Reflections

Not long ago, my son Aaron and I were invited to help deliver the 64-foot sloop “MicJay” from Charlevoix to Toronto.

We step outside hoping to hear the songs of orioles and spring peepers and the bassoon rumble of frogs mating in the neighbor’s pond and, instead, are struck by a cold wind from the north and a rattling of sleet.

We spent the night with our friends Betsy and Eric in a cottage they had rented on the shore of Lake Michigan near Point Betsie. The cottage was a 1950s-era Cape Cod perched on a dune a pebble toss from the waves breaking on the beach.

It’s an illusion, of course, but winter hours seem longer. In summer, when the days last from five in the morning until 10 at...

When the wind started banging against the windows of our house, I put on my coat and drove to the foot of West Grand...

The night sky is an excellent corrective to our self-importance. Everything superficial falls away. Vanity disappears. Politics, culture, and fashions of every sort fade to insignificance. It’s just us, alone beneath the infinite, as we’ve been since the beginning.

A few of us were sitting on the patio having a beer and talking about good days — what makes them and why we value them and how you don’t always recognize them until they sneak up and surprise you.

Whitefish Point is a funnel for migrants, and on some days you can see hundreds of raptors soaring in “kettles” as they wait for a south wind to carry them across the lake to Canada.

For 20 years I’ve walked this same trail once or twice a week, in every season and in all kinds of weather. Say 60 times a year — 1,200 excursions.

Years ago, when my wife and young sons and I lived in the Old Town neighborhood of Traverse City, we often walked to the Carnegie Library on Sixth Street. On winter evenings we would bundle up in coats, boots, hats and mittens and set out through the snow.