You might guess that this is an old photo. Even if you don’t know the age of the purple beach urchin (four and a quarter, I think), there is a vintage van (VW bus I think?) in the background that probably hit the junkyard decades ago.

Our snowbanks at the moment are sorta equivalent in size to the one the beach urchin is sitting on. The last several winters whatever snow we got didn’t last long. Is it global warming or weird weather patterns? I do not know. I do believe that using less energy in general is a decent strategy. I’m not sure I will ever be able to adapt to a fully electric vehicle though. It might work for me if I were just driving it around town and could plug it in at home. And if I also owned a robust gasoline engine vehicle to drive me up to the yooperland.

The VW bus belonged to our (late, alas) neighbor Hans’s son, who must have been visiting his parents at the time? The GG and I can’t remember what he did for a living but we think we remember it involved something to do with botes on the Great Lakes. The GG looked him up and apparently he went to the Great Lakes Maritime Academy and “worked the engines”. He also said, “like my dad”. The Gumper was the master mechanic on the Hornet in WWII.

Anyway, a VW bus is in my history but not via my family. We had VW bugs. But the Sherman family, who encamped at the moomincabin for two weeks a number of summers when I was a kid, could not fit their family of seven in a VW bug. So they had a VW bus and I rode in it many times. Usually us kids were on adventures with my dad and Pete Sherman, his childhood friend. The Commander and Esther Sherman would be back at the moomin, cruising through the Joy of Cooking, cooking up stuff to feed all of us kids plus community dinners with the relatives at the Old Cabin. Just a slice of my idyllic childhood.

Beth, Paul, Danny, David, and Willy. Beth was Beth Frances and her dad was insistent upon that as her middle name. I can only guess to honor my mother Frances. Danny was my age and also my first boyfriend (at age six). We play-acted our “wedding” on the beach many times. It took place at Niagara Falls (the Shermans lived near there) and there was something about “let’s go honeybunch!” at the end of it. Oh, we didn’t kiss or anything like that. We were little kids.

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