Summer 2012

Our “unplanned” summer has turned out to be one of the fullest ever! Leaving oneself open to doing things spontaneously appears to be wonderfully exciting and leads to such unexpected opportunities that the summer has flown by. Spontaneous pleasures included:

-       A few days at the cottage of friends Mary Anne and John Larzelere. Their place is on the shore of the East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay a few miles north of Elk Rapids. Judy (organist for both kids’ weddings and fellow Scrabble group player) & Aram Kabodian joined us too. This summer the Larzeleres bought two Jetskis from their next-door neighbors to add to the two they had. So John, Aram, Marv & I spent the better part of a morning going across the bay to Old Mission Penninsula, then back across and down to Elk Rapids, then north beyond their cottage before returning to their place. We also had a chance to spend an afternoon on their pontoon boat on Elk Lake, taking lunch with us and swimming a great deal in the unusually warm water.

-       Taking our kayaks (& Marv’s mom) to the English Inn in Eaton Rapids, where we met Ann & Shelby and Shelby’s sister, Marti & her husband, John. All but Thelma kayaked on the Grand River for an hour and a half, and then we had dinner and stayed the night at the beautiful Inn and awoke to their wonderful breakfast. Because it was a Sunday night we had the place nearly to ourselves and played cards until 11:00 in the basement Pub, with an occasional employee wandering through to see if we needed anything.

-       Going to Bob & JoAnn Hubbard’s cottage on the dune between Lake Michigan and Crystal Lake for two nights. We were alone there the first night and then Kabodians joined us there, too. Sadly, Bob’s Parkinson’s disease has led to a sudden and frightening decline in his health so the Hubbards ended up not coming at all. We went in the first place so we would be near to the Hoxeyville Music Festival, which we attended on our way home on Friday. Hubbards’ son, Matt, plays with The 7 Walkers, which was a featured band at the festival. He had backstage passes for us that allowed us to meet the members of the band, which includes Papa Mali and Bill Kreutzmann, who was the drummer for the Grateful Dead. It was really fun to go to a Music Festival like that at our advanced ages and realize that there were plenty of people our age or older there, too.

What fun it is to say, when someone asks if you want to do something on the spur of the moment, “Sure!” And we had lots of chances to do so. That was in addition to our 5 days at the Hansen Cottage for the Fourth with 27 people (including our whole family), 5 nights at Edgewood Camp (with the whole family there for the weekend before K&J had to leave, then Sarah’s crew the rest of the time), and 2 nights camping with Eli & Jordan near Carmel, then babysitting the three kids so Sarah & Craig could go to his company summer party. We also had two big dinner parties with different groups of friends and I did Garden Day at MSU. I worked for about 12-14 hours and dug up, cleaned, separated, and replanted all my irises, and we’ve both done a lot of flower & vegetable gardening, and had lots of other fun stuff to do. See? It’s been a really full summer.