On a bay of Lake Michigan, there’s a city where it snows in May, one week before the streets bloom pink with cherry blossoms. The masts of a hundred sailboats line its marinas; its every other building is a brewpub. This sounds like somewhere “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, […]
Yearly archives for 2016
Remembering
The windows of my fourth grade classroom offer an unobstructed view of the Twin Towers. From 610 Henry Street, we look across the East River and watch our country smoldering. This—America’s greatest symbol in flames—is the first clear memory. There are earlier recollections, but this supersedes all that came before it, and casts a shadow […]
A Story of Water
After the OSU course, I ride north—Corvallis to Portland, Portland to Seattle. I was last here eight years ago, with teenage angst and a stupid earring. That was the summer I did construction work (i.e., cleaned up after construction workers), and wrote a fantasy novel at 826 Seattle (now known as the Bureau of Fearless Ideas). […]
Alsea Falls
The trees are so tall out here. I know this is because of the fog and the moderating effects of the California Current, as well as the lack of a need for those energy-intensive winter survival mechanisms (like polyol production and extracellular freezing) born of a longer growing season with milder temperature extremes. But in […]
Man Buns
My first flight from Traverse City to Chicago is canceled. I am not informed of this by American Airlines, but rather by my mother, who takes it upon herself to check, then calls me—frantic—a couple hours before the flight. I’m on hold with the airline for an hour, during which time the dog is quiet. The dog […]
Notes from Eroding Stone
20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet pulled the last of its frozen fingers back into the north. The glacier left basins in its wake, and those basins filled, 12,500 years later, with the Nipissing Great Lakes. The waters of Nipissing would become Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, and on Mackinac Island, those waters would […]
Sleeping Bear
A mother bear and her two cubs, the Ojibwe story goes, were driven by fire or famine—different tellings offer different reasons—to swim the 118 miles from Wisconsin to Michigan. The mother made it across Lake Michigan; her cubs did not. Gitche Manitou (the Great Spirit), seeing the bears’ love for each other, raised up the […]
Good Night
As strong as cold, on earth the only men, Wiesel dies eighty-seven in New York. The terrorists are up to tricks again: Orlando, Kiryat Arba, Atatürk And twenty in a Bangladesh café All hacked to bits while they were drinking tea, But no one cares—they’re brown and far away And Trump is shouting something on […]
Shantih Shantih Shantih
These are the words with which Lucy Kalanithi signs my copy of her late husband’s book. I almost missed her reading. The Cherry Festival has come to Traverse City, and on Thursday my usual parking lot was replaced by carnival grounds. Rollercoasters and a ferris wheel, booths for fixed games and fried dough—it looks like […]