The author, a native of Redford, is a novelist and Chicago-based reporter for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He worked for the Detroit News from 1984-95 and is a former Chicago bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. This piece first appeared on medium.com and is being reposted with permission.
By Bryan Gruley
My parents bought this cottage from a heartbroken man in 1971.
My father told me the story as we wound through a snowstorm up Interstate 75 to this house sometime in my college years in the late 1970s. The heartbroken man was in the throes of a divorce. Dad negotiated with him over beers at the rickety picnic table that stood outside the cottage between the gorgeous cut-stone fireplace chimney and the gorgeous cut-stone barbecue grill. I can imagine Dad sitting at that lean-to table wishing he could get a hammer and nails and a level to make the thing stand solid and true.
I won’t disclose the unsavory details of the man’s split with his wife. Dad knew the story well enough to use it as both succor and leverage while bargaining over the price of the cottage and its two-and-a-half-car garage and the outdoor shuffleboard court and the fat cast-iron bell sitting on its own cut-rock pedestal and the 300 feet of frontage on crystalline blue-and-green Big Twin Lake. The man wanted something like $35,000 for the whole shebang. Dad made a counteroffer of $31,000, with a twist. He’d pay most of it — was it $26,000? — on the books, and give the man the rest in cash, so his ex couldn’t get her hands on it. I don’t know if the story is true, but I love it anyway. The cottage was ours.
Big Twin Lake sits in a glacier-rounded bowl about 16 miles northeast of Kalkaska in northern lower Michigan (this is not the Upper of the state’s two peninsulas, but the mitten-shaped lower half that Michiganders invoke when they display an open palm to point out their hometown). The cottage perched on a bluff carved into grassy terraces separated by knee-high walls of more cut rock. At the bottom was the lake, a half mile across by a mile long, shaped like a snail, wide at the southern end, cupped into a cove at the north, and filled with the clearest fresh water I have ever seen. I remember marveling at how you could watch bass trolling the sandy bottom 20 feet down (catching them was another matter).
The house was built around the shell of a log cabin that had been haphazardly expanded over the decades. Dad and my grandfather spent part of one winter shifting the kitchen from the middle of the house to the end nearest the road, stripping an outer wall to the studs with two feet of snow piled at their feet. There were four smallish bedrooms, one bathroom, and a big living room with a panoramic view of the lake through picture windows. Summer dawns, the sun would burst through and slash a broad shaft of gold from one end of the house to the other. You didn’t mind the sudden brilliance rousing you because it meant a gorgeous day was ahead.
Bryan Gruley: "Over time, Big Twin became our family's true home."
It probably wasn’t the best time for Dad to be buying a cottage on a lake 220 miles from our house in suburban Detroit. He had closed his small engineering shop for more than a year due to a lack of orders from the auto manufacturers that were then his sole customers. It was a cyclical slump, typical of the car industry, and Dad was confident that business would eventually pick up and he would reopen his shop. Meanwhile, he went without income because he was too proud to collect unemployment. I asked how he could shutter his business for such a long period. He shrugged. “Why work and go broke?” he said. “Stay home and go broke.”
I was 14 during our first summer with the cottage. I caddied at a Detroit area golf club during the week and drove up north — as downstate Michigan people say — with Dad for the weekends. For all of the beauty surrounding it, the cottage wasn’t exactly a refuge at that time. Dad, my 12-year-old brother Dave, and I spent many weekends doing chores. We mowed the wispy lawn, repaired the dock, weeded gardens, cleaned gutters, yanked bush stumps and, most memorably, dug down to a septic tank to unclog it. Invariably, when we thought we were finally done working and could go for a swim or boat ride, Dad would come up with one more task.
“Ten-minute job,” he’d say. Three hours later, it was time for dinner. The phrase remains part of our family lexicon, as in, “Time to re-shingle that roof. Ten-minute job.”
Chess, Cribbage, Scrabble or Monopoly
My mother spent many summers at the cottage with my three sisters and youngest brother. She loved to start her mornings at the picnic table with coffee and a cigarette, gazing at the lake. She loved the evening quiet after the birds went to bed and the boat motors ceased their growling. She loved playing games with her children and grandchildren and anyone else ready for chess or cribbage or Scrabble or Monopoly. When she couldn’t find players, she tossed Yahtzee by herself, trying to top her best score.
She whistled “When Irish Eyes Are Smilin’” and other of her favorites as she worked in her sprawling garden, where she planted a statue of the Blessed Mother. Years later, one of my treasured annual chores was to haul Mary out of storage to her garden vantage. I’d say a Hail Mary in gratitude to both mothers for making it possible for me to be there.
We water-skied and tubed and knee-boarded. We snow-skied and sledded and snowmobiled. We fought over shuffleboard and Jarts, badminton and Wiffle ball. There were corn roasts and scorched-black hot dogs, greasy sacks of cheeseburgers from Ed’s Hide-A-Way Bar, little white-paper bags of candy from Jim and Judy’s general store. We celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving at the lake, worked Memorial Day and Labor Day, griped about having to go to Sunday Mass, balked at answering the bell Mom clanged to beckon us in from the water.
I could sit with my siblings for days conjuring memories. For me, though, certain odd recollections jump to mind whenever I think of Big Twin: Sister Kimi screaming out of the woods trailed by a cloud of rankled bees. The aroma of Mom’s pot roast with onions and carrots. Dried blots of ketchup on the checkered vinyl tablecloth stapled to the picnic table. Sister Karen cutting ribbons of water taller than her as she slalomed past the cottage. Bob Seger blaring from outdoor speakers. My Uncle Al donning my grandmother’s wig at her wake. Seeing the Northern Lights for the first time, July 4, 1978, not realizing at that moment what they were. Sitting on the oak swing just before dusk as the water turned orange and pink along with the sky. The ancient green beer fridge in the garage. And the exquisite promise of pure blue sky spreading over the cottage as I back-paddled away from shore on a summer dawn.
Over time, Big Twin became our family’s true home. Dad and Mom talked about moving there someday. We assumed without really thinking that the cottage would remain with the Gruleys forever. We didn’t consider that Mom and Dad would get old and weary of attending to the property’s constant needs.
When Dad was in one of the darker moods that often enshrouded him in his later years, he would threaten to sell the cottage, wielding it as an emotional bludgeon. Mom made it clear that she had no desire to spend winters on a cold white lake in the middle of nowhere, away from her friends and bingo and ceramics classes. Although my parents never put the place up for sale, the idea of losing it started to become real. The thought made me treasure the place even more.
This poignant reminiscence was posted Wednesday at Medium.
As I got into my 40s, my eyes would well whenever I pulled away from Big Twin, wondering whether I’d been there for the last time, whether the next time I wanted to come up north, the cottage might not be ours anymore.
Time to Empty the Place
And then, it wasn’t.
MY FIVE SIBLINGS AND I emptied the place on a chilly weekend in November of 2015.
After Mom died in 2006 and Dad followed five years later, we knew a reckoning was at hand. Their will required us to sell the cottage while giving each of us the first shot at buying it. The arrangement offered the possibility of keeping the place in the family, while ensuring that nobody would be stuck owning something they couldn’t afford or couldn’t use because they lived in Denver, like sister Kathleen; or their weekends were eaten up downstate with their childrens’ sports and dance, like Karen and Kimi; or they had already retired to their own house on Big Twin, like Dave and his wife, Jan. Dad wanted us to do whatever we could to keep the place, but not at the risk of jeopardizing family harmony.
For the first couple of years after Dad’s death, we put off any major decisions while paying expenses and property taxes out of the trust that owned the property. Nobody was writing checks, Dave and Jan were keeping an eye on the place, and the rest of us were pretty good about sharing chores and splitting up summer weekends. As the money started running out, we started to talk in earnest about what to do next. Mike, the trustee, laid out our options in emails. There were minor disagreements and misunderstandings as we struggled to find a way to hang on while respecting Dad’s wish for accord.
“This cottage and everything it represents has been graciously given to us, and it has essentially cost us nothing,” Mike wrote in one email. “Mom and Dad made unbelievable sacrifices to be able to give this to us, and as Captain John Miller said to Private Ryan, ‘Earn this.’ We earn the privilege of using it and owning it, and we honor the sacrifice Mom and Dad made over the past 40 years by doing our best to insure the cottage is a benefit to everyone, and not a burden to anyone.”
Lots of people go through this sort of thing. Plenty offered well-intentioned advice, telling us what a tragedy it would be if we didn’t keep the cottage, pointing us down this financial path, toward that tax-reduction tactic. One of my brothers-in-law made a reasonable proposal for the two of us to buy the property. Financially, it was doable. But I had to ask myself: Did I really want to drive 335 miles one way from Chicago a dozen times a year to do chores?
My answer cut to the core truth of our challenge: It really wasn’t about money. It was about our lives and whether the cottage fit into them as neatly as when Dad and Mom were the ones worrying about whether a pipe would burst in February or how we’d fix that uncooperative sprinkler head (10-minute job). As Mike put it in another email, were those of us who wanted to keep the place “cottage people?” Were we the sort who head up north “every weekend all year long, rain or shine, hot or cold, and work from Friday to Sunday more than 50% of those weekends?” I despaired reading that email because I knew it meant the end of Big Twin.
We finally stuck a For Sale sign in front of the house. For a variety of reasons — the hangover from the 2008 recession, a glutted market, that damned single toilet-and-tub in a place that sleeps 10 — the cottage was not an easy sell. Prospective buyers looked but didn’t bite. We lowered our price. The estate fund was almost depleted when a family from the Grand Rapids area showed up in the summer of 2015. Lindsay, Dave, and their two children loved our place just the way it was.
Four Decades of Memories
On that gray November weekend, my sisters, brothers, and I, joined by spouses and children, filled a rented trailer with four decades of memories: inner tubes, snowmobile helmets, paint tarps, puzzles beloved by Mom, a set of Dad’s golf clubs (that didn’t work well anyway), a gas lawn mower that drove us crazy with its refusals to pull-start, Chock full o’Nuts coffee cans filled with rusted screws and bent nails our Depression-era grandfather had saved.
My sisters disassembled the photo collages Mom had put together and displayed throughout the house. I took a baptismal crucifix from my parents’ bedroom. We drank a lot of wine and beer and gathered for the last times around the big dining room table where we’d eaten hundreds of meals and bickered over countless games of euchre. Mike had to leave a day early; I watched from above, a lump in my throat, as he and his wife, Terry, went down to the deck to say goodbye to the lake. A month later, the cottage was no longer ours.
I saw the Northetrn Lights for the second time last Labor Day weekend. I was sitting on my brother Dave’s dock around midnight, having come from Chicago for what turned out to be three days of flawless sky, boozy boat rides, sumptuous dinners, and old friends. Each morning, I rose early and back-paddled across Big Twin’s mirror surface. I lazed in the sun watching Dave’s dog Jameson hunt baby fish. And I met the lovely family that bought our cottage.
One afternoon, Dave and I pulled his pontoon boat up to the enormous lake deck Dad had had built in the 1990s. Lindsay was out sunning with a cocktail. Her son and daughter were messing around in the lake with friends they’d brought up. Lindsay told us she and her husband had recently traded their house downstate for a smaller one so they could invest the difference on Big Twin. Wow, I thought, they are definitely cottage people. Even though they had owned our place by then for almost a year, Lindsay seemed as excited as if they’d bought it that morning. “This is like our home now,” she said. I looked away, feeling a twinge of regret.
Late that night, I sat on Dave’s dock beneath the yawning arc of stars that always made me feel as if Big Twin existed alone in that space, as if there was nothing beyond the green bluffs ringing the lake. I kept thinking about the kids playing at the cottage that afternoon, about the summer joy in their laughter and how many years they now had to enjoy this miracle. It reminded me of all the pals my sisters, brothers, and I had brought to the cottage over the years, how for so long we had savored our special home without ever imagining that one day it would be someone else’s.
I will be back on Big Twin this summer. My siblings and I have rented a house on the lake for a reunion. I’m hoping we’ll go over to the cottage for a visit. Maybe I can grab a cold one from the old garage fridge, maybe sit on the oak swing and watch those youngsters and their friends zoom past on tubes, maybe retell a few stories of the cottage from when we were just kids, unburdened by the knowledge that things end. I will grin and silently thank Mom and Dad again for the blessing they bestowed on us, the blessing we chose to pass on, and I will know with absolute certainty that, though it broke our hearts, we did the right thing.
