THIS IS US

Whenever I think of Michigan, my olfactory memory kicks in first, flooding my nostrils with the musty odor of our cottage basement.

Each year, when I first descend down those basement steps, the odor smacks me in the face. It’s not unpleasant, just forceful. With it, I am struck by every memory of every week of every summer of every year I’ve spent in this cottage since I was 10 months old.

Most of these memories aren’t distinct, but rather a blur with no defined beginning or end. They are montages of The Things We Do Every Year. Running down the Sugar Bowl dune, arms outstretched. Walking to the outlet, heads bent as we search for stones. Singing songs around a campfire that we sort of know the words to, marshmallow roasting sticks in hand.

Mornings in the back lake, counting my strokes, squinting into the rising sun. Afternoons on the beach, slathering sunscreen, glancing up from my book to stare into the water that glints and sprawls. Evenings on the deck, counting down the seconds as the sun slips below Lake Michigan’s horizon line.

Every summer, I tell people that we’re “going to Michigan.” Sometimes they ask, Why? There could be many reasons to go to Michigan, even some reasons not to go to Michigan.

Perhaps I should be more specific. By Michigan, I mean Northern Michigan, and by Northern Michigan, I mean an hour southwest of Traverse City, and by an hour southwest of Traverse City, I mean a small plot of land overlooking Lake Michigan that my grandparents and their neighbors purchased in 1975.

On this land, two modest cottages were constructed, both of which have stretched and expanded a bit with each new generation. They are filled with sleeping nooks and fold-out sofas. Our cottage has nine rooms and can sleep 16. Next door, the basement is lined with bunk beds. Between the two houses, 24 sisters, brothers, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews come and go throughout the year.

But mostly in the summer. In fact, I’ve only once visited the cottage in any season but the summer, and that was when I was three months old. I slept in a drawer. I have no memory of the winter I’ve seen in photos. Icicles dripping off trees, the dunes sealed in snow. The lake looking somber, a basin of rippled steel.

The lake is forever there and forever changing. Even in the summer, it takes on multiple identities in the course of a single day. Shimmering silver in the morning; in the afternoon, a frothy Caribbean blue. Aflame at dusk, the sky smeared with luminescent shades of pink and orange.

There are other things that bind us — shared blood, childhood memories — but it’s the lake that ties us together for a few weeks every year. Whatever its hue, whatever its mood. The lake is our Big Lebowski rug.

It takes forever to get to Michigan. As a child, I usually flew there, and now I fly there with my children. Even if a ticket to Traverse City is affordable (which it usually isn’t), there is always a layover, and flights in and out of the small airport seem to be delayed or canceled more often than not. Sometimes it’s easier, and almost always cheaper, to drive the five or six hours from Detroit or Chicago.

This past year, it was mid-afternoon when we drove the last leg from the airport. As we crested the final hill on M-22, we snatched our first glimpse of the lake, tucked in between two dunes. Minutes later, we made the left turn that would lead us to the cottage.

My son said: “MOM! We’re on The Road!”

His eyes sparkled in anticipation. He knew, as we all knew, that The Road would eventually turn to dirt, then climb sharply up a blind curve, where my mother would honk, then descend to the cottage.

From the front, the cottage simply looks like a house in the woods. It’s not until you step inside that the view of the lake assaults you — aggressive, almost, in its beauty.

When I lived on the East Coast, my partner, stepson, and I drove to Michigan, sometimes knocking out the 14-hour trip in the course of a single day. The first year, we stumbled in the cottage well past midnight and awoke, bleary-eyed, to the lake stretching outside the back windows.

My partner said: “Holy shit!”

Even after 40 summers, “Holy shit!” is still what crosses my mind each year when I first behold that massive body of water that looks, but doesn’t taste, like an ocean.

The lake is our consistent backdrop, but Michigan is about so much more.

It’s about staying up and sleeping in. Cereal and solitaire. Haphazard lunches, steady streams of snacks. Cherries on the beach. Deck railings draped with damp towels. Sand between the toes, sand tracked into the cottage, sand in the sheets.

Cocktail hour, the chatter of conversation, crackers and cream cheese with whitefish. Adirondack chairs. Grilled meat, bowls passed between hands, platters of sweet corn. Intermittent thunderstorms. Sunsets and stars. Charades, Yahtzee, Monopoly. Dessert. Always dessert, even when our stomachs strain against our waistline.

Every year, we swear we’ll never play Monopoly again. We won’t go to the Cabbage Shed — the service is bad and the food overpriced. The drive-in is overrated. We’re sick of walking the Frankfort pier to the lighthouse — it’s nothing special. Maybe we’ll hike Baldy, but maybe not. There are new trails now, let’s try one of those. Breakfast at Watervale? Mediocre, not worth waking up for. The canoe is too heavy and no one wants to carry it back up the dune. We’ve found enough Petoskey stones, do we need to keep looking for more?

But every year, tradition prevails. We do All The Things because that’s what we do in Michigan. Though no one has yet stepped up to fix the elaborate spreads that my grandparents used to serve during cocktail hour, every now and then we try. We don’t regularly consume cocktails either, but we’ll occasionally mix some gin and tonics. It’s our way of honoring my grandparents’ legacy.

My son, while carrying a tray of crackers and hummus to the coffee table, once exclaimed: “I love cocktail hour!”

As a kid, I loved cocktail hour, too. The adult conversation was usually boring, and I didn’t understand all the fuss about cocktails. But there were snacks, and moreso than the snacks, it was a time to converge, to rest, to anticipate.

It’s also a time to tell stories. There are so many stories.

Remember the time when I lost my flip-flop off the pier and Uncle J climbed down a ladder to rescue it?

Remember when Uncle B threw you in the water with all your clothes on?

Remember when we found a note in a bottle on the beach from a girl who was looking for a pen pal?

Remember when Poppop made us a treasure hunt and the prize was a roll of quarters?

Remember when A ate too much corn and barbecued chicken and vomited on the way to the airport?

Remember when cousin E had to sit in the truck for time-outs?

Remember when Mom got mad at Grandma and threw a box of powdered sugar across the living room?

Remember when Dad got a fishing hook stuck in his finger?

The lake is a quiet witness to all our stories. It watches them play out, and it watches us retell them, year after year after year. It watches the laughter, the occasional tears, the continuous consumption of food and drink.

It is always there, watching. It bears witness.

The lake does not belong to us, but I think of it as ours. Even the cottage does not technically doesn’t belong to me, though it will someday — or at least a fourth of it.

I’m not all that eager to own it. Once my grandparents passed, and their children took over, my mother has come to see it more as a headache than a refuge. Something always needs attention, as things in homes typically do.

The cottage is an investment, an ongoing project, a piece of property — and one that’s probably out of reach for most families. I’ll admit, I feel a little sheepish about having a home in the family that sits empty for much of the year. It feels lavish, and I’m not the lavish type.

The good news is that you don’t need a second home to make memories. You don’t even need a lake.

When I think back on my childhood, my mind immediately goes to the traditions — the things we did in specific places with specific people, year after year. Our Christmas caroling party with neighbors, our week in “the snow” with family friends, our New Year’s hike with my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

Many of these I now share with my children, and we also create new traditions of our own. They are like bookmarks in our lives. They are when the photos are taken, in the same spots, with the same people. They are how we watch ourselves evolve and grow older. Whether with neighbors, friends, or family, we are forever bound by the time and place.

Natural beauty helps. I’m certainly partial to it. But I’ve also learned that traditions can create their own kind of beauty. This past June, we made the street outside our home beautiful just by closing it to cars and setting up some folding chairs. The day was overcast, the sky and asphalt both the same indistinct shades of gray. But it was beautiful because our neighbors came and sat with us in the middle of the street. Children played. We laughed and shared food.

Next summer, we’ll do it again.

I know we’ll do it all again, but the hardest part about Michigan is always leaving it. I’m usually ready to go, ready to return to my routine. I’m more than ready for my children to go back to school. By the end of Week Two, they already take the lake for granted. They are sick of each other, weary of the beach. They miss their Legos, their friends, their own beds.

Yet as our departure approaches, I start to miss Michigan before we’ve even left. I ask myself: Did we do All The Things? Should I take more pictures? Did I properly appreciate everyone and everything?

At the end of our last day, after the long, lingering evening is finally preparing to transition to night, we take our usual seats on the porch to watch the sunset. Over the years, I’ve been lucky to see suns set in the Peruvian Andes, on the Australian outback, over Indonesian rice fields, under Serengeti skies, behind Costa Rican volcanoes.

But nothing matches the splendor of a sunset over Lake Michigan. Nothing in the world. In the air, the clean smell of pine from trees that cluster around our cottage; beyond the deck, the still steel water, the lip of sand. Clouds, in aching colors, gather around the sun as it drops almost imperceptibly, searing a line from horizon to shore.

Quiet descends. The chatter recedes, the quibbles temporarily dissolve. We are lost in the sky, in its bigness and our smallness, in the simultaneous sense of timelessness and of time slipping away. As the last sliver of sun ducks under the horizon, we count down together: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And then it’s over. Tomorrow will be a blur of packing, a flurry of hugs. I will look up at the lake intermittently, scheming, trying to figure out how to tuck it away, how to bring it home.

But the lake stays. The lake waits. Next year is both ages away and right around the corner. The lake will see us then.