"Nancy's Lake"

You can't poke around anywhere here without bumping into some other odd collection or another. These are aged pieces of birch bark from trees around the shores of a lake in the northwestern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. I know of only four times those of us from California ever visited there, but it established a magical hold on my kids' minds.

When she was 9, my oldest daughter had a habit of drawing or painting on things she gathered in nature (like stones, driftwood, pine cones, etc.) At this lake in Michigan, she established what became over the next decade a family tradition. She drew on a piece of the ubiquitous curls of birch bark that line the shore of the lake. She dated her drawing as a momento of our visit.

The trees shed their outer layers all the time. Native Americans, of course, carved birch bark canoes out of these remarkable trees. Their outer bark is white; the inner bark is pinkish-brown. The consistency of the bark is soft, almost like flannel.

It is easy to write on, reminiscent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

That first visit was in 1985, when her little sister was 6 and her little brother 4.

Our next visit to the Nancy's Lake, which the kids had christened after my own oldest sister, who had a summer cottage there, came in 1991. This time, just the two younger kids with me, and they were 12 and 10.

Then, in 1995, the family gathered to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. This time I had my two sons, aged 14 and ~1. The following year we again gathered there, in honor of my father's 80th. This time, the birch bark shows, I had all five of my kids (so far), now ranging from four months to 20 years old.

For these large family gatherings, virtually every child and grandchild and spouse of my parents' four kids were there. My three sisters have 8 kids and close to that number of grandchildren. We shot family videos of the events; the one from my father's birthday party is a classic.

That was to be our last visit to Nancy's Lake, however. She and her husband sold the cottage and moved further downstate.

My father lived to the age of 82.

My mother lived to the age of 87.

Today, my 12-year-old and I discovered these parchments, in a plastic bag at the bottom of one of the dozens of boxes I have stacked around this place. As I find things like this, I photograph them and post them on the web. I'm creating a digital family history -- a quirky one, mind you, but what other way could it possibly be if I am the curator?

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