Environmental Autobiography, Part I

I haven’t lived too many places, geographically-speaking: barring a four-month stint studying abroad in Greece, I’ve lived in only three states – in order of appearance: Wisconsin, Minnesota and New York - and two cities per state (if you’re willing to count Brooklyn as a city). But while I was born and raised in Shorewood, WI, a small residential inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, growing up I had the good fortune to be able to spend many weekends and several weeks per summer on Whitewater Lake with my Great Aunt Lee.

Aunt Lee – more specifically, Leora Emma Petronella Goelzer Frank – had been living on Whitewater Lake for a very long time, certainly as long as I could remember. She was my father’s mother’s sister, who had left Milwaukee shortly after marrying my uncle Carl Frank. He owned a small piece of land on a somewhat remote lake southwest of the city where he had built, with his own two hands, a small clapboard cottage some years earlier.

Of course, he had some additional work to do: the garage, for instance, took up more than half of the house. When it was just him, living in the small back room hadn’t been much of an issue – but now that Lee was going to be living there too, he had to lay tile over the garage floor, install another door and build an actual kitchen. The foundation may have been made of cinderblocks, but it was structurally sound and barely ever leaked. So what if the shower was a stall stuck in the corner of the basement? So what if there was only one toilet, a true water closet without so much as a sink? It was home, and Aunt Lee embraced it.

My dad had spent a large part of his youth going out to Whitewater Lake, where in a lot of ways he was like the child that Carl and Lee never had. So when my dad eventually got married and started his own family, we soon started our bi-monthly trips out to see Aunt Lee – Carl had unfortunately died shortly before I was born and Aunt Lee, stubborn as always, decided to stay on at the lake by herself even though she had no car (she didn’t know how to drive) and at that time there were few year-round residents.