The name At the Cottage came to me while I was driving away from one.
I was heading back downstate Michigan after a vacation Up North, near Petoskey. Back toward Kalamazoo. Back toward a job I had pursued as though it were my dream job. The place I had been working so hard to reach.
But somewhere along the way, that dream had become a life of overdoing. I was trying to hold together things I couldn’t control and carrying responsibilities that were too large for one person to carry. I was burning out, although I’m not sure I fully understood that yet.
Up North, I had briefly felt like myself again.
I had stood in the breeze coming off Lake Michigan and wandered along wooded trails without needing to accomplish anything. For a few days, life had become quiet enough for me to feel present inside it. Then I got into the car, began the drive south, and felt the loss of it intensely.
I have always felt that loss when leaving the north.
When I was growing up in the deep woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula’s Hiawatha National Forest, the woods were where I went when the stress of family or the demands of school became too much. I ran through the forest, built forts, followed paths, and generally got lost for a while.
But I think I was also finding something there.
There was a gentleness I could feel in the woods. In the stillness, away from the blinking, buzzing, voice-over-voice demands of the modern world there was space to feel again. My senses could soften and slowly come back online. I could feel the ground beneath me, the living things around me, and my own place among them.
When I became an adult, going Up North felt like returning to a kind of wholeness I hadn’t known I was missing. With fewer demands, the parts of me that had gone quiet or shut themselves away could begin to open again. I could be present with my family and, at the same time, feel the larger life unfolding around us. The trees growing. The birds calling to one another. The wind moving over a world that carried on without needing anything from me.
I became aware of how small I was within it all, but the feeling wasn’t lonely or insignificant. It was a relief. I didn’t have to understand everything, manage everything, or hold everything together. I was simply one small living thing among many, and I belonged there.
I still don’t have language that can hold the experience completely. Maybe some things can only be held when we become quiet enough.
Over time, my experiences as a feeling person, an art therapist, and a mom to two sensory-sensitive neurodivergent children have deepened my understanding of what I had been finding in those woods. The world asks people to take in so much. We need places where we can stop bracing against it, places where we can exhale, follow our curiosity, and feel at home in ourselves.
I began wondering: What if we didn’t always have to travel north or leave our ordinary lives behind to find that feeling? What if our homes could become peaceful enough for us to feel at home in the world again?
I suppose that question became At the Cottage.
“The cottage” isn’t one particular building. It is the name I give to a way of being at home, a refuge from urgency, but not from life itself. Just that life looked a bit different. A place with room for quiet and imagination, tree forts and painted creatures, books and questions, tenderness and a little harmless nonsense.
By turning my nature-inspired art into home decor, I am trying to bring home some of what I once thought I had to leave behind: the stillness of the forest, the freedom of wandering, and the feeling that the world is alive with a goodness we cannot always explain.
I hope my art helps families make room for that feeling in their own homes. Not perfectly calm homes. Not homes where no one becomes overwhelmed or where family life never tumbles into chaos. Just homes that offer us little places to return to. Places where children can feel at home in themselves and free to imagine, parents can linger, and all of us can become quiet enough to notice that we are part of something living.
Perhaps wonder doesn’t disappear when we leave the cottage. Maybe it is just shy, and it's waiting for us to make a little room for it at home.