My 99-year-old aunt in Michigan loves children, all the more so, maybe, because she never had children of her own. This wasnât for lack of desire, but a result of the war (World War II) which she will tell you, âdestroyed the life I had imagined would be mine.â So my aunt lives vicariously through the lives of her nieces and nephews and their children. In the meantime, she satisfies her longing for connection by donating money to orphanages in Latvia (our native country) and to knitting soft, fine, merino wool socks for those orphans as well as for children she imagines might frequent the local Salvation Army store in Grand Rapids.
This summer my grandchildren (Savannah, almost 11, and the twins, Wes and Abby, just turned 7) flew back to Michigan with me in July for a 10-day visit. As my aunt phrased it, âIt was a dream come true.â Although our weekly telephone conversations have always been long and detailed, nothing compares to âreal life.â
For the grandkids, too, meeting my aunt and experiencing Michiganâs âtropical, rain forest feeling,â as Savannah characterized her first impression, was to make concrete the many stories I had told them about both.
And for me, there was pleasure in seeing a particular love of place replicated in not only my sonâs eyes years ago, but potentially now in his childrenâs.
So, what made an impression on my grandchildren? For Savannah, it was the âdeciduous trees,â because she noted, âIâve seen pine trees in Nevada.â All three loved eating straight from my auntâs well-tended raspberry patch, as well as the currents and gooseberries. Hanging their wet swim suits on a clothesline attached to two trees at the Chippewa River, being startled by a fish in the river, and guessing which clump of plants might be poison ivy and which not, intrigued them as well.
They tackled the big dune at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore with gusto time and again, climbing up hundreds of feet and then racing down at breakneck speed, sliding toes first, then digging their heels for a slower descend. We were lucky the day had been cool and rainy so the dunes werenât blistering hot, but refreshingly damp.
We also drove across Big Mac, the nickname for the seven-mile-long suspension bridge across the Straits of Mackinaw and took the ferry to the famous island in Lake Huron where no cars are allowed.
Here the kids and I rode bicycles around the island (eight miles) while my aunt sat on a bench in town, patiently watching the horses and buggys vying for space on the packed-with-tourists main street of town.
When asked, the grandkids liked swimming at Lake Michigan the best of all. My childhood friend Ruth supplied us with snacks, drinks, towels, and boogie boards and the kids dug in the sand, floated, swam and ârodeâ a rubber ârugâ that bucked like a bronco. The âbig lakeâ is like an ocean, but lacks its sticky saltiness. At one point Savannah, assuming Ruth was American, asked, âWhat are you two speaking?â When I said âLatvian,â she asked, âWhere did she learn it?â To which, I said, âShe was born in Latvia like me.â So Savannah concluded, âOh, then Ruth is family!â
My brother Sig and Sandi hosted the family reunion. Pure heaven for my aunt. She hugged everyone delighted in Sandi and Sigâs teenaged grandchildren. My son Sev had purposefully flown in several days earlier also, to revisit the haunts of his childhood summers. When it came time to take photographs, time itself seemed to conflate. Sev and his cousins, Nikki and Nate were the parents of the six grandchildren there, and yet I had an eerie feeling Sev, Nate, and Nikki also exist in some parallel universe where theyâre an eternal 3, 5, and 7 years of age. Who was I? A grandmother to three or six?
Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., is professor emerita at Western Nevada College.