Thank goodness I have a sister.

Together we take care of our family’s ancient farmhouse on a lake in northern Wisconsin. This house, forest and almost all the neighboring land around it belonged to our great grandparents, or other relatives. Our maternal grandparents from the Czech Republic vacationed in the north woods and bought 2 farms during the depression from our Norwegian paternal relatives.

So a vacationing city girl meets a local country boy and voilà! The home movie that sums up this union is an image of my practical Norwegian grandparents, looking a bit like a Grant Wood painting, sitting outside on a summer day in those curved metal lawn chairs, while my mom wearing her Catalina swimsuit is doing a dance in the lawn á la Theda Bara from The Vamp.

Janice and I spent every summer of our lives at Long Lake even the pouty teen years.

We drove into the yard and our grandparents rang a bell to signal our arrival. All our cousins arrived from Minnesota and we had many lovely nights under the stars looking out over the beautiful lake and happily listening to our uncles and aunts tell stories of growing up in rural Wisconsin, freezing cold trips to the outhouse, a one room schoolhouse, and seeing the doctor in summer when he came to vacation on the lake.

We dreamed for years of building our own house, keeping the farmhouse, but having something new for our expanding family, and this vision is becoming a reality. Kevin and I are digging in those beautiful, mossy woods, in between trees softened by lichens, paths made by deer and a hidden mound where the bear spent the winter.

It is our responsibility and our greatest joy to keep telling the stories, and writing new ones as we go.

“We plant; we store the seedcorn. Our sons and daughters

topdress old trees. Two chimneys require:

Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house.

–Donald Hall