Waconda: The Beginning

If you drive down Heights Road in Lake Orion, you may have noticed the little red house on the bay is undergoing some pretty significant construction.  My family owns that cottage, and we are looking forward to the day it becomes our forever home. But every story has a beginning, and ours started back in April 2012.

For the previous couple years, there had been an old summer cottage for sale on a big lake in a little town not far from our home. We've driven by it many times and talked about how pretty the location was, but how impractical it would be to buy a place that needed so much work at this stage of our lives. We already have a beautiful home, and maintaining it is a full time job. And we all know about the soft housing market. So we did the right thing.

We bought it.

A wise woman once told Senior to imagine what his headstone would look like. She said the dates don't matter... what matters is the dash between the numbers. That dash represents what you did with your life. Now we may not leave a universal legacy, but we do want to live life to the fullest and enjoy each and every day. So with that in mind, Senior and I each wrote a list of goals we wanted to achieve in the next decade or so, and then compared notes. Our lists were surprisingly similar, which might explain why we've been happily married for so many years. And one of the things on both our lists was to live on or near the water. Even if it's impractical.

The house was built in 1916 by George Fuller, who named it Waconda.  We were told that the name came from a Native American story and means "Great Spirit of the Waters". His daughter Helen spent her summers there until her death at the age of 102. None of Helen's children wanted to keep the cottage, so they put it on the market. One of the last traditional summer cottages on the lake, it sits on a shallow bay that is home to ducks and swans who are pretty annoyed that we have taken over their dock. We're happy to spend a day or a few hours there or even just stop by long enough watch the sunset. Neighbors have made us feel welcome by dropping in to say hello or to share their memories of Helen. We've enjoyed hearing from them all, even the helpful lady who told my kids that Helen died Right There on the porch, and the cheerful guy who told us that her dying wish was that the property stay in her family.

We kicked off that first summer with a Memorial Day picnic at Waconda. The kids alternated between relaxing in the sun and raking up the seaweed encroaching on the dock, flinging it up on shore in all its smelly glory. I got out our tippy little kayak and paddled around the bay, collecting the flotsam that washes in from the boaters on the lake. I now have 63 bottles of sunblock. Senior channeled his inner engineer and figured out how to make the floating dock actually float, then we all pitched in to launch it. I was proud of the way the kids took ownership of the place. If I'm very lucky, I'll get to see them share it with their children some day.  

We put our 'regular' house up for sale and waited for someone to come and love it.  Meanwhile we set about enjoying the cottage as is.  We knew if the stars lined up correctly we'd eventually remodel Waconda and make it our full-time, lakefront home.  But whatever happens, we hope that we can always keep the "Great Spirit" in Waconda.  I hope Helen approves.