Dear Mother: This is a lovely place to spend the summer! The children are having a marvelous time. This Lake Wissota is the nicest of the Wisconsin lakes we have seen, big, clear, sandy bottomed. We swim two or three times a day off our own dock. There's a very nice island out in "big Wissota" -- meaning the main part of the lake (we are on a little sort of "appendix" of the lake, so that we have that little bay one direction from the house and the "big lake" the other direction). We have the use of a lovely new Dunphy boat this summer, 14-footer, stable and roomy, so it will take the whole family for supper on the island. We have a nice shady front yard and all the swimming, fishing, sunbathing and picnics anyone could want. We like the island for picnics and beach fires, but we have had typical fisherman's luck so far -- every place we try the fishing was wonderful last year!
Mark is having a fine summer with his various zoological specimens. He loves any kind of animals, and this summer has developed an intense interest in skeletons and anatomy. We know almost no one so far but the family next door, and they are very friendly. The doctor treats the boys as though they were his grandsons, especially Mark, and Mark makes regular treks over there to study a skull which the doctor has. "I'm so glad I know a man with a skull," he told me one night. The doctor's daughter has a horse which Mark adores. Fluffy, the hamster, is still doing fine. And Mark has a painted turtle named Homer which the doctor found along the road and brought to him. Mark's first idea was to keep it in the bathtub but Phil thought up a more novel and much more satisfactory solution: he drilled a little hole in the shell where it extends beyond the tail, soldered a ring into it, and in that way tied Homer to one post of our dock, where he can swim and sun himself to his heart's content. Mark's collection also includes a huge tadpole which the doctor also presented to him. It has two legs "sprouted" and is a good three inches long -- must be a bullfrog tadpole. In addition Mark has a goldfish in a bowl, and a minnow drying out on the sun porch roof in the hope that he can preserve its skeleton.
There are many birds nesting around, orioles, flickers, robins and so on, and dozens of friendly little gray squirrels playing around the yard all the time. In fact, we have all sorts of wild life except the fish we've been trying to track down. The water is still too cold and too high, the old-timers say, for Wissota is supposed to be a good fishing lake.
Now I must help Caroline with a sewing project and Rickie with a model airplane he's building (machines are to him what animals are to Mark). -- Ruth.