When I was a kid, my mother was heavily into antiques and she did -- she had furnished our house in completely, for the most part, antiques. The chairs were not very comfortable and it was -- very much a lot of antiques in this house. Anyway, she didn't want a regular grill in the backyard because it bothered her look. So, she bought a big giant kettle and got ma- had a stand made for it and she got a grill for the top of it and then she put the wood, or the charcoal in the, in the kettle with the lid, and that was our grill. Okay, fine. It was kinda dorky, but it was okay. My dad grilled. My mom did not usually do the grilling. My dad did, but my dad couldn't really cook.  So anyway, one Friday night, it was kind of late, and my mom had gotten home from school late, and my dad had gotten home from work late. And it was probably in May or June, it was fairly warm outside. Not much was going on, but it was starting -- looked like it was going to rain and my father said, "Oh, I'll just go out and I'll cook some hot dogs on the grill." And my mom said, "Well, you better hurry up ‘cause I think it's gonna rain." Well, my dad took lighter fluid out to the grill and doused the charcoal with, with lighter fluid, stuck part of the newspaper on top of it, and lit the match. It kind of exploded. He bounced back very quickly and he was not hurt, thank heaven. But the fire that it -- the fire in, from that grill went very, very tall and went up the tree that was next to where my mother had parked this grill. And, fortunately, the hose was there and my father put the whole thing out with the hose and was running around. Everybody was running around, my mom was screaming. The hot dogs are, you know, just sitting on a plate. Everything is running around like a, I don't know, circus. But the tree was kinda severely damaged through this and eventually we had to have a tree person come and eventually that tree had to be taken down. And it's one of those things that I always -- I never really…

But I also used to play this game with our dog Brandy. So Brandy was acquired by my dad to be a hunting dog, but she actually didn't have a really good temperament for it, so she ended up being a pet. So she kind of knew the concept of fetch. Not -- I don't think she was very good at it. But we had this fantastic garden and we always grew, like, way more zucchinis than we could eat and there’d always be these giant zucchinis that would just grow to just prodigious size in the garden. So I would sometimes pick one and then I would take -- I'd be out with Brandy, that's the dog, and we would play kind of like this combination of sorta fetch and keep away and football with the zucchini. So, like, I’d throw the zucchini and she'd grab it in her mouth and be running with it. And you know, zucchinis, when they’re that size, can be really bi- heavy. So she wouldn't get real far. And even though she was a big dog, it, like, would slow her down. Or she’d drop it, then sometimes she'd stop and kinda, like, be taking a bite out of it and I’d, you know, run up to her and, like, act like I'm gonna grab it from her and she’d pick it up and run and we would just, like, wear each other out until at some point the zucchini was like -- had been dropped enough or she’d chewed on it enough that it would just break into pieces and the game would be over and she’d just eat some of it. Anyway, I just was like -- I'm not exactly sure what sport that was, but, you know, it was -- you don't normally do stuff like that with a zucchini. It was just kinda a fun, fun thing to do.

I grew up in Detroit, the city of Detroit, Michigan, and never had my first glimpse of Lake Michigan until my first teaching job. I fell in love then. My second year of teaching, I rented a house with a couple of other teachers at the end of a long road in Montague, this -- which was close to- close to Lost Valley Beach. Lost Valley beach is a private- private beach. Pristine. It's for members of the Lost Valley community only. I was smitten. I would go down to the beach as often as I could, sit on the dunes in the quiet, watch the waves either lapping quietly, rolling in, or sometimes thrashing, and contemplate the big questions of life and the little questions of life. By that time I had abandoned God, but as I discovered sitting on that beach, God had never abandoned me. After I moved away for another teaching job, Lost Valley Beach kept calling to me. I purchased a small parcel of land in a property association in the Lost Valley community. Not on the beach, but very close to it. And for the next several summers, I spent my entire summer in a camper at Lost Valley Beach, becoming a part of the community, and still in love with the beach, and the water, and the dunes, the whisper or roar of the waves. I stopped going when the -- my property association rules banned campers. Fast forward several years, I got married, had a child, sailed with my husband on Lake Huron for a few years, and then we just did not do much after we gave up the boat when our daughter was born. We were busy raising a child. The call of the lake and Lost Valley Beach was still strong. I finally convinced my husband to rent a cottage there, so we went there for several years. He fell in love with it. My daughter fell in love with it, and sometimes she would bring friends. Later, her boyfriend, who is now her husband. And we went there until my husband passed away. I didn't go back to the beach for quite a few years afterwards, but I just -- it never left me. I finally convinced a friend from England who had never seen Lake Michigan to go for a day trip to Montague and to Lost Valley Beach,…