Long Line

This week’s prompt is “long line.” It pretty much had me stumped as far as story ideas.  I thought about some long family lines I’m aware of – I read an article once that suggested Shakespeare may have referenced the Flewelling family in one of his works.  That would certainly be a long way back for that family line.  And I thought of some family lines that are no doubt very long but which I am stuck on because I can’t get past a certain ancestor (the Howard line, for example).

However, as I pondered the phrase “long line,” trees came to mind.  Not family trees, but real trees.  I tried to dismiss the idea as a bit strange but it kept coming back again and again. A long line of trees… So my post this week is about trees in Northern Michigan – beautiful trees there now and trees my grandfather captured on film almost 100 years ago.

In Ogemaw County, Michigan, where I was raised, there are lots and lots of trees.  I grew up surrounded by them.  Birch trees with their white bark are perhaps my favorite. 

But a beautiful maple in the Fall can be breathtaking. And also supplies precious sap for making maple syrup in the Spring.

  Apple trees loaded down with fruit are a wondrous sight.

Pine trees are so prevalent there that they might be overlooked, but who can resist stopping to listen to the sound of the wind moving through them?

My paternal grandfather, Lewis Bruce Walt, was born in 1904 in Rose City, Michigan. His father died when he was nine years old and a baby sister passed away a month later. His mother, Etta Agnes Howard Walt, eventually remarried.  My grandfather, together with his two younger brothers, Howard and Burt, lived on Schmitt Road in Cumming Township (just outside Rose City) with their mother and stepfather.

When Pappy – as my brothers and I called him – was around 20 years old, he had a camera and used it to take several pictures of family, friends, and Northern Michigan scenery.  At some point, he carefully arranged the pictures in a photo album and labeled several of them.  When I flip through his photo album now, I see the landscape of my home as it was in 1924 or 1925.  The snow, the rivers, the lakes.  And the trees.

Although my grandfather moved away from Ogemaw County for a period of time, he returned in the mid-1940s to make his home on Schmitt Road with his wife and son, my father. He remained there the rest of his life.

In 1975 my grandfather passed away. He is buried in Lane Heights Cemetery in Lupton, Michigan. In the shade of a beautiful old tree.