Finn because my surname begins with “Fin”. Family because this land belongs to my family (and another, we’ll get to them in a bit). Moomin because I am a moom. And troll because most of the time, I live in Trollandia, that’s Michigan’s lower peninsula, which is below a bridge, the Mackinac Bridge to be exact. (It’s also a classic children’s book series and I apparently remind “people” of the Groke.)

So I am here and it is brrrrrr, featuring a northwest wind straight off Gitchee Gumee and I would be surprised if the temps are out of the 40s. And looking at my super-duper indoor/outdoor thermometer just now, I am right. It is 46. We are warm inside the non-winterized moomincabin, with two heaters going and the upstairs blocked off.

The excitement this summer is that the neighbors two doors down do not have any water. Their pump has failed and there’s only one pump rodeo in “town”. They are very good but they are so booked up, my neighbor (and lifelong friend) cannot even get on the schedule. Would we be willing to run a hose from the moomin to their cabin?

Yes yes yes yes yes! She seemed a bit reticent about asking but OMG, I was just cracking up. Until I was a young 20-something, the moomincabin and our family’s Old Cabin got our “running” water from a GARDEN HOSE connected to my next door uncle’s well. In the beginning, it was a no brainer because the only water we HAD in the moomin was cold water in the kitchen sink. We heated it up in huge teakettles to wash the dishes and do what limited bathing we could do. I usually took baths in the lake as a teenager, whatever the weather. Our plumbing got a bit unwieldy when we added a water heater and fully-equipped (albeit miniature) bathroom. It still worked but The Commander decided we needed our own well and so we have one. (And I didn’t bathe in the lake nude, I had a system and you do not wanna know.)

After 100 years and multiple generations of sharing this beach with our friends, OF COURSE we will help in any way we can.

We reminisced about how our parents described “running water”. You grab a bucket, run down to the lake, fill up the bucket, and run back up

Oh yeah, we arranged all of this via text messages (the neighbor cabin inhabitants are currently still at their home in Florida). Super easy! When we were kids, the only phone on the beach was my next-door uncle’s and that was because he was a doc and it was a *party line* to boot. We’ve come a long way.

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