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We have no long views of the cabin in color, so I did some extracting and placing of B&W on a photo of Michigan Upper Peninsula beach that 100% matched the one where the cabin was sited.
It's gone, as are most of the people who enjoyed it -- my sister and three of our cousins are all that are left.
The journaling is long - as follows:
When in 1950 our family first followed that barely walkable path off West Beach Road to my grandfather’s cabin on Lake Michigan, we landed on a soft pillow that a hundred years before had been harsh wilderness. We would go back nearly every summer for eight years.
Our first visit, a year to the day the cabin was first occupied by my rarely-vacationing grandparents, the ground was still healing, with only a few derelict boards and rusting nails from the cabin raising the year before. Certainly we saw nothing of the loss and bewilderment the lumberjacks and the miners of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan had undergone across two centuries to our day.
A concrete walk extended from the back door, covered by a rooflet, around the side to the step up to the concrete front porch, and on down a few steps to the beach.
That we hadn’t participated in any of the struggles of the U.P. was fine by us. We were interlopers among interlopers, and we didn’t care. The sand, the lake shore (miles up and miles down), the lichen, the rounded and incredibly beautiful granite beach rocks, the sky to the horizon south and to the line of woods east and west, the smell of the new-cut pine that framed and paneled the cabin, all made your moment of standing there the only moment that could count.
My mother’s father and mother had opened the new cabin the previous August, in 1950. In 1960, just a flash later, my aunt and her children closed it for the last time, at least, as far as our family was concerned.
My BUDDIES
, Marion, Jenna's Mommy, All My Memories, Winnie49, Tiffanys Scraps, Grannywin,emst
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