Where Is Your Luck?

I’m a person who likes the same places. I envy people who are curious and travel to strange places and I aspire to be like them. But left alone, I would go where I always go.

And it would be here. On the Lake Superior beach just east of the Pictured Rocks in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

For years, my family would visit the U.P. We’d spend a week on a small lake and, like a sacred ritual, we’d drive up to Grand Marais on Lake Superior to walk on the beach and have a whitefish sandwich at the Sea Gull Restaurant.

Every year, we would walk past a big brown beach house and I’d envy the people who owned it. We’d sit on a log on their beach, swat at the giant black flies and marvel at the brown house owner’s good fortune.

What is it that separates us from them?

Who owns these houses? Here on this beach on Lake Superior? How do we become one of those people? Are they so much better or smarter than us?

Why are they so lucky?

I had no answers for these questions but, as so often happens in life, luck’s currency is cash. My father who could never spend a penny and my mother-in-law who worked until she dropped were our benefactors. They helped us buy the brown house.

And now they sit with us each night on the porch when we watch the sun go down. They admire our frugality as we open last year’s can of hash and repair wooden chairs with long nails. They walk to the beach with us and throw sticks in the lake for the dogs to fetch, wince when we walk barefoot on the cold rocks, and scream bloody murder when we finally fall back into Lake Superior’s icy, clear water.

We are here because of the generosity of people who wouldn’t give themselves this gift of beauty and peace. Instead they gave it to us.

It’s a lesson not lost on me.