I’m not sure when it struck me, but sometime within the first 30 minutes of paddling and floating around Lake Heron, make that Lake Hudson, I realized what a neat place Lake Heron, er Hudson, Recreation Area is.

June 9 was a hot Saturday. I had left my wife Brenda, her sisters Bonnie Zenk and Beth Fetzer, planting flowers with their mother Joan Waldron at the family farm on Sand Creek Highway.

I had helped pull weeds earlier, and the women had the planting under control. My two cents definitely wouldn’t be needed in deciding what went where and the physically tough part of the job was done. On the trip down to Lenawee County from Ludington I had put my 17-foot Old Town Nantucket kayak on top of the truck thinking I might explore Lake Hudson again. It’s been almost 20 years since Brenda and I and our daughters moved from Morenci to Ludington.

I remember writing in a farewell column in the Hillsdale Daily News, where I worked for about 18 months after a five-year stint at the Morenci Observer, that I was trading seas of soybeans and corn for beaches of sand and the blue water of Lake Michigan.