Our beach doesn’t have a formal name. It has been called many names over the century the family has owned it. Mostly it’s just “the beach”. My dad would sometimes call it Sunset Beach and it certainly *IS* a sunset beach, at least in the summer. It faces northwest. Some people call it Birch Point Beach after a small peninsula a half mile to the east. And there’s Round Island Point Nature Preserve, which is adjacent to us on property we once owned.

The [moomin]cabin’s official name is The Veteran Greenhorn Society, LLC. And that’s fine. The Veteran Greenhorns were my dad and about six of his friends when they were in high school back in the late 1930s. They would tromp the woods in the area, packing pistols to pose for gunfight photooos, etc. (I have posted those before.)

At some point I informally started calling this place the moominbeach (moomincabin, moonindeck, whatever). Sometimes when I post photoooos on facebook I use the prefix “moomin” to indicate where I am. Beach, cabin, deck, garage, outhouse… Well, we don’t have an outhouse any more. If I need to use an outhouse I use the Old Cabin outhouse.

I posted a sunset on facebook last night and said I was at the moominbeach. A facebook/high school friend wondered where it had gotten that name. Well. It is a combo…

First, when I was taking classes at community college and I had a 9:00 o’clock class, I would get to the college library at 8:00 AM, cuddle up in a chair and watch the sun come up, study a bit if I needed to, and check my email. I had a lot of YAG emails in those days but, at that time of the morning, I often got emails from Lizard Breath on her college study abroad program in Spain. Once, one of us (can’t remember if it was me or her) mistyped me as “moom” instead of “mom”. “Moom” stuck and we still often refer to female parents as “moom” or “mooma”, i.e., mooma duck, mooma turkey, etc.

Second, there are Tove Jansson’s moomintroll books, a children’s series of novels that began in 1945. The beach urchins loved the moomintroll books. When I bought the first one I was thinking I would be reading it aloud and I think I even began reading it that way. But the beach urchins, quick green lizards as they are, were long-time independent readers by then and they absolutely took off reading every moomintroll book they could get their hot little hands on and left me completely in the dust. Okay then.

So somehow I started calling this place the moominbeach. I think it’s only my branch of the FinFam that calls this beach the moominbeach. Just our thing.

P.S. Well, also we are the *Fin*layson family, although unlike the author, we are not Finnish at all.

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