When I was five years old, and my brother was seven, my parents bought a plot of land on Lake Mazinaw, an hour or so north of Belleville. We spent every summer there, until I was about 16.
My father was a school teacher, my mother a homemaker. So from June till September, we were at the lake. Camping at first, then building a cottage from the ground up. My parents had the necessary skills, so they just got on with it. My brother and I toddled along behind, first clearing the land, then wielding paint brushes and hammers. Within a few years of hard work, we had a cottage in the woods. It seemed so normal. In hindsight, it was anything but.
Feeding chipmunks in the woods at the cottage, July 1982.
The Hammond family cottage in the summer of 1977.