Lake Christie

When I was 6 or 7 I went up to Lake Christie in Michigan with my grandma, Nana.  Her favorite sister, my Great Aunt Jo was up at the lake every summer with her daughter Virginia and my older cousins from Chicago.  Their cabin at the lake was the same one my mother went to as a teenager.  Mom and her sister would periodically go ‘back east’ with Nana from California to visit their cousins in Chicago and Michigan.  To the end of her life she fondly remembered her trips to the lake and was always plotting one last visit.  When we lived in Ohio, we went there several times, as well as up to Minnesota to see my Dad’s folks and south to Tennessee to visit the Stanley kinfolk – we were well situated for seeing grandparents on both sides.  In the fall of 1957, my folks relocated to California once more and visits became less frequent.    In 1956, Mom was pregnant with twins due to be born in early August, in 1957, she was juggling three infants in diapers and whichever the year, was happy to have Nana take me away to the lake.  My Grandma and I were roommates in our home in Columbus and needed no arm twisting to hit the road together on an adventure.  I am pretty sure Nana drove us, I vaguely recall her commenting on place names and which road to turn on – so I don’t think we took a bus.  I wish I could remember the car ride better, I think we drove straight through. It was almost a 300 mi trip and manageable in a day - albeit a long one.   I also cannot recall whether my brother went with us – of course I was pretty self-absorbed and pretty young then.  I remember my folks coming up later on - perhaps bringing him then with the babies. I get confused about which trip was when and have only a few unmarked photos as reference points.  I know that Mom had the twins in 1956, and that we went up to Minnesota that summer while she was very pregnant and that I had my birthday at Shady point, ( which is another tale) so I am thinking this was not the same year. – it’s all too hazy now, suffice it to say there were many visits to lakes and relatives while we lived in Ohio as well as a trip or two down to Florida (again another tale).    Our route to Aunt Jo’s lake took us through Battle Creek Michigan, that mystical place where my brother and I sent our accumulated cereal box tops in order to redeem fabulous prizes displayed on the packages. It was a disappointingly normal looking sleepy little Midwestern town.  There were no gaudy warehouses brimming with unredeemed frogmen, patches, magic viewers, submarines and gyroscopes - only grocery stores and gas stations like everywhere else.  I could cross Battle Creek Michigan off of my life-list of destination cities.  We drove on through fields of corn on tiny country lanes– a strange sight to me since we rarely left the city limits of Columbus.  As we approached the turn for Aunt Jo’s – I was astounded by how on earth Nana knew which unmarked back road was the right one.   The air smelt green, the countryside silent - but for the distant sound of an occasional passing truck and the constant buzzing of insects.  Then suddenly, past a few trees, we saw the lake.  The cornfields reached right up to the backside of their property and we would wander through them on occasion picking their miniature young ears, nibbling bits off of the tiny cobs in imitation of those cartoon chipmunks ‘Chip and Dale’.  The lake had a dock and boats and minnow buckets and all those things mucky and interesting to a landlubber.  Cousin Harry (two years older than I - which was WAY older when you are little) was always going out in the rowboat to catch turtles and explore amongst the rushes and cattails - it was kid heaven for a nature enthusiast.  My older cousins would tell us little ones ghost stories up in the communal sleeping quarters.  I especially remember one about ‘bloody bones’ who lived in their dark basement and crept up step by step to ‘get us’ – we shrieked with panic and hid under our covers - then begged to hear it again.  Being budding teenagers, they had movie magazines and stacks of 45’s in their recreation room. The Everly brothers, Buddy Holly, shoo-bop and rock in roll continuously spinning on the turntable.  I, who had memorized the lyrics of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ singing to my record player at home was suddenly in the world of big kids and tried hard to love the music that no longer revolved around candy and hippity hopping down bunny trails.  It was a strange new land which both intrigued and scared my youthful mind.  I was relieved to escape the teen’s hangout and wander over to the docks and watch the minnows circling in the bucket or poke at the snapping turtle to make him bite my stick.  Growing up looked way too complicated, and the songs that described adolescence were so filled with sorrow and emotional complications that I was happy to drift back into the main house and help my grandma and her sister make carnations out of facial tissue, tying them and fluffing them and then dipping the ends into a dish of food coloring to give them raspberry edges.  When you are little, you need that sort of simple repetitive activity – the older kid’s world was just too complex.  Nana and Aunt Jo and I made hundreds of paper carnations – I can’t remember what for, either for leis or to cover an aircraft carrier – who cared!   It was fun busy work that my little hands could master. 

I recall one evening we all went into town because the older kids were dying to see the new Elvis Presley movie Love MeTender.  They shrieked periodically throughout the tedious movie, their reactions providing more entertainment than what was on the screen - at least in those days they had a cartoon first.

 

As I stare at this hazy old photo of me with a twig and cousin Harry in the rowboat – we both look so little, yet we were allowed to wander our end of the lake, taught early to be careful of various dangers, looked after by lenient grandmas who gave us far more latitude than our parents. My Grandmother was about the same age I am now when she and I went up to the lake. I can understand her eagerness to visit her sister and have time to chat and just be together, remembering their past while enjoying the present with a new young generation.