Little Traverse

A Walk with Dad

As an assignment for a summer writing class, I wrote this memoir piece… and began writing about Harbor Springs.  Here is that original piece (I’ve varied it for other previous posts).

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If you ask a Michigander where she’s from, her right palm will pop forward.  With her four fingers pressed closely and her thumb falling away, her hand is the precise copy of her state.  Looking at “The Mitten,” a Detroit native will indicate that she’s from the bottom left of her thumb joint.  Someone from Grand Rapids is closer to the lower crease of the pinkie finger.  A resident of Lansing will point smack to the middle of her palm.  When I was five years old, my father showed me how to point to the very tip top of my right ring finger.

“This,” he said, with his big dad finger touching my sticky little one, “is Harbor Springs.”

In both of our left hands, we held ice cream cones.

I’ll admit it right away – I’m not a true Michigander.  Eleven months of each year, I was raised in Glenview, Illinois, an ordinary suburban neighborhood north of Chicago.  School, soccer, Girl Scouts, basketball, cooking class, softball, piano lessons – my childhood, and that of everyone I knew, swirled around the ever-accelerating pace of organized activities and accomplishments.  That twelfth month, the month outside of our home, is what has shaped my life, and the lives of FitzSimonses three generations into the past.  The month in Harbor Springs, Michigan, keeps a community of family and friends connected.

It was a very special, though altogether typical, evening when Dad walked me into “downtown” Harbor Springs for ice cream before bed.  Everyone’s memories of Harbor are laden with images of that sweet treat.  To be fair, fresh cookies and homemade fudge sometimes do crowd out the flashbacks to Cherry Chip in a waffle cone.  In fact, visitors “Up North” consume so many sugary snacks that the fifteen hundred locals refer to members of the summer influx as “fudgies.”

As the August sun lingered past dinnertime in the northern summer sky, Mom authorized a walk into town for Dad and me while she put my three younger sisters to bed.  She bathed me in the huge kitchen laundry sink, dressed me in my nightgown, strapped on my sneakers, and released me into Dad’s care.  The pair of us had about a mile to walk from our grandparents’ house to the fudgie paradise of downtown Harbor.

Grammy and Papa lived in Cottage Nine, one of just over a hundred “cottages” in this 128-year-old resort community.  Cloud Nine, as my grandmother dubbed her summer retreat, sat near the end of Harbor Point, a three-quarter-mile peninsular slip of beach and evergreen forest that cradles the northern edge of Little Traverse Bay.  Grammy, Suzanne FitzSimons Reynolds from Grosse Pointe (on The Mitten’s lower thumb joint), had spent every summer of her life in this town.  Her time away from school consisted of family breakfasts on their docks and big band cocktail hours at The Little Harbor Club, with plenty of hours in between for her and her cousins to enjoy the beach or to practice tennis.  Grammy’s relatives numbered in the double digits, and like salmon heading upstream, they all have returned north annually to this place of their salad days.  Thus, Dad, Sherman FitzSimons Reynolds, and all of his cousins (and his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, great aunts and great uncles) have always summered together in this hidden gem of a town.

Unaware of this history, I plodded along the sidewalk as Dad trailed me in the lengthening shadows.  The sharp, piney air cooled with the waning of the day, and my father bundled me in his lavender golf sweater and scooped me into his arms.  He told stories of this uncle teaching him to water ski over here, and that neighbor roasting marshmallows on that beach over there.  We knew most of the summer residents who shouted hello as they passed us, but this was special time, just Dad and me.  After a few houses, we cut across to the other end of the peninsula, from the harbor side to the bay side, so that we could catch the horse and buggy into town.  Harbor Springs is not prone to change; the Point’s community has never altered the “no cars between Memorial Day and Labor Day” rule.  If you visit here in the warm weather, you must either walk, bike, or ride on the bihourly horse-drawn carriage.

We rode the buggy to the end of the Point road, and walked a few more minutes to Main Street.  At the corner of Main and State, the line at Kilwin’s Fudge and Ice Cream Shop was already snaking out the door.  Inside the warm, cake-scented nook, I chose my favorite flavor, Superman, in a sugar cone.  Dad got his usual Cappuccino Chocolate Chip in a waffle cone.  We walked one block down to the shore, through the middle of the pedestrian-ruled street, stopping along the way for a quick drink.  At the corner of Bay and State, Dad boosted me over the waist-high boulder containing a spigot of ever-flowing natural spring water.  After my first few licks of that combination of creamy blue raspberry and tart red strawberry, the frigid liquid refreshed as nothing else could.

Down at the docks, Dad and I watched the boats draw in to the marina as the sailboats folded in their spinnakers.  He held me around the waist as I leaned over the pier to watch a mama duck lecture her little ones.  Across the small harbor, the Point and Cottage Nine changed to silhouette against the setting sun.  The quiet chitchat of the fudgies was broken only by the occasional seagull yelp or boat horn blast.  The green light of the lighthouse started circling the bay.  Day sighed into night.

On the walk back to the Point, we stopped at the Buhl’s boathouse to wash my face and hands in the lake. “The Vestibuhl” was not filled by its occupants, our cousins – a rarity.  They were likely next door at the Club for dinner and dancing.   The beginning notes of a piano-filled evening wafted from the main dining room as Dad piggybacked me past.  We hopped onto the 8:15 PM buggy ride as the white horses, Star and Penny, started again on their peninsular loop.  With the glazed eyes of a tired but happy child, I leaned on Dad and fixed my gaze on the horses.  The clip-clops of hoofs and clinking of the bells on bridles lulled me into dozing.

I woke at the end of Cottage Nine’s harbor side dock. A beach towel, warm from the day’s sun, enveloped me.  Darkness had fallen, and Dad was holding me with my head resting on his shoulder. His mom was pointing out the constellations as they appeared in the crisp, clear night sky.  Grammy had noticed that I was awake, so she took my hand in hers.

“This is Orion’s Belt,” she said, moving my finger along the row of three bright stars.  “This is the Little Dipper, and this is the North Star.”  Grammy unfolded my right palm.  She pointed to the tip top of my ring finger.  “And this is Harbor Springs.”