The Woods, the Meadow, the Lake

Make time before time gets away!

We woke up early, in the dark, Sunny and I. Reluctantly, I got organized for the drive out to the highway with a red bag for the weekly morning garbage pickup. (I don’t put a bag out every week but don’t like to skip more than one or two.) The sky before sunrise was lovely with soft pink clouds, and quickly I came to an executive decision: Sunny and I deserved a vacation! I could still open the bookstore on time in Northport after having most of the morning for adventures, and Shalda Creek was calling my name.

Magic in every mood --

It might have seemed natural to go straight to the beach, but I always have other priorities south of Bohemian Road. First, a slow drive down washboard almost to the end of Lake Michigan Road and then a walk to and beyond the very end. The road didn’t used to end there, I told Sunny. She isn’t always the most eager listener, but she tolerates my irrelevant musings and reminiscences.

Then the meadow. 

That big old sentinel maple --

If the soil were better, the meadow would have completely filled in with trees by now, but instead there are only, still, plenty of waist-high bracken, colonies of horsemint, stands of black-eyed Susans, and of course northern Michigan’s ubiquitous bladder campion. With no driving permitted on it any more, the old two-lane grows fainter every year. 

This is the first place I ever identified horsemint.

Now I have a thing for it.

Green lake of bracken fern --

The last time the Artist and I walked the meadow was with our Peasy on Labor Day of 2021. Though we had no premonition that such would be the case, it was the end of our last summer together, so now that walk – I am so glad we went to the meadow that day! – is especially poignant for me, and as my feet follow the old road I relive not only that beautiful day but summer days of long ago, when the Artist’s famous “house in the woods” stood at the far end of the long, winding two-track. No trace of the house remains, except in memories of those who loved it.

She got her feet wet.

Finally I did take Sunny Juliet to the beach. It was only her second experience with Lake Michigan, but she waded in with considerably less skepticism this time, comfortable getting her feet wet. The lake was beautiful. Subtle. Rain is coming this afternoon, maybe even thunderstorms, but we had a morning of summer vacation, rich in memories for me and in novel sensations for Sunny, and I tell her what the Artist said so often to me: “We live in a beautiful place.”