Category: Our Experiences

We closed on the sale of The Double Dogleg today, and also on the purchase of the yet-to-be-named new house (actually not so new, but new to us). We had been watching the new house since early or mid-spring, but didn’t fully realize the vision. We agreed that if the new house was still on the market when we returned from Walt Disney World in mid-April, we would list The Double Dogleg and put an offer in on the new house. Our offer was competitive, and we were lucky to find a buyer for our house in relatively short order. Once the respective purchase agreements were signed, we set our eyes on a late-June closing date. This was eventually delayed by about a month, and we finally closed on both houses at 10am on July 15, 2015.

Throughout the sale process and the packing (mostly by Lindsey), Lindsey was pregnant and Carson was born on June 8, 2015. So, while we’ve been living out of various boxes strewn throughout The Double Dogleg, we’ve had a crib in the living room and spent most nights taking turns sleeping on the couch. I’ll remember that there is stuff everywhere. Diapers in the dining room. Kitchen stuff in the Yogi room. A basement full of my stuff (just. can’t. let. go.).

I will also remember, and miss, The Double Dogleg’s solitude, wooded views, epic snow blowing opportunities, back porch bon fires, goldfish in the pond, raking (and raking more), the many improvements and clearing we did, the various tenants, sledding and skiing in the woods, Harvey growing up his first two years there, Lindsey’s car slip on Christmas Eve 2011, killing dad’s snow blower, relentlessly clearing saplings, maple syruping, Mt. Yogi and our other signs, shoveling everything everywhere, the sliver of beach and the stuff growing on it, jumping off the raft, hiking in the woods, looking up at the canopy, and many other memories and adventures that have been previously documented here. The Double Dogleg was our first house together and the house to which we brought both Harvey and Carson home. And those memories, along with the many others, will stay close to our hearts.

And now it’s time to being the new adventure of making the new house our home sweet home.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

~ T. S. Eliot

Lindsey and Harvey bought maple syruping supplies at McGough’s in Traverse City. After reading a few articles and watching a YouTube video, we went out and started drilling holes in trees. We found two with running sap, placed our spiles and hung our bags. Now we wait and see what we get. The next adventure will be boiling it down.

Update, Saturday, March 14:

We bought an old metal pot from Walt & Susan’s Antiques on Old Mission Peninsula, and then built a roaring fire in the metal pit on our back deck. This all began about 5:30pm. Reducing the 1.5 gallons of sap to about a 1/3 cup of syrup took almost six hours. I finished up around 11pm by filtering the embers out of the syrup via a coffee filter. It was satisfying to end up with what we set out for. Here are some pictures.

(The adventure begins.)

(Reading Scotland’s Gift: How America Discovered Golf, by C.B. Macdonald to pass the time.)

(11pm-ish . . . when I determined it had reached 219 degrees, seven degrees above water’s boiling point.)

(The end product. It’s sweet, and mable syrup like!)