From Michigan
Sleeping Bear Dunes
Everything seems sad from the perspective of nostalgia. Even the happy times bring a sigh or a tear to the eye. Because they were there and now they are gone. Because they can only be fully appreciated in retrospect. I walk through these moments and my feet are slow, but they do not drag. I do not trudge through my memories but stroll steadily so that I may catch my breath from the frenzy of present day. I am at peace here. I visit every place with the utmost enthusiasm but remain open to the prospect of a new view. I bend with change; I do not break. I do not cling to memory with the iron vise of desperation. This was a time both pure and intense. But to it, I am neutral.

I have never felt a place like this before. I suppose the feeling would be similar, were I to return to Germany and if I remembered any of it. The impression that this place gives me is one of utter duality. There are things as I knew them and things as they are. What was remains as a ghostly overlay of what is. Were I depressed, I would call it a haunting. I would cling to vapor and weep as it left me. (Note to self: I never really feel this way when I go to Helena because my relationship to the place has grown as I have, as have the people I know there. There is a different haunting with Helena. The difference between there and here is that this is an utter severance and a deeper bond. I will always feel here as my roots.) But nothing idyllic can be tangible. I am grateful to find peace in my life, and with my family, though a few moments bring tears to my eyes:

We pulled off the road to the cottage and parked by the beach, where I walked today, and Gran said, "I told your Aunt Julie that when I could no longer leap over the fallen logs and hike down the beach, I wouldn't miss it. But I was wrong, I do." It made me wonder what right I have to be so hyper-nostalgic. Here isn't only my childhood (in fact, here is really only my summer vacations), here is a thousand childhoods. My mother spent far more time Up North than I did. And her mother's time here encompasses ours tenfold. I feel sad for her, weakened by Lyme Disease and with two bad knees, that she can't even enjoy the beach near her old home. But she said to me, later, as we cruised down one of the wide rolling highways (a wonder in a sports car... mmm... I always wanted to learn to drive up here), "Well, Kathryn, I'm glad that someone will be around to enjoy all this and remember it after we're Dead and Gone." That made me wince. She's always saying that, "Dead and Gone." I don't mind so much if she's at peace with her last twenty years on this earth, but I'd rather not think about returning for a funeral in five years. Still, saying that was a gift from her to me. She knows I have a great love for northern michigan. This place does not belong to me. But it is My place.

Today we drove again to the West coast of Michigan. Lesley couldn't join me as her brother's car got a flat and they weren't sure whether the new tire was suitable for travel in an unfamilar area. So Gran was kind enough to take me out of the Bay area and back to the open lake. My plan was to hike the great Sleeping Bear sand dunes back to the water, take a quick dip, and hike back. I knew it wasn't more than two miles to the water. Gran insisted it was too easy for me to get lost up there and wanted me to take some trail I was unfamiliar with. I disagreed. Anyhow, at this point in our connundrum, we drove by Port Oneida road and I decided I would opt for a walk on the beach. She drove me down to another beach a few miles away so that I could walk BACK to the cottage area and she would meet me there after running errands.

So I walked the beach. The climate in that area always changes from year to year, resulting in a different beach makeup each season. Usually, the face of the beach alternates between rocky and sandy, with varying degrees of dry grasses. When I stepped onto the beach, I found more damn zebra mussels and marsh grasses. Stupid ecological fluxuations. Stupid non-indigenous plants and animals. I walked farther. After trudging through one rocky patch and one area of intense mussel infestation, I could see clear down the beach. The water's edge was pure sand. The water itself was sand out to the bar. I was amazed... hardly any rocks! It was a pleasant walk. As I walked, I opened my mind to the scenery and was twelve again, coming back to the cottage after beachcombing. I picked up a few rocks and watched the shoreline for landmarks. It was strange, seeing things and recognizing them, suddenly remembering why a particular outcropping or growth had significance. Here marked the path up into the woods, a secret trail past a cemetary, an apple grove. There was the Old Green shack... a mysterious building that both parents and children feared. I poked my head inside and was surprised to find that instead of a reassuring interior, the place was dark and forboding. Moreover, it still terrified me. I latched it and ran. Look! A little trickle of water from the undergrowth carving a path in clay and sand down the hillside to join the lake. This was Alyson's stream. Father down, I find my own stream, still running. Some things never change. Gran always warned us about poison ivy- it thrives this time of year- but we never listened. We always trotted up the hillside and into the woods, barefoot and in our bathing suits and never once got a case of the itchies worse than a 'skeeter bite.

My strange haunting sense grew as I got closer to the end of my walk. I felt myself young and brown, saw myself climbing the steps to the cottage and strewing sand all over the front porch. I opened the screen door and the Daddy-Long-Legs fled. I toweled my hair in the entryway, looked over the couches and the breakfast nook. Through the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen. Into the back bedroom where we would whisper secrets and huddle in the twin beds, afraid of spiders. Here is where I first talked to my younger sisters about sex. Hush hush. Slam the back screen door. There was a hose here, and a laundry line. A picnick table, once upon a time? Mole holes and anthills... course grass scratches my feet. Sometimes we would run down the little slope here to the gravel turnaround. Sometimes we would run the other way down the hidden drive. The slope is bulldozed and the drive is blocked now, but in my head I toured the whole house, ending in the basement room and the garage which we seldom entered. Every place has an smell, a sound, an essence. It is still there, even if it is gone.

I swam in the lake for some time, letting the water hold me. The lake changes and it does not change. Today it was green with a bottom layer of algae from out deep... a storm is coming. At the end of the walk, I found myself inexorably drawn to a sharp cut up the hillside not quite where the public access trail should be. A new path? I wondered, so I climbed it... and no, it was not a new path, but the most familiar of all. Here was the baring of the hill where the old stairs to the cottage had been. Torn out, they left a soft scar in the hillside, steep but climbable.

Gran met me on the drive and we went to the dune climb after that. On the way, I stopped to take pictures of the old town hall and outhouse down the road from the Port Oneida cottage. Like all things here, these trifles will always remind me of home. Anyway, despite her insistence that I not climb back to the water, she was eager to let me indulge and scale the face of the master dune. She dropped me off outside and we met an hour after. Like all things big and brooding, the dunes haven't changed much. Even now, in the best shape of my life, they're still a bear to climb. I wandered around for half an hour, part of my mind still playing "lost in the desert" like it always did when I was young, and then climbed back down. It was good to know I remembered right... the path to the beach is well travelled, wide, and marked... no way to get lost among all the foot traffic these days. The view up there was incredible! But I was more glad for the walk down the Port Oneida beach than my dune climb, though it was a good workout.

When we got back, we roused Grandpa and went for dinner in town. It's hard for Grandpa to get the energy to do much of anything anymore after his strokes. When he talks, it's easy to get frustrated with his slow speech or at his mishearing of things said. It pains me to see him so stiff and slow, both physically and mentally. But he refuses to give up. Surprisingly, this is both a blessing and a curse. His perseverence has caused his health to soar in the past two years. For a long time after his strokes, he could neither talk nor walk well. Now he does both with passable accuracy. But he will not lay down his pen nor his sword. He still wants to work. Granted, what he does is write (and from home), so it's not a stressful job, but the stroke has decimated his concentration and his vocabulary. His typing skills are those of a child and he makes more spelling mistakes than a five year old. But he tries hard. He still wants to be the best travel writer and Editor in the east. But he can no longer edit his own work. He lives in words and deeds of the past. Frankly, I don't blame him... I'd be saddened at losing my skills, too. But there comes a time to appreciate the past for what it was and understand what is. He can't write, but he tries. And what was so great is going from him and will, in a few years, be gone.

There is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I talk to him. I want to tell him what an inspiration he was to me but I never could connect or converse with the man. Even when he had his full wits about him, we never really talked. He was more a career inspiration than anything else. I envied them, travelling about, socializing, being well known. But now that I have questions, I find it hard to phrase them... and he he finds it harder to formulate answers. He showed me his office tonight, articles, plaques, letters, clippings, and slides from the last fifty years. He fought in World War II, has a signed photograph shaking hands with Kennedy. A letter from Truman and one from Form. Artifacts from most of the 173 countries he has been to. He finds these things easy to remember, at least. But when he speaks about them, there is a sigh in his voice.

We got him to come out and go downtown with us for the live music by bribing him with one of his favorite steak restaurants. I rarely eat red meat, but I decided tonight that since the cuts were choice, I'd opt for steak. The first I've had in five years- an 8 oz. Tenderloin. Yum ^^. I was very pleased with myself and with the steak, though it was a *bit* rare, being rather thick. After dinner, we walked the street and listened to the live music. I painted a bit on a public canvass, a flower for growth, a cat flourish to say, "I was here."

Later, on the porch, I drank a Boston Cooler (Vernors Ginger Ale and Vanilla Ice cream), talked to the cat and listened to the crickets wake up. I prepared myself for an emotionally busier day tomorrow, meeting with two old friends who I have not seen in over three years. I tried to take a deep breath and let go my apprehensions. I know that the more neutral I am, the fewer expectations I have, the less likely I am to find an old friend suddenly a scalding persionality. Let it ride, Kat... let it ride.

I watched the bubbles rise to the surface of the glass and crystallize on the ice cream, each one a requiem for a dream.