State of Mine

When thumbing through seed catalogs, I gazed at the photographs of meadows dotted with daisies, sprinkled with scarlet poppies and crowned with golden coreopsis.

Built in 1929, the little two-story farmhouse had its charms. But it was the park-like property on which it sat that compelled us to sign the BUYER line, nearly two acres punctuated in front by century-old walnut, oak and hickory trees, a trio of towering evergreens and a fragrant overgrown lilac bush.

Driving over the Mackinac Bridge and west back to the lake retreat her grandparents once owned, she rehearsed what she would say to anyone who caught her: “This little cabin has been in my family for half a century…”

From the backdoor of my farmhouse, the morning sun creeps above the frosted beige carpet of a soybean field. For a moment, it oozes...

Standing at the prow, I faced forward into the wind and breathed. The steel hull of the passenger ferry sliced through the lake, curling...

If you want to know what the world was like 200 years ago, go to South Manitou Island some nice Indian Summer day.

Lately, my mind keeps wandering back to the many boyhood summers I spent in Idewild, Michigan, on the edge of the Manistee National Forest.

Every year, as the cold, spring rains ended and summer — ever so slowly — began to crawl onto the shores of northern Michigan like a forgotten castaway, the dragonflies arrived to signal summer had begun.

McNamara started her blog, Simply Scratch, in February 2010 with a mission to get back to her rural Michigan roots and revitalize her home kitchen by swapping canned goods and prepackaged mixes for wholesome, healthy ingredients.

The following excerpt from the short story “Incomer” by Gloria Whelan is from the newly released book “Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” (2015, Michigan State University Press), edited by Ronald Riekki and presented with permission of Michigan State University Press and Wayne State University Press. All rights reserved.