Don’t take what you have for Granted.

When we pulled up, the damage was not nearly as bad as we had heard it was.

This was, until we started walking further down the street. The whole place was left in ruins. Whole roofs blown off of new, strong houses. Trees splitting huge houses in half. The damage was indescribable. I had never seen anything like this, not in real life at least. I felt like I was walking through a dramatic made-up movie scene. It was hard to comprehend that this was all real.

This is exactly how I was feeling after visiting my grandparents lake house on Indian Lake last weekend after the devastating tornadoes, which took out a huge part of their neighborhood. So many houses that I have grown up around…gone. It was so surreal. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I took the familiarity of that place for granted.

I have grown up going to my grandparents lake house my entire life. My mom grew up going there as well, as the land has been in our family for about 5 generations. In 2004, my grandparents tore down the original small lake cottage and built a large lake house to fit us and all of our cousins. After they built this house and we had room to stretch, we were up there all the time.

The lake house has always been my second home, just from all of the summer’s spent there, the weekends spent there, and the fact that we all “quarantined” together in the house during COVID. Everything there has always been the same whether it be the neighbors, the houses, and even the cars that drove by on a daily basis.

I suddenly realize that I have taken this all for granted. I wasn’t grateful for all of these small things growing up, and I just kind of anticipated that the lake would always be the same, feel the same, and look the same no matter how old I got.

I now look at the ruins that my grandparents neighborhood lies in(luckily their house had minimal damage) and I just think how grateful I was to get to experience the same normalcy here for so long. I now realize why you should never take things for granted!