My family owns a bit of land on a lake in Northern Wisconsin.
It's the most beautiful place in the world.
I spent summers up there as a kid. Once I turned 18, I got my own key to the place and free license to head up there whenever I wished. Over the years I've had a number of bluegrass sing-alongs on the front porch, cooked and consumed fantastic meals in the kitchen. I learned to take a fish off a line, the rudiments of butchering a deer, how to count while playing cribbage. I've cried over broken hearts and written long essays about my father and smoked endless cigarettes at the end of the pier. I've seen the Perseid meteor shower and gone skinny dipping and swamped canoes.
In the spring I go on walks through the woods and see the Trillium blooming. Summers I try to spend at least one weekend fishing with Daddy. Fall I cook Thanksgiving dinner. Winters I head over and read curled up next to the fire. The natural beauty is one part of why I love it so much. The other is that it's a place of deep memory. My grandfather became enamored with this part of the state when he worked in the CCC. He and my grandmother finished the place in 1959 and every summer since then my family and extended family has spent time on the lake. My great-aunt had the place next door and when we were children we would run back and forth between cabins, swimming all day and playing cards with Dorothy when we got cold. My grandmother's best friend, an elderly Czech woman used to let me eat raspberries out of her back raspberry patch and always made me these special Czech cookies that were my favorite.
It's the place that I think about when I think about my gram (still fishing at nearly 90!). When I remember the happiest moments of my childhood and my adult life they were here, in some capacity. I have, on more than one occasion, tied an inner tube to the end of that pier and floated off of it reading a book for hours. My favorite bike rides have taken place on long, hilly roads surrounding the place.
There are a few things for which my dorky enthusiasm knows no bounds. History is one. Doctor Who is another. Also on the list is: urban bee-keeping, running, baking, and French cooking. Building things with other people. Learning what "home" means.
As I've gotten older, the sort of rural area where I grew up has turned increasingly into the kind of suburban nightmare I can't stand. Mom and Dad's house feels a little less like home with each passing year. It's inevitable, of course, but it's still a little sad. Minnesota has become home in a way that Wisconsin can't be. I have not just friends here, but an honest-to-the-gods community. It sounds not only dorky but sentimental to say that we're building something together, but it's true. Each random Monday night dinner at someone's house, each bonfire, each mile we run together is building a home that doesn't exist for me anywhere else.
Except on this tiny bit of land in Northern Wisconsin. Out in the middle of nowhere, on this wooded lot there's a sense of place and belonging that my family has built together. From digging the foundation back in in the 50s to putting on new siding sometime in my early adulthood to a Jarts tournament on the place's 50th birthday to pitchers of sangria on the porch with my brothers this summer, we've built this little place that will always carry the feeling of home for me.
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