Spring Lake

Growing up in Spring Lake, Michigan, home was always defined by the proximity to water. I lived about ten minutes from Lake Michigan, summer days spent chasing waves that felt more like an ocean than a lake, winters when the whole town seemed to brace itself against cold wind coming straight off the water. You grow up differently when a body of water that big is just down the road. It gives you a sense of scale, a scale of how small you really are compared to this beautiful planet. But my favorite memory wasn’t at the lake at all - it was in the woods. There was a patch of trees near our house, that felt like dense woods behind Mr Leonard’s home… it slowly became its own universe to me and my neighbor friends. We’d spend hours out there building teepees out of fallen branches, propping them against each other until they held, convinced we’d built something structurally sound enough to survive a massive thunderstorm. We’d start fires, We played survival out there, pretending we lived in the wild, foraging and scouting and defending our little camp from nothing in particular. With a bag of snacks from the pantry of course. It wasn’t about escaping anything. It was just pure, unstructured kid imagination, the kind you don’t realize is rare until you’re older and don’t have it anymore. Spring Lake Public Schools were the kind of good you don’t fully appreciate until you leave and compare notes with people who didn’t have it as easy. Small class sizes, teachers who actually knew your name and your older siblings names too, sports and academics that both mattered without either one swallowing the other whole. It wasn’t flashy. It was just solid, steady, the kind of foundation that quietly does its job. And that’s the thing about Spring Lake as a whole it’s small, but it’s mighty. Everyone genuinely seems to know everyone, not in a suffocating way, but in a way where you’re rarely a stranger anywhere you go. You run into your third-grade teacher at the grocery store. There’s a version of Midwest charm that people romanticize without really understanding it, and Spring Lake is that version… friendly without being fake.