Fall Preview

A few weekends ago, Bryan and I flew back up to the west side of Michigan for Bryan’s family reunion.  Up north, the leaves were already changing to their fall reds and oranges and the temperatures were cool enough to need layers at night.  For the reunion, we stayed in a lakeside seasonal cottage, part of a lakeshore beach association gathered around a private sandy beach on the shores of Lake Michigan.  

Not much has changed to the cottages since this picture was taken

If you’ve ever been lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on your definition of comfort) to have stayed in a home that is over a century old, you’ll know that there isn’t any room for our modern expectations.  It wasn’t insulated and didn’t have A/C or heat.  As the cottage typically gets the most use in the summertime, the lack of A/C was countered by two large screened-in sleeping porches, which I had never seen before in real life.  These were chock full of beds but unfortunately, as it was in the 40s at night, they went unused during our stay.  The stairs in the cottage seemed twice as steep as they are in modern homes.  None of the floorboards were level and exposed electrical wiring snaked around roof beams.  There were no closets and only one bathroom for every five bedrooms.  We crammed all of Bryan’s parents / aunts / uncles under one roof and made it through a long weekend without starting any new family feuds.

The entire beach association felt like a place frozen in time.  No one locked their doors and in the evenings, people gathered around porch lights, reading or quietly talking.  In the early mornings, we warmed up with hot coffee and huddled around a space heater.  On one blustery night, we all gathered around a bonfire on the beach.  Our host showed us black and white faded pictures of her relatives who first built the cottages, dating back over 100 years ago.

Despite the cooler temperatures, we all made it down to the beach to scour the shoreline for Petoskey stones (Bryan found one!) and sea glass.  That Lake Michigan is a lake and not an ocean never ceases to amaze me.  With our sandy feet, the cottage’s outdoor shower did actually get some use but inevitably some sand did end up getting tracked indoors.

Because of the naturally occurring erosion from the lake, the beach cottages have been picked up and moved back several times to escape the shoreline, the most recent time happening in the 1980s.  This also means the homes get crowded closer and closer together after each time.  Someday, the lake will swallow up that small group of vacation homes and the physical reminder of the previous century will be lost to the waves.  Maybe it was due to the encroaching fall weather or because it was the end of the summer vacation season, you could already sense a little of that in the air around the cottages, in the infrequency in which they get used - because the original owners have relocated to the rest of the US or because people now eschew these old buildings in favor of modern comfort and conveniences.