When I was a boy, one of my uncles had a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. My family went there for parts of three summers, and I loved it!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.
When I was very young - around the age of nine - my family used to go to a house in Somerset that my stepfather rented every summer. There was fishing, lakes and riding.
We went to a small lake, Bass Lake. It was beautiful. It was perfectly still when we got there in the morning. The fog was lifting off the water. It was just magical. And we did catch some fish, 13 fish.
We slept in the park before we had a house, and eventually we shared a home - my parents, my grandparents and five uncles, my family, all of us - on White Oaks Street by Magnolia Street near the railroad. Those were hard times, but I loved living there.
When I was 12, my mum put us in a summer camp meant for children from low-income families. It was in upstate New York where we had to live in tents, fetch water, cook our meals, and even dig our own toilet bowls.
I was on the beach every summer. That was the pleasant part of my childhood because we were right by the sea. We'd take a picnic, and I'd spend hours in the water until I turned blue. You couldn't get me out of there.
Other than motherhood, the eight years that I spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I have incredibly fond memories of. It's a beautiful place, with four seasons up in Wisconsin. And really wonderful people.
Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.
I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we'd vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.
My father liked doing carpentry work, construction work, in the summer vacation. And so my mother designed a cabin, a log cabin, like a - it was like a Swiss chalet. I was twelve years old, and my father and I built it on a rocky point peninsula out into Lake Superior.