to get to them at least once a year. The drive, without stops, is 24 hours from our home in Utah, and worth every minute of it.

We've driven there together before we had kids, all the way in a tiny used Subaru Impreza with the windows down and no air conditioning "to save gas." Then we drove with a newborn, stopping every hour for diaper changes and feedings and bathroom breaks. And now we've spent so many summers pushing the miles with two kids, managing potty training and car sickness and boredom, trying to piece up the drive into multiple days with hotel rooms and swimming pool breaks in between, and eventually just settling on all-nighters with Red Bull and bad gas station coffee to get it over with and save the kids (and us) some pain and agony.

And then we get to Michigan. And with its backwoods-lake town mashup, we get to swim every day, catch toads after it rains, pick blueberries and raspberries, ride our bikes on the dirt road in front of my in-law's painted green lake house, go into town for ice cream, visit my kids' great-grandma at the care home, go fishing for pike, take boat rides around the bay, and also reap those benefits of family and sleep in, share the burden of cooking and cleaning and caring for the kids, have an occasional date night.

Sure, living in one house with family for over a month every summer means you all drive each other crazy sometimes and don't like the way they cook or clean or drive and want your own space and can't wait to get back home to your own stuff. But we need our family and their weird differences.

We would rather have our family with us in Utah. Then we get the best of both worlds - the mountains and big city where we love to live, and our very special kin nearby. But if they can't be, this is the next best place for them to be. We are thankful and so blessed by the memories we make by the lake. And we'll be back there next summer, and the next, and the next.
- Kelsey Ramos Conroy