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.
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 memento of our visit.
Birch trees shed their outer layers all the time. Their outer bark is white; the inner bark is pinkish-brown. Native Americans carved light-weight, strong canoes out of these trees. The consistency of the bark is soft, almost like flannel.
It is easy to write on, reminiscent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
On one of our visits to the Nancy’s Lake, which the kids had christened after my big sister, who had a summer cottage there, the family gathered to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. The following year we again gathered there, in honor of my father’s 80th.
For these large family gatherings, virtually every child and grandchild and spouse of my parents’ four kids were there. 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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