Just got back from Petoskey, Michigan the other night. All the way home, through all of Michigan and Northwest Ohio, the forests and bright blue water of the north kept playing through my mind's eye. And I wanted to go back and stay forever. Northern Michigan has my history stored in it. It's where my mom, grandma, and step-grandpa moved just a few years after my mom's dad died. The home in Petoskey was where my grandma owned a little country store. Round Lake down the street was where my mom swam as a teenager. This little tourist town was where my mom said goodbye to her best friend when she moved away. It's where my mom grew up and graduated from high school, the high school where she met her boyfriend, where she broke up with her boyfriend, and where that heartbreak made her move in with her best friend in Ann Arbor making it possible for her to meet my dad. Petoskey is where I used to go with my parents to visit my grandma and her husband. I remember the little house, eating oatmeal in a high chair, and then sitting on the lap of the man who I knew as Grandpa and smelling his pipe smoke. One day, we didn't go up to Petoskey anymore. I was only two or three when my grandma got a divorce so those memories almost immediately flew away from me like a firefly drifting around, only once in a while lighting up to remind me of the pipe smoke or the screeen door or the breakfast bar.
I really only remember driving up to Traverse City in the summers. Visiting my cousins for the Fourth of July. Dressing up in red, white and blue outfits my mom had made. Going to the Cherry Festival and watching my cousins ride on a float. Sometimes, my mom and her best friend would take the kids to see fireworks in a town nearby. I loved those fireworks the most because everyone stood by their car near a field to watch and then they'd beep their horns when the really good ones exploded. Anytime we visited, my grandma would read Shel Silverstein to my cousins and I - silly voices and all - and we'd play Pictionary which made us all giggle and yell because our drawings were impossible to decipher. We would sing little songs and sometimes she would play the piano for us. She always played the first bit of "Claire de Lune" by Debussy or the theme to "Somewhere in Time" or she would play show tunes and my mom would sing. She taught us the right hand part of "Chopsticks" while she played the lower notes. Afterward, my cousins would go home and my parents and I would go to the upstairs bedroom. I'd listen to the comforting noise of the cars going by on the busy road below until I fell asleep. I still don't know why that sound is so comforting, but I never tire of hearing it.
My grandma has since moved to a condo which I have never seen, a few of my cousins have since gotten married to men I have met maybe three times, but I know they remember those times too because my older cousin walked down the aisle to "Claire de Lune" and her sister had the theme from "Somewhere in Time" played before her wedding. Maybe I'll find a good Shel Silverstein poem to quote in my programs...
So you see, Northern Michigan has a lot of my past life sitting and patiently waiting for me. Waiting for me to come back and remember it all over again, to see it in the deep blue water, to feel it in the wind and the sun, to smell it when someone's pipe tobacco drifts around the corner, to hear it in the traffic going by late at night, to taste it in the newly washed sweet cherries. It's in me, it's part of me and it's drawing me back. The firefly in my mind is wildly flashing its light, attracting me back to my childhood, back to easier times of perfect abandon. Picking wildflowers, swimming in the lake, eating cherries on a curb downtown.
No other place on earth comforts my soul the way going "up north," does. I'll be back someday and I just might not ever come back.
I haven't uploaded my own pictures yet so the one on top is from wikipedia.
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I'm back to blogging and very lonely! Let me know you were here!!