By: Isabel Brush-Mindell
Ama and Fah Anderson, as I know them, bought Cedar Cove in 1951. They spent five years making the trip from Cincinnati, Ohio to Northport, Michigan, and after strategically lowballing an offer, they found themselves the new owners of a fixer-upper of a house. Over the coming years they formed what I now know as Cedar Cove. Fah created the peninsula that shapes the landscape of the property as part of his mission to make the beach sandy for Ama. It was a change to the landscape that would never be legally permitted nowadays, but the sand indeed followed instructions and fulfilled its duty. My childhood was filled with stories of the making of the flagpole, a tall straight cedar stripped of its bark as it was dragged through the woods behind their red Jeep. Ama and Fah’s fingerprint remains in the single tree in the middle of the beach, a tree which we have sought out countless times as a source of shade on days when the sun bakes your skin.
Every summer for the last 25 years I have spent the last week in July and the first week in August sitting on the dock next to my cousins and aunts and uncles, siblings, parents, and grandparents as we drink in the beauty of Northern Michigan and enjoy conversations from the emotional to the humorous to just sharing silence. My cousins and I have invented countless activities from the water, sand, boats, and the woods around us. And we continue to play together seamlessly, now as adults. They lived that too—my mom and her brothers, every year of their lives. They sailed through their youth, worked the surrounding cherry orchards as young adults, and then shared these same adventures with their children. The story of our countless years of love, joy, imagination, creativity, and freedom began with my grandparents who met for the first time at 19 in the dining room of Cedar Cove in 1953. This one mighty house is a space intimate to all of our lives and a living property that has grown and evolved just as we have.
The three generations of Brushes
Best cousins– Clare and Isabel (me)
Clare and I have been glued to each other's sides for our whole lives. We traverse the property each summer together, from the woods to the water, our imagination and creativity weaving countless adventures. We are the originators of the fairy villages, the Rock Shop (our entrepreneurial foray into selling really special rocks to our family), and too many inside jokes to count. We are spectacles of goofiness, aptly described in 2008 as “they’re just giggling and rolling around”. And it is true, we never fail to crack each other up time and time again. And I expect no less than to be sitting on the end of the dock together, gray hair and wrinkles to match, cackling away like always.
The Littles (Linus, Helen, Elias, and Cecilia)
One of the greatest joys has been watching The Littles spin their own games. They have also grown up best buddies, creating 9-hole golf courses that weave through the property, “traps” burrowed into the sand in the lake, and hours and hours roasting away in the hot tub. Now, as we cross over into adulthood, our age related differences are melting away year by year and we are entering into a new age of our relationship
Our four boat sailing fleet
The family sailboat race course starts as you cross between the swim raft and the peninsula, then sail out to the buoy at the end of Paradesia, tack around our neighbors sailboat, and head back to the starting point. None of the sailboats are equal, and winning depends primarily on which boat you end up in. We sail everything from the all-plastic, single person “hopeful puffin” (that resembles a bathtub) with a tarp for a sail to our Hobie, specially outfitted with custom wings and a trapeze, whose speed resembles flying.
The epic motor boat rides in our 25-horsepower Boston Whaler
Every summer the cousins load our Boston Whaler far past weight capacity to make the 15-minute boat ride into town to get ice cream. We ride to explore the abandoned house on Gull Island, the small piece of land that sits at the mouth of Northport Bay. We have grown too big to be able to water ski behind the boat and have since invented paddle board surfing. And we always make the trip out to the bell buoy to watch the sunset.
Five years of building fairy villages
Hot tubbing
Kayaking and row boating
Golf ball hunting
My cousins and I have collected hundreds of golf balls from the treasure trove that is the woods around hole number seven at the nearby golf course. Each year we smack them out into the bay and then, as they disappear from our bucket, we go out diving to collect them.
Cedar Cove, also lovingly nicknamed Hippie Hollow
The maintenance, improvement, and future of Cedar Cove
Cedar Cove is a living property that we all have joint ownership of and responsibility over. As a child, that responsibility took the form of grocery shopping and cooking for our 18-person extended family on our designated summer evening. Our joint ownership has meant that we have spent one weekend in the spring working as a family to take the kayaks, stand up paddle boards, and sailboats out of the garage, to set out the beach furniture, and to clean the windows for the summer; and one in the fall to put the boats away and drain the water from the house for the winter. Taking part in these work weekends prepares the house for the rentals each summer that have allowed us to keep the property without it being a significant economic burden. We Brushes are a family of doers, and each generation has thought of new ways to improve the property. My mom and uncle's generation built our outdoor shower and new deck and redid the kitchen. Now, as my cousins and I reach adulthood, our family is dreaming up new ways to ensure the coming generations can continue to enjoy the space as we did, passing the legacy to our descendents. The most pressing problem that has presented itself recently is that us young people have started to bring up our partners and we need more sleeping space! We have put our heads together and come up with options that take the form of an add-on to the original house, a garage redo, and little cabins in the woods. The evolution of Cedar Cove continues!
My mom and uncles in 1976
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You can contact the author at isabelbm@umich.edu.
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