  My sister was ten and I was six when we first felt the sugary sand of Lake Huron's shores beneath our feet. Our parents had rented a cottage at Cherokee Trails, a now defunct cottage resort in Oscoda, Michigan. Every summer for more than ten, we trekked to northern Michigan to spend time on the beach, play tennis, swim and enjoy nightly bonfires on the beach. These are among my favorite family memories. There were five cottages at Cherokee Trails, and the Stuart family always rented #4. We started going there because some close family friends had been going for years. Well, one week at the cottage sold us for a lifetime!
There was beach volleyball, shuffleboard, tetherball, adirondack chair swings, cook-outs, Sunday morning Bloody Mary parties for the adults, fishing...the list goes on and on. We all had different interests. Dad liked to ready trashy espionage paperbacks, swim and drink scotch cocktails in the evenings. Mom like to play volleyball, read Prevention magazine, play tennis and go on random shopping excursions. Mom was also fond of exploring whatever and wherever possible. Jennifer, my sister, liked swimming, tetherball, boys, volleyball, campfires, cookouts and cards (oooh! alliteration). I loved all these things, too...including the boys. I have particularly fond memories of walking up US Route 23 to the "7-Up Store" to buy candy and wildly exciting (and tame) incendiary devices like sparklers, snakes and smoke bombs...always an endless source of summer entertainment. I loved to play Canadian Doubles tennis with my parents...and visiting the Greenbush Library which was adjacent to the tennis courts.
Swimming in Lake Huron was always a nippy proposition, but it never seemed to really bother us. We'd bodysurf in the waves and we loved playing on the old metal slide sitting about 30 feet out into the lake. We'd make ambitious sand castles and sand sea-creatures. I remember that we always met and made new friends every summer...there were always new families each year vacationing there.
I always laugh when I remember what a treat it was to go into town and go shopping at the Ben Franklin (much like a Woolworth's)...or watching the town ready for the annual East Tawas/Harrisville Art Show, or even "Paul Bunyan Days. " I think of all these things and smile. Eleanor and Homer LaGassey owned Cherokee Trails. He was a former Air Force pilot and a very talented pen & ink artist. One of his works hangs in my house, now...the very print that adorned my room in the cottage, as a matter of fact. Homer put the resort up for sale shortly after Eleanor succumbed to Diabetes. I made a pilgrimage to Oscoda a few years ago with Mom and Dad just to check things out...to see what it all looked like.
Not much had changed, except that the resort was for sale and empty...but it was all there. I found myself with the sugary white sand beneath my feet. Caught in the swift undertow of not-so-distant memories...it all flooded back, the sun, the laughter...and the peace. Like the morning after a particularly heavy rainstorm, we found the entire beach covered by millions of ladybugs...the sand was deep crimson for as far as the eye could see. Time goes on and everything changes, just a little. I am going back there someday...if just to walk on the shore, or to visit Greenbush Library, play tennis or remember being six years old. 
