I Just Didn"t Know
I am sitting at a large old oak dining table at a cottage on Lake Huron in Michigan as I write.
My eyes glance around this room where I spent so many of my days and where so many faces of my youth played.
My heart expands with memories and events of long-gone summer years that dance across my mind.
In my soul I hear the quiet and soft words, "I just didn't know.
" This old cottage-perched on a sidewalk, perched on a very big lake-is the receptacle of voices and childhood laughter that colored my youth and helped create the woman that I have become.
Six siblings and I shared too few bathrooms and bedrooms, fought and howled in laughter, tussled for position and grew to adulthood within the aged walls of this cottage and on the echoing boards of its screened porch.
And then there is the lake.
This body of water defines the row of cottages that kiss its shores.
A sidewalk runs in front of cottages that all bear the names of their owners.
Ours, the "Korth Cottage," holds position number ten from where the sidewalk starts at end of the "Point.
" This is Point Lookout, a small finger of land that juts into Lake Huron and carves Saginaw Bay from this very large body of water.
As a child and teen, this place was magic and those who peopled it were magic, too.
We were all "Baby Boomers," sons and daughters of WWII veterans who had come home, had restarted their lives and bought a summer place to get away from the cities they called home during the non-summer months.
And, oh my, were there a lot of us! There must have been more than a hundred children that ran these sidewalks, swam and boated these waters and felt the first licks of maturity in the late-dusk evenings of north Michigan nights.
On days when the lake called its tune with rainy winds and big "rollers" pounding the shore, friends abounded in basements and living rooms that "rock and roll never forgot" and where our feet learned the dance steps that made us "cool.
" We played endless games of Euchre with viscous glee, read tattered comic books and munched potato chips.
Girls and boys approached one another shyly and then fled back to the safety of their single-sex age groups.
Families would gather in impromptu get-togethers in an "everyone is welcome" lifestyle.
Laughter at bawdy jokes would echo off porches as we went from cottage to cottage gathering those of our tribe who had "come up" to the Point for the weekend.
We gathered in defined groups separated by sometimes only a two-year age difference.
There were just so many of us, you see.
So here I sit forty years out from these days that defined me, and I realize now that I just didn't know.
I did not know that I laughed and lived and loved and grew up in halcyon days that are forever gone.
I just didn't know that I had the childhood of a lifetime--mine.
My eyes glance around this room where I spent so many of my days and where so many faces of my youth played.
My heart expands with memories and events of long-gone summer years that dance across my mind.
In my soul I hear the quiet and soft words, "I just didn't know.
" This old cottage-perched on a sidewalk, perched on a very big lake-is the receptacle of voices and childhood laughter that colored my youth and helped create the woman that I have become.
Six siblings and I shared too few bathrooms and bedrooms, fought and howled in laughter, tussled for position and grew to adulthood within the aged walls of this cottage and on the echoing boards of its screened porch.
And then there is the lake.
This body of water defines the row of cottages that kiss its shores.
A sidewalk runs in front of cottages that all bear the names of their owners.
Ours, the "Korth Cottage," holds position number ten from where the sidewalk starts at end of the "Point.
" This is Point Lookout, a small finger of land that juts into Lake Huron and carves Saginaw Bay from this very large body of water.
As a child and teen, this place was magic and those who peopled it were magic, too.
We were all "Baby Boomers," sons and daughters of WWII veterans who had come home, had restarted their lives and bought a summer place to get away from the cities they called home during the non-summer months.
And, oh my, were there a lot of us! There must have been more than a hundred children that ran these sidewalks, swam and boated these waters and felt the first licks of maturity in the late-dusk evenings of north Michigan nights.
On days when the lake called its tune with rainy winds and big "rollers" pounding the shore, friends abounded in basements and living rooms that "rock and roll never forgot" and where our feet learned the dance steps that made us "cool.
" We played endless games of Euchre with viscous glee, read tattered comic books and munched potato chips.
Girls and boys approached one another shyly and then fled back to the safety of their single-sex age groups.
Families would gather in impromptu get-togethers in an "everyone is welcome" lifestyle.
Laughter at bawdy jokes would echo off porches as we went from cottage to cottage gathering those of our tribe who had "come up" to the Point for the weekend.
We gathered in defined groups separated by sometimes only a two-year age difference.
There were just so many of us, you see.
So here I sit forty years out from these days that defined me, and I realize now that I just didn't know.
I did not know that I laughed and lived and loved and grew up in halcyon days that are forever gone.
I just didn't know that I had the childhood of a lifetime--mine.
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