Appropriately, due to COVID, all of my trips out of town since March have been to the most charmingly remote of places. And near the top of my destination list for as long as I live will be this quiet little cottage tucked away amidst cornfields and a sloping treeline…

Lake Leelanau, Michigan. Land of cherry wine and Petoskeys. A Traverse City satellite and home to 126 year-round residents. One of just a few lakes in this lake-riddled state, but to our family, it’s been home in the summer for five generations.

Mich Favorites: this winery, this farm/bakery, this beach for volleyball, this shop for workout and activewear, this ice cream, this library, and of course, lake time :)

Mich Not-Favorites: going home

In 1934, Elmer “Doc” Schroder, a successful dentist from Toledo, built a cottage on the shores of Lake Leelanau, Michigan, where his wife, Lulu, and two daughters - and more generations to follow - would spend their summers. His younger daughter, my grandmother, was then thirteen.

Later, when my grandmother and grandfather met at Ohio State and started dating - she, a sociable Pi Phi, he, on track for orthodontia school - they shared where and how they’d be spending their summers. She went first, saying she’d be in a small town in Michigan (“You’ve probably never heard of it,” she’d said). Not only had he indeed heard of Cedar, Michigan, but that’s where he’d be for the summer, too, for his summer job.

“I’ll see you there,” he’d said.

Now, nearly nine decades after my great-grandfather built this little cottage, not much, it seems, has changed. Every season, four of his fourteen of his grandkids and their families still rotate weeks at the cottage, and this year, his would-be first great-great-granddaughter. Here we all learned to ski and wakeboard as kids, visited town by boat at Suttons Bay and Leeland, ate fresh in-season cherries, and enjoyed the longest of summer days and the best star-speckled cricket-singing sleeps at night.

To this day, a newspaper article hangs framed on the wall in the cottage. Yes, Dr. Shroder had been a dentist…until an accident rendered him blind in both eyes. The article chronicles my great-grandfather’s journey to a new life. Having always been, it seems, good with his hands, he found a new hobby and practice in building doll furniture, for which, at the time, “demand was so high he couldn’t keep up.” His old woodworking shop remains behind the house, now our shed for the “lake toys”: water skis, kayaks, wakeboards, a giant inner tube.

The title of the article? “In the darkness, a cheerful whistle”: a nod to one of his many tricks he learned while blind, to whistle as he walked down the hallway so the sound would bounce back and guide him where to go next, like echolocation.

I never did meet my great-grandpa Doc. From the stories my aunt and uncles recall, he was beloved by everyone who knew him. He was always silly, my dad recalls, and was known for a sense of humor that rivaled most. (Of the five pictures shown in that newspaper article, one was of him strutting outside the cottage sporting one of his wife’s pink dresses over his blue overalls).

What a gift, I think when I come here, that he gave us all as a family in building this little cottage on the lake. I wonder if he could have known just how far-reaching his gift would keep on giving.

What’s a special place to you and your loved ones?