Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
My maternal grandparents own a fairly large piece of land in rural Michigan. It’s mostly forest, and while there is a highway going right by the place, it doesn’t get much traffic all told.
In other words, it was a great place for my Mom to just kick the kids out to go play in the woods as soon as we were old enough to know not to go on the road.
We visited every summer for a few months, plus a week at Christmas, for most of my childhood years. Mom would get to enjoy the rural life she grew up with and my sister and I would get a chance to explore and play and learn the old fashioned way.
And every evening, Mom would ring the dinner bell to call us in to eat. It could be heard pretty far into the woods, and we would come trudging up in a few minutes, happy from hours of building forts in the woods.
We still use the dinner bell today, though my sister and I stopped spending all our time outside years ago. I do have younger cousins, after all, and a few of my uncles spend a lot of time out there as well, especially one of the civil engineers in the family who enjoys making trails in the woods.
In the winter, we don’t use it much. Few people head into the woods when there’s a foot of snow on the ground, and if they do, they’re on skis and are heading out of the area you can hear the bell anyway. Besides, the bell gets covered in snow too.
But it is quite happy to sit there, waiting for the next time it’s rung to bring the family home.
