September 19, 2008 at 4:04 am (Michigan, memories)
Tags: memories lullaby michigan
I have a different beat in my head when it comes to lullabies. Not harmony, not muscial score, neither 
classics nor pop; my best lullaby comes from Brookwood. You can get it anywhere in a country-ish setting, away from the cars, highway noise, booming stereos and cell phones, but for me it comes from memories of Brookwood.
What am I talking about here? The whispers of the night; the crackling of a fire, adults murmuring in another room, a soft snore from the porch….., when you were really listening to the music you heard it! The locusts and other insects and the frogs and toads chirping and droaning outside. Humming night insects drifting past the window. The wind whispering through the pine trees. The occasional hoot of an owl.
I live in a suburb of Chicago. Yet, on a quiet, cool, breezy summers evening I can sit in the yard in my sky chair and let the lullaby of the night soothe me. It echoes the familiar, beloved sounds of my memories of Brookwood.
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September 5, 2008 at 9:05 pm (Michigan)
Grandfather and Dad were both sometime loggers. Both were employed in this profession at times when jobs were hard to come by and money was tight. But the job was a natural thing for them because of their respect of nature and interest in the forest. They were able to work at thinning a forest and at the same time manage it to help it become more healthy. Back in the day many smaller logging companies actually seemed to care about the land they cut upon, unlike today when large conglomerates clear cut and hack away.
When it came to Brookwood Grandfather made sure the forest was properly managed. Trees that were cut down were appropriately replaced with diverse trees of a type that were natural to the area and grew at different rates.
Grandfather later allowed other logging companies to come in and log on Brookwood, or to come through Brookwood to get to the site of their logging. But since it was his land he once again controlled the manner of cutting, what was cut, how it was replaced…..and the way in which those huge trucks tore through the forest. The trucks were capable of making a huge mess and causing a lot of damage if not controlled. We must have had good forests because even with those constraints there was still some logging at Brookwood. It was far enough from the cabin that one rarely saw them- you had to be in that area.
Grandfather bought a sawmill at some point. I have the feeling from what I have read in family records that the mill was already outdated before he bought it. I believe it must have been a hobby for him. Most milling jobs were for trade of one kind or another. In the 1960’s my Dad had tongue and groove pine paneling cut to finish the second floor of our home in Illinois. It may have been one of the last jobs turned out by the mill. Grandfather died in 1963.
Dad inherited the sawmill and the 40 acres on which it sat. We would go over occasionally on trips up, look over the mill, take a gander at the rusting Doodlebug and Dad and my brother would talk about restoring it, maybe fish in the Sauble River (on the banks of which the mill sat)…….just kick around a bit. The Sauble has great trout fishing! Then we would leave. I can remember being terrified to enter the sawmill because of the large wasps nests that inhabited it!
After Dad died my husband, myself, Brent (my brother) a friend and my husband’s brother went there for a weekend of rough camping. We had a blast! It was husband Lou’s first ever rough camping experience and he enjoyed it- and he learned a lot about camping out in nature. I can remember too Lou and his brother Jeff chasing a snake along the river bank and me having a fit. I knew that was probably a rat snake of some kind but I wasn’t very comfortable with them chasing a snake and trying to catch it when they didn’t know what it was!
Shortly after that my brother planned a camping trip to the forty…..and Mom informed him she had sold the property. It was sad to see the last of the Michigan property leave the family. I think she said she sold it to someone in the Tuckey family (the were related to us but we didn’t know them very well). Zahn Tuckey and his sons did not live far from the mill. And so the last of our piece of Michigan fell through our fingers…………
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September 3, 2008 at 2:01 am (Michigan, memories)
Tags: Brookwood, edibles, memories, Michigan, prickly pear, wintergreen
We have discussed some of the odd critters that crossed our dining room table in Brookwood. Today’s post is about some of the other interesting edibles we were able to try in the woods of Michigan.
Out away from the base of the Smoke Jump there grew a small patch of prickly pear. I am not sure how 
they came to be growing there, whether Dad or Grandfather had planted them. But they were an interesting plant. We never made it a habit to eat the flat, pad-like edible “leaves” or nopal….I don’t even remember trying it. Nowadays nopal is being used as a diet aid! However we did try the pears, otherwise known as “Indian Figs”. Dad peeled them and gave them to us to try. I remember it as being sweet and chewy…indeed the chewiness was rather fig-like – the seeds were hardly chewable and I think we spat them out. But they were neat, different and not unpleasant. occasionally we would ask him and he would harvest a few.
Interestingly my husband found a large potted prickly pear in the trash this year and brought it home! It has bloomed it’s lovely one day yellow blossom and is now forming a fruit! I will have to harvest it and have my family try it!
Another unexpected treat was wintergreen. It grew by the Foxhole. I believe that previously I may have mispoke and claimed the color of these tiny berries was white. They are instead a lovely shade of red when ripe. They grow on a short, about 6″ tall evergreen in sandy, well drained soil. The FLOWERS are white and waxy and bells shaped in most varietes.
Wintergreen was a very mildly sweet, lightly minty, sometimes spicey tasting berry. The berries were tiny and we would pick a handful and eat them. As a child however, a person is impatient, and we didn’t have the desire to keep plucking and eating! It was a tasty sometime treat however!
There were also wild strawberries, wild blueberries, wild raspberries and wild blackberries. These were all really luscious treats that we could avail ourselves of. Dad loved to have blueberry pancakes and blueberry muffins made with our fresh berries. Sometimes Mom and Aunt Martha would make a berry cobbler. All of it was made even more wonderful because there were bush ripened, freshly picked delicacies.
Then there was the previously discussed acquired taste- sassafrass. Dad occasionally made sassafrass sasparilla. for one thing though, his was not carbonated. That was not too pleasant for me. It was similar to a somewhat spiced sweet tea. (I can’t stand sweet tea! Give me lemon and/or mint and NO sweetner!) I guess I don’t have a lot to say about that….it was definitely an acquired taste to which I never became accustomed!
There were a lot of edibles right on the property that we could enjoy. And we took full advantage of the ones we enjoyed!
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September 2, 2008 at 10:02 pm (Michigan, memories)
Tags: brookwood. michigan, memories, New buffalo, white pines
Brookwood was in a forest populated by oak, white pine and birch trees. Thanks to my formative years in
Brookwood, I have developed a fondness for the scent of white pine. To me it is the heady smell of freedom, the eau de parfum of happiness.
We are often on the road. Frequently our travels take us to or through Michigan. I can have my eyes closed, but when the aoma of white pine begins to drift into the car, I know we have entered my state, the state of my heart.
When I was a child we stopped in New Buffalo at a wayside for lunch on our way to Brookwood. Those were the days when we still took the old highway to Michigan. We kids would leap out of the car and run happily though the white pine groves, sucking the scented air into our lungs, taking deep, deep, cleansing breaths. That was the point of the trip that my mind would start to click in and I would begin to think…….we are on our way, we are on our way, hurray!
Several years ago, a friends son asked if he might plant a tree in my yard. As a school project he had planted it in a paper cup and nursed it along for a season. That tiny sapling was an infant white pine. We planted it by the back corner of my house. Today that tree is almost as tall as my two story home. That little boy is shipping out to Iraq as a civilian teaching the troops how to repair diesel engines. And I am enjoying the perfumed memories of Michigan on my back deck. I only wish we had planted a small grove instead of one tree.
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classics nor pop; my best lullaby comes from Brookwood. You can get it anywhere in a country-ish setting, away from the cars, highway noise, booming stereos and cell phones, but for me it comes from memories of Brookwood. 
