Reflections

Not long ago I spent a year living in other people’s cottages. There were nine of them in all, each on or very near the Great Lakes, extending from the Minnesota shore of Lake Superior in the west to the New York shore of Lake Ontario in the east. They varied a great deal in design, from an 80-year-old log cabin to a summer home so new there was still sawdust on the ground to what can only be described as a mansion, but I noticed some shared qualities.

Filling notebooks that winter with clumsy sentences struggling to be true was the first significant act of my adulthood.

A bite in the air after the frivolous fun of summer, it feels good to get serious. This is the best season in Michigan, these weeks of brisk air and Halloween colors, of sudden rain rattling against the windows and wet leaves plastered on the sidewalk.

Opportunities for adventure are endless, and you don’t need to go far to find it so get lost in the wild countryside of Michigan.

Early in the morning Rick and I slipped from the house and stayed lost until dark. We were explorers of the near-at-hand, world travelers who never had to leave home.

On a beach the boundary between the wild and the civilized blurs. And that’s good. The boundary should blur. It’s porous, after all.