Last week I was up in Thunder Bay for my Grandfather’s 85th birthday. Henry Dlugosz, my grandfather on my mother’s side who emigrated from Poland following the second world war, is more commonly referred to as Dziadziu by the grandchildren.
In some earlier posts I talked about my grandfather and how he inspired my love of space and of learning. It was at the cottage, 45 minutes outside of Thunder Bay at Shebandowan lake, that I learned about how vast the universe was. It’s been a few years since I was able to get up to the cottage. Getting back out there to celebrate my grandfather’s birthday so close following our return from Florida was an amazingly cathartic experience. In a sense the trip home was full circle. It was really out on the dock with Dziadziu that this trip south to see the shuttle first began. I was a kid and space was cool and neat. Now I’m an adult (sortof) and space is cool and neat, but I can rent cars and use cameras and have a valid passport.
Below are some shots I wanted to share:
Matthew and Dziadziu at Cottage
This is my grandfather and I at the cottage at Shebandowan celebrating his 85th Birthday.
This is the cottage itself. My grandfather constructed the cottage. Construction began in the late 1970’s
Here I am standing on the dock where most of my early star-gazing days were hosted
Above the tree line in the previous image, I’ve tried to point out where my grandfather had first revealed the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky. It was a fuzzy blob just above these trees (probably actually through the trees now as they are taller than they once were.) Of all the celestial objects we looked at back then, this memory stands out the clearest. I think it was because of the immense scales of size my grandfather was trying to convey at the time.
Blessings,
Matthew