It's Travel Time

WHAT month is it???

In northern Michigan there are, besides weekend tourists and short-term vacationers, summer people and “year-round” people. The year-rounders who can afford to make a getaway in late winter or early spring, though, are not shy about doing so, and who can blame them? Some take February or March in Florida or Mexico or the Caribbean. For years, before and between the Florida and Arizona winters, the Artist and I made more modest forays to Lake Huron on early spring weekends when March rolled around, because cabin fever isn’t just about getting to an exotic location. It’s more about seeing different scenery and different people. 

 

“But we didn’t even have winter this year.” 

 

“We had a month of winter (January).” 

 

“No, we had ten days. That’s all!”

 

Okay, and now February, typically the coldest month in northern Michigan, has been bringing us daytime temperatures in the 40s! Along with many others, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this month’s weather. It isn’t right, isn’t normal, it bodes ill for the future – and yet, in the present, it makes life easier and certainly (because of lower fuel bills and no plow bills at all) less expensive, which is hard not to appreciate. And who can complain about blue skies? Besides that, for me (and I know I’m not the only one) this time of year is a minefield of associations. Anniversaries after loss are ambushes along life’s road, in that you know they’re coming – looming inexorably -- but not the moment or hour or the manner they will hit. So with all of the financial and emotional possibilities threatening, I found unseasonable February warmth and sunshine more than helpful.  

While we still had snow --

Blue view --

Thanks to books, I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ireland and Scotland, France and Italy, some of it over a hundred years ago and some in more recent times. Fiction, nonfiction – one is as dreamy as the other, when it comes to exploring mountain villages, river sources, stone ruins, and local stories from local folks in faraway places. When March arrives, I’ll post my “Books Read” list for the month of February, with enough annotation to give an idea of each title’s contents for anyone who might be curious.

 

Leelanau County itself, though, provided me with antidotes to cabin fever. Monday, Presidents Day, was a bank holiday, so I had to go to Traverse City on Tuesday instead to take care of banking errands. By noon, though, I was already zipping out of town when the beautiful sunshine inspired me to detour to Good Harbor Bay, where Sunny and I walked on the beach! As close as I live to Lake Michigan, you would think beach-walking would be a frequent life activity for me, but somehow, unless I have company, time just seems to slip away. Well, not that day! I seized it!

Good Harbor, Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Again, the following day, Wednesday, the Artist’s birthday (he would have been 87, if still living), when I felt the need to do something special, Good Harbor was my choice. I'd first contemplated a stop at the Happy Hour for a beer on the way home, maybe even buying for whoever might happen to be sitting at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, but there was no way to include Sunny Juliet in that plan. And as it had on Tuesday, the sun was shining, the sky blue, so with sunset later and later every day, Sunny J. and I had plenty of time after I closed the bookstore at 3 o’clock to drive down to Good Harbor again, scenes of many memories and associations over the years.

Lake Michigan, Wednesday afternoon

Calm water

This is how I am traveling in February now. Books take me to other countries, and I take mini-vacations close to home with my dog, because, as the Artist loved to say, so often, “We live in a beautiful place,” and whatever the weather, every road of my county is saturated with memories, making it all the more beautiful. Travel time in my home county is any time, and any county drive is also time travel, my present brimming over with the past. 

Thursday morning fog -- beautiful!

 

Today’s postscript:

 

If audiobooks are your thing, please consider signing up to get yours from libro.fm – and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore. Your audiobooks won’t cost any more than they do if you buy from the online behemoth, but you will be supporting a small indie bookstore in northern Michigan. Thank you! And special thanks to those of you already ordering from libro.fm via Dog Ears Books!!!

The “Cabin” Is My Refuge

Let's address a major Up North winter issue: cabin fever.

I live in an old farmhouse, not a cabin, but cabin fever is no respecter of architecture. Like the flu, it can invade mansion or hovel or anything in between. Up North people know what I’m talking about.

A couple of lifetimes ago, in Kalamazoo, I went through a winter of impassioned Arctic reading. Couldn’t get enough of that polar stuff. Especially liked books by women in the Arctic. A Woman in the Polar Night (now reprinted) is one title I recall, in which the author lived through the dark winter days with her husband and another man (husband’s coworker or something) in a tiny, tiny cabin. She took seriously the advice that it was important to get outdoors every day but also that she must not fail, under any circumstances, to keep one hand on the cabin wall at all times so as not to lose her sense of direction, get lost, and freeze to death a foot from safety. And so she would leave the shelter of the cabin interior, dressed in her warmest clothes, and make a circuit outdoors, in darkness and stinging wind and snow, clinging to the safety of the walls, every day of the Arctic winter. That was her outdoor exercise and her cabin fever preventative.

The tropical equivalent to cabin fever is island fever. Simple and beautiful and idyllic as life can be in the islands, a non-native visitor can suddenly be overpowered by a desperate need for immediate escape. Lemme outta here! After all, an island is isolated land, and isolation deprives us of sensory and social variety. Iso- is sameness. So not any particular deprivation, such as cold, for example, but deprivation itself is the essence of cabin fever. Feeling trapped.

A friend asked me if I missed Florida this year. (The last time our pack went south for the winter was in 2010.) Not really. I always love being on the road, and our time in Aripeka was creative, but being home this year feels just fine. Not going outdoors with my sketchbook, as I did last year, I still get out with Sarah for little dog-and-mom adventures, very necessary and healthy for both of us. The bookstore is still open four days a week, and on other days we sometimes range as far afield as Traverse City, so no, I don’t feel housebound or trapped.

In fact, what I’m feeling deeply this winter is love and gratitude for my home, for my very specific old farmhouse, for the cold, windswept land surrounding it, the rooms we close off and don’t heat (for the sake of economy), our sheltered central room (no exterior walls) with dining table and fireplace and my yellow leather chair, my tiny Paris kitchen, our tiny bathroom with the beautiful new floor tile I admire daily, the “mouse nest” of a living room with its overflowing bookshelves, comfy pillows, and cozy throws, and the bedroom, where Sarah (who can be a real “bed hog”) joins us at night on a double bed piled high with blankets and pillows. Sometimes, as I did Monday, I stay home all day, and it feels like such a luxury! No one who has never held jobs outside the home could possibly understand! 

More often, David and Sarah and I travel together to Northport to do our errands and tend to our work (studio/gallery and bookstore) and our social lives—and then we come home again, and it feels so good to walk in the door and shed our coats and put the kettle on! “Isn’t it great to be home?” we say to each other every day.

Immune to cabin fever? Like flu, one should never feel too cocky about not coming down with it. Sometimes the fever doesn’t pounce until March, and I’m not saying it can’t happen to me, only that it hasn’t struck yet, and I’m feeling no symptoms. Love my crockpot! Love my rice cooker! Love that big cast iron Dutch oven! Last night’s beef barley soup and biscuits were heaven on the table!

Time to read!!!

Cabin fever? Hardly! Well, not at the moment....