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 […]
3 Years, 9 Months, 17 Days
Sometimes, I do this thing. In the evening, I go to a body of water (a bay is preferable) and I sit, cross-legged, on its edge—as far out over the water as I can get. I take my notebook and a pen, and I write. I write from the moment I sit until there’s no […]
45th Parallel
Old Mission Peninsula, which splits the west and east arms of Grand Traverse Bay, is covered in cherry trees—their white flowers in full bloom like a seagull-feather coat upon the land. Grape vines, also common here but not as pervasive as the cherries, are barren this early in the spring. At the tip of the […]
Ebershoff
Outside the City Opera House, a lone evangelist cheerfully distributes hate lit. I dodge the outstretched pamphlet and pull out my phone, feigning interest in the AMBER Alert that’s been blowing up my notifications since I landed. In rural Michigan, you get crime alerts on your phone. This would not fly in Brooklyn. I wonder […]
Enders Edmundites
At the mouth of the Mystic River, Mason’s Island shelters mainland Connecticut from the storm surges of Long Island Sound. At the foot of Mason’s, eleven-acre Enders Island peers through the fog toward New York. Both islands are covered with boulders—glacial till from the Laurentide Ice Sheet which crowned this land 20,000 years ago. Dr. […]
Hanami
You come home, and you choose what to bring back with you. Maybe you unplug Friday evenings, or shave your armpits every forty days. Now you drive a stick-shift. Now you speak another tongue. Now you only toast when your eyes lock over a glass. This weekend, my first back in America, I went to Sakura […]
