Where Shall I Go Now?

This is not how it looked. This was an unintended fancy setting.

The past is no longer there.

 

When I learned that my friend Hélène had died – and although she was my mother’s age, it came as a shock -- I knew that Paris would never be the same for me. It was in her apartment on the rue de Vaugirard that I rented a room for the month of May 1987, and one of my fondest memories from the long-deferred dream journey David and I made together in September 2020 was an evening in an Auvergnat restaurant in Hélène’s neighborhood, David’s young English friend, Justin, completing our international quartet. “We’re making beautiful memories,” Helene said to me, leaning her head on my shoulder for a moment. 

From album of that trip in 2000

Was that really 24 years ago? We always thought we would go back. 

After the expected yet deep pain of losing our old Sarah to old age, followed by the more tragic loss of poor little Peasy, the Artist and I had a few weeks (all too brief) in which we thought about making a much longer, more roundabout trip back to Michigan in May, going north into South Dakota (a state David had never seen but where I was born) and then to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, home of children and grandchildren we hadn’t visited on their own home grounds for too long. But that trip was not to be….

 

One of my sisters spends a couple weeks in early spring down in San Miguel de Allende and says I’d love it there. People I’ve known for years here in Leelanau have bought a house in the south of France and tell me the guest room is waiting for me. “But I have a dog,” I tell them. I’ve crossed the U.S. between southeast Arizona and northern Michigan three times with Sunny Juliet, so domestic travel presents no problems (even Canada would be doable, except for big cities), but how could I leave my little partner to go out of the country?

***

 

The foregoing I set aside without posting and eventually put up something else instead. Travel? Not in my cards at present.

 

Then along came Sunday morning, as it does reliably every week, and the sky was a cloudless blue, sun bright, barely a breeze stirring -- features of the morning that may or may not come together on any given Sunday, so hallelujah! -- and I realized that I had not been any farther from home than Grand Traverse County for almost a year. Several errand trips to Traverse City and one drive to Interlochen were the extent of my “travel” since return from Arizona in May 2023. Also, this year April 15 marked 32 years since the Artist and I exchanged vows for the second time (Kalamazoo, MI, the first time; Paris, Illinois, second). 

Paris, Illinois, April 14, 1992

My gypsy feet itched for the road, and I thought about Benzie County. Specifically, there was allure in the idea of following M-22 south of Empire. But there was a loose button on my shirt….

 

 

Surprise trip back

 

So I got out my sewing basket, and found when I opened it a little red notebook, a diary from April and May of 2015, that began with our last days in Dos Cabezas – that is, the last days of our first time there, a mid-January to mid-April stay. We were eleven days on the road home that year, stopping often and doing a lot of sight-seeing, and every day’s sights and every evening’s stop were recorded in this book. I began reading and couldn’t stop, mesmerized by the memories brought back by my own handwritten lines. 

The little red travel diary

When I reached the last page and closed the book, I looked out my window at robins on still-bare branches and felt as if I had just crossed the continent again and had aged nine years in half an hour. That is the power of written words.

April 2015

 

The road to Benzie

 

Most of the day remained after my half-hour in the past, however, so dog and I, with camera, binoculars, water bottle, and water dish, piled into the car and headed south. Without going into all the details and every road we traveled, here are a few highlights from our Sunday on the road:

 

These were the true colors of Benzie County's Platte River.

 

Old work by beaver artist

Best views of Long Lake were from the road,

where there was no room to pull over,

so a tiny boat launching area was the best I could do.

In Frankfort, Sunny Juliet and I lunched at the A&W drive-in. 

A real drive-in! Shades of my childhood!

From there we drove around Crystal Lake to rejoin M-22, and then it was back home again and dog play for Sunny and Griffin, followed by bedtime with book and dog for me, finishing up my reading of William Kent Krueger's Windigo Island. Sunny and I slept well. We had had a big day.

Magic Words, Magic Day

Bee at work on goldenrod

“Sunday off” is a magic phrase. Like “weekend,” it isn’t part of my summer vocabulary, but once September rolls around, I’ve earned a little time off, and when a Sunday in September begins so rich in promise, the open road beckons, speaking much more loudly than yard chores and certainly more compellingly than housework. I came to the end of a delicious book as the sun came up over the woods, and that was enough reading for the day.

Morning reading spot (one of them)

Backyard birdland

Off down the road we went! South! Opposite the direction I go most mornings!

Following breakfast at Art’s Tavern, we ventured down an unpaved side road to a little inland lake south of Glen Arbor. Other dogs were frolicking in the water, and we broke our Sarah’s heart by not letting her join in the fun! Cruel, cruel dog parents!

Lucky dogs!

Our expedition had barely begun. We hadn’t brought a towel. Sarah would acknowledge no merit in our excuses. So, “Time to move along,” we told her. Before envy completely spoiled her day....

Strollers and fisherman shared the breakwater at Frankfort, a scene we took in from across the Platte River outlet, sharing a cup of coffee before a visit to the Oliver Center for the Arts, where a very colorful show was in progress. You must take my word that it was colorful, or go see it for yourself, though, because I kept the lens cap on as we made our way through the galleries (in which an etching by L. C. Lim, an artist I do not know, kept pulling me back again and again). When we got to the pottery studio, though, I could not help seeing still life compositions everywhere I looked, and while David visited with the potter, I let myself frame a few shots.

South of Frankfort, in southernmost Benzie County and into Manistee County, landscape and scenery looked more and more like the U.P. to me. Towns there are simpler, country houses more modest, and the perils and tribulations of modern civilization comfortably seem far-off. Elberta exhibited a bit of change but not too, too much. Between Elberta and Arcadia we ventured off two-lane blacktop onto a dirt road that narrowed quickly to two-track and then threatened to disappear altogether, crowded on both sides by impenetrable wetland growth. There was nowhere to turn around, and so we had to go on, not daring to stop in loose, soft sandy places or muddy stretches with deep holes. But isn't this just what we had gone seeking? Adventure! A road completely new to us! Coming onto higher ground, with a cornfield on one side, we stopped to stretch our legs and let Sarah stretch hers. At the edge of the cornfield was a pile of fresh scat, with lots of cherry pits and corn kernels showing. I walked down the road a way and found raccoon tracks. Back in the car we continued on our way and eventually came out onto pavement again, none the worse for our exciting detour. Rather the better, I like to think. But I took no pictures on that little road. Private adventure, secret road.

Beyond is Lake Michigan

In Arcadia we found a public bench on a dock on the edge of Arcadia’s long, lake-like harbor and soaked up peace and sunshine for a while, sharing a fresh, crisp apple and a bottle of cold water from home: heaven enow. Across the water and behind the sand dune was Lake Michigan.

Too late

Exploring old boatyards exercises the dream muscles (although ours are never inactive for long), and here was no exception. Neither of us is or ever will be a sailor, but we both appreciate nice lines. 

Too big

Then David finds a boat that could use improvement and expounds on its shortcomings and needs, and I discover a flowering plant I associate with Lake Huron rather than Lake Michigan and attempt to impress him with my find – and his interest in botany equals mine in remodeling boats, but never mind! We are patient -- and familiar -- with each other’s pet obsessions after so many years together.

Square windows on a boat!

Tansy!

Circling back through Honor, we stopped for cheeseburgers at the Lumberjack Bar & Grill. As we looked over the menu, two couples in the booth behind me were packing up their leftovers, and I heard one of the men say, “No, the dog won’t eat pickles.” Suddenly I felt a happy kinship with strangers whose faces I could not even see. Without leftovers at the end of my own meal, I saved the last bite of cheeseburger to wrap in a napkin and take out to patient Sarah, waiting for us in the car.

All day long the light seemed golden, with none of that flat, white, washed-out look so usual in the middle of a day. Was it the time of year or because we were so near water that the low fall sunlight was bounced back up and all around us? “Like the light in Italy,” David affirmed when I cautiously ventured my hypothesis. (Neither of us has ever been to Italy.) Perhaps we have seen days just as beautiful but not more beautiful, surely!

There were many photographs I did not take, but back at home, as evening pulled the sun down behind the neighbors’ hill, it seemed I would be able to see this day forever and that along with images of trees and water and fields and golden light pouring down, soaking through, animating everything, I would remember as well our desultory conversation, shared memories evoked by well-known scenes and impossible but entertaining dreams sparked by less familiar horizons.

Home again, where we belong