Day Trip to Lake Michigan

Seven of us from the continuum care complex left our campus in two cars to go on an adventure. Destination: A cottage on Lake Michigan down between South Haven and Benton Harbor about hour and a half drive way from home. It’s owned by a couple of ladies that split their time between our CCC and their summer place. Once on the Blue Star Highway---which most Michiganders know---we had to take a narrow, winding fire trail through the wooded dunes before getting to a cliff top where five cottages perched along with more birds than I’ve seen in ages, all greedily eating at their bird feeders, ignoring the fabulous panoramic view. But few people could view that lake and not be awed by the power of seeing the water, hearing the waves lapping the sand and breathing in that first breath of fresh, water-cooled air. I could feel myself relax and tensions slip away.

If you read my last post you’ll know I wrote about not liking the idea of riding in a car with another 80 year old at the wheel but of the two cars going, I picked the right one to get in. The other car left last and got there before we did and when we arrived my neighbor, a retired physiologist, said the ride made her a nerve wreck because their driver drove too fast and played hop-scotch with the 18 wheelers. That driver who probably weighs all of 90 pounds laughed and said, “Everyone tells me that!” When it was time to leave my neighbor crawled in the back seat of the other car saying, "I don't want to see out the front window this time."

In previous posts I’ve called the couple we visited the Skinny Minnie Twins and I guess I’ll continue to do so in this post. Neither one of them has an ounce of fat on them and yet they say they each love sweets and especially Crumbl Cookies. But they also go up and down a 130 steps to get to their sandy beach on Lake Michigan where they swim and walk two miles each day. I and three others in our group rode their incline elevator while others in our group tackled the steep steps down to the lake and they did it with none of them having a heart attack. 

Crumbl Cookies are supposed to be the best cookies in the world according to their press releases and the Twins which is why we bought a box of twelve cookies to take out to their cottage. $48 and if those are the best cookies in the world then I’m the real Santa Claus. To me, they were like eating raw cookie dough which apparently a lot of people do enjoy because the chain is growing fast and furious. Over the day I ate a half of two different flavors---milk chocolate chip and sea salt taffy, wasting 480 calories that could have gone to something I actually enjoyed. Why do I do things like that? Finish reading a bad book, finish eating something disgustingly sweet and barf worthy? The lunch they serve, though, was a wonderful array of healthy finger foods, deviled eggs to die for and fresh fruits. It was a fun day and their lovely cottage (a converter garage with a six sided, two story ceiling) was very modern with lots of light coming in and exactly like you’d expect of two graphic designers---all white with touches of red and Herman Miller furniture.

Looking out at their million dollar view was a great reminder of massive size of Lake Michigan and if you’ve never been there its like looking an an ocean. You can’t see across to the other side and the entire horizon is nothing but sky and water unless an occasional freighter is out in the shipping lane. They haul taconite, limestone, grain, salt coal, cement, gypsum, sand, slag and potash out to the St Lawrence Seaway headed to the Atlantic Ocean. If you don’t know what potash is, I’m glad you asked since I had to look it up---it’s a potassium rich salt used to make fertilizer and apparently Michigan has a lot of it. 

We didn’t see any freighters that day and the waves weren’t very high for the few people we could see along the beach playing in them. Lake Michigan waves typically get between 3-4 feet high and up to eight on a windy day, with the tallest ever recorded being ten feet. And in case you’re wondering there are a few places along the Michigan coastline where they surf---Marquette, Muskegon, Grand Haven, Sleepy Bear and St Joseph. I was a fish when I was a kid but now I’m too bumpy and frumpy to ever get caught with a bathing suit on but if surfing had been a thing when I was a kid I might have tried it if not for the fact that our little inland lake didn't get those kinds of waves. The Twins kayak the shoreline when it’s calm. That’s more my speed and I did have a canoe (and sailboat) when I was young and was spending my summers at a lake. All in all it was a wonderful road trip. Well, except for eating the cookies which I’m still kicking myself for doing. ©

 

Photo from the South Haven visitor's center.

The Widow's Vacation in Saugatuck

This woman has been on vacation! Yes, a genuine, long-overdue vacation where I packed my bags, put the dog in a kennel and took off for some R & R. I didn’t go far. My niece and I checked into a Bed and Breakfast in my favorite tourist town along Lake Michigan. I’ve been going to Saugatuck since my teens but I’ve never stayed overnight unless you count the times in my late twenties when my husband and I brought sleeping bags over to the beach and fell asleep under the stars. Those were the good old days when we were carefree and didn’t worry about getting caught with our pants down. Literally. (Raise your hand if you think I’ve shared too much information here.)

Our B & B had nine bedrooms with private baths and it was the oldest continuous use residence in town. My room had its original horsehair plaster walls and polished plank flooring with square, blacksmith-made nails and it was named after Susan B. Anthony. She stayed in the same house 136 years ago while she was in town to help organize a local Temperance Union and to give a speech on woman’s suffrage. The local newspaper of the era said “she succeeded in closing six of the fourteen saloons” and “that was a testament to her persuasiveness and organizational skills.” My niece and I tried to find a bar to have a drink in one evening and we only found two open, neither one enticing enough to draw us inside. Susan would be proud that we choose, instead, the only other business open that late---a chocolate and ice cream shop.

We packed a lot into our vacation. After a leisurely breakfast each morning, seated on miss-matched oak chairs at a long farmhouse-style table, we’d take off to do things like: walk the beach, drive the shoreline of Lake Michigan, visit a neighboring town, and browse a few antique venues. We also walked along the marina, strolled a few residential blocks with gardens you can’t truly enjoy just driving by, and we even visited the place at the shore where we spread some of Don's ashes. One night we went to a summer stock production of First Date, a musical that was so funny I had tears running down my cheeks; another night we went to an outdoor concert in the park where we perfected the fine art of people watching. One afternoon we toured a restored 1920s, twenty-five room mansion with a third floor ballroom that was built by the inventor of comptometers, the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. His story was fascinating. Where the lumber industry clear-cut the woods along the lake, he managed to restore the land, stabilizing the shifting dunes with carefully chosen vegetation and now the property is a deep woods again. I wouldn’t have thought that was even possible.

Our Meals: When we first got to town we had lunch at a store-front restaurant with Andy Warhol style murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls. The next day we ate at the oldest structure in the county, originally built as a hotel for traders and people in the lumber industry. I lost my ‘fish tacos virginity' at another place across from where the ferry operates. But my favorite meal of all was when we decided to have dessert instead of lunch at a large pie factory-restaurant. It’s out in the boondocks---in the middle of apple orchards, wine vineyards and blueberry farms. They’d taken a page out of a near-by winery's book and had a pie sampler tray on the menu---various, warm pies served in squatty jelly jars with vanilla bean ice cream on the side. Then there was the day we had ice cream cones for lunch. Yup, I was a bad influence on my niece. But so was she on me. Did I mention her stop to purchase a couple of bottles of wine?

Saugatuck is a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who spend the summers or boat over on the weekends. A high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers. My niece and I wondered if my great-great grandfather could have lived in town during its boom town days when he was known to have made his living following the lumber industry around this part of the state. We romanticized him living in our B & B when it was a boarding house for lumberjacks or eating at the hotel where we had dinner. Using our imaginations doesn’t make it fact, though the idea could be an interesting, family genealogy ball to chase for a tenacious researcher.

However, we did get a heavy dose of family history while we were on vacation. Sorting boxes in the basement the week before our trip, I had found six cassette tapes made of my mom and dad talking---circa the early 1970s through 1984. My niece and I listened to half of them in the evenings while drinking wine and munching popcorn. It still blows my mind that tapes made thirty and forty years ago could so clearly bring my parents back into focus. At one point we laughed so hard I actually thought I’d pass out from lack of oxygen; I could feel my face turning red. I suppose you had to be there to understand the humor in hearing my folks say long good-byes to their two dogs. They were dropping them off for me to babysit while they spent the winter in Florida. My niece started prompting them to include me (their daughter) in their “good-byes” and I started prompting them to say “I love you.” The tape ended with me singing a 'lullaby' to the dogs, which reminds me I should erase that embarrassing section. 

It was a vacation filled with quality time and memorable moments with one of my favorite people in the world. I crossed a few things off my Bucket List but believe it or not, there are still things on my ‘Saugatuck To-Do List’---like take the chain ferry across the river, ride the paddle boat, visit the art colony, walk the entire length of the boardwalk and I can’t believe we forgot to go to the kitchen gadgets store! I love that place. But for the bonus point of vacationing, when I picked Levi the Mighty Schnauzer up from the kennel it was reported that he had a wonderful time playing with a puppy during the puppy's daycare/socialization sessions and taking part in group obedience classes at night where he was pronounced to be "well behaved and sweet." Levi came home as tired and happy as I did.  ©

Main Street, Saugatuck

Our Bed and Breakfast

The Susan B. Anthony Room

The Felt Mansion

The Marina

The pier in the distance, Lake Michigan. The photo at the top was taken looking in the other direction.

This is an elaborate set of brand new steps and wheelchair ramps at a county park leading down to the beach. Don would have loved it!

The Day Trip and the Fancy-do Restaurants

 

Thursday I went on a restaurant hop to a tourist town along Lake Michigan. Restaurant hops are popular events at my senior center and they do a couple a year. The way these restaurant hops work is we’ll have a salad or soup at one swanky place---this year it was on the fifth floor of a hotel with ceiling-to-floor glass walls on two sides. Needless to say, the views were as incredible as was the spinach almond salad with dried cherries and bacon balsamic vinaigrette with a side of warm flat bread that I had pre-ordered before the day trip. Then the 50 of us split off into little informal groups to shop for an hour and half along the tourist hub of specialty stores before meeting up at another restaurant for the main course. That was at an Irish pub and those who had them claimed the beer floats were incredible. I’m not a beer drinker and can’t wrap my head around the concept of ice cream and beer together in a glass but West Michigan is getting quite the reputation for its micro-breweries and unusual offerings in the higher end bars. I had turkey breast slices layered with avocado, applewood-smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato and onion with Chipotle aioli on grilled sourdough bread plus cottage fries. It was great!

More shopping was on the schedule after that and before the dessert course of wonderful creations served on the whitest tablecloths you can imagine. It was an elegant place in a converted, 120 year old storefront on Main Street where we could watch the tourists walking by. I had coconut panna cotta with pineapple, tapioca and cilantro. Very different than anything I’d ever had before which is why I choose it and it was easy on the palate---light but flavorful. On day trips like this I love sitting down in a restaurant and having your heart’s desire brought to you without having to go through the ritual of everyone at the table reading a menu and changing their minds a hundred times. When we sign up for these trips we all pre-order from a choice of three things for each course.

I’m not a fan of window shopping (or purposeful shopping for that matter) and if I would have remained alone on this trip I probably would have found a shady place to people watch or read part of the time and I would have been perfectly content doing it. But another widow who lost her husband a year after I lost Don and I are slowly building a relationship and she invited me to tag along with her and another woman as they checked out the boutiques. They are going to Ireland in the fall with a group from the senior hall and they were using this day trip to get to know each other better since they will be sharing a room on their overseas adventure. The senior hall sponsors a guided, overseas trip once a year and if I was inclined to go abroad I’d feel safe traveling that way. If they ever pick Paris or Alaska as a destination I will probably be tempted beyond my ability to say no. It’s not on my Bucket List to travel but I’d love to see the Louvre in Paris and Glacier Bay in Alaska via an inside passage cruise. Thankfully, I’d have nine months to “train” and get in better shape for a trip like that. The day after the restaurant hop I was so wiped out I could hardly move. Walking in the sun and riding in cramped seats and my old bones don’t mix well.

In case anyone is wondering what a restaurant hop costs, we each paid $36.00 and that included the 3-course meal and non-alcoholic beverages, gratuities and transportation. Our senior hall doesn’t make money off any of our trips and events so they are as affordable as they can possibly be for what we get in return. Next month I’m going on another day trip, this time to our state capital where we’ll be dining on a riverboat cruise.

I have been known to "bring Don along" on these day trips via my ash locket with his picture and date of birth and death inside. I sometimes wear it for courage and Thursday I noticed that my shopping companion had an unusual pendant on her necklace. It was a circular glass piece surrounded by diamonds and it held her husband's wedding ring. Inside of the glass---in the center of the ring---were tiny things floating around---a cross, a yellow ribbon, a boat, etc., that represented different parts of his life. I like my more discrete heart-shaped locket with its tiny pocket for ashes better BUT if I had seen one of those pendants first, before having Don's ring incorporated into a beaded necklace, I would have bought it. See what I missed by not being a fan of the Home Shopping channel!  ©

Day Trips and the Search for Friendship

As a card carrying member of the Worrywart Club I thought yesterday would be the day I’d end up in an emergency room. Again. Why? Because I managed to put my bra on inside out and with my arm in sling it was too much trouble to start over again. People in emergency rooms, I decided, see all sorts of things so I took a chance they wouldn’t laugh out loud or put another punch in my Old Person’s card should I end up there. Besides, I didn’t have the time to start over. I had to get myself to the senior center to catch a bus for a day trip. Destination: a tourist village on Lake Michigan to do a restaurant crawl with time for shopping in between courses---four courses, four restaurants. Don and I had been going to that town since our teens, long before we even knew each other, so I was looking forward to this mini trip. At one of the restaurants I’d also be able to look across the channel to a series of sand dunes where some of Don’s ashes were thrown in the wind.

It was a dark and cloud day with severe thunderstorms predicted which resulted in keeping the hordes of people away that usually fill up the art galleries, marinas, up-scale shops and food venders of all descriptions. After the bus let us off and all fifty of us scurried off in different directions I was amazed that at times it was like I had the whole town to myself. I loved it because I was free to remember past times spent on those quaint streets.

All four of the restaurants on our crawl were ones I’d never been to before and I enjoyed them all. When ever Don and I went to this town, we usually took the dog so we ate at the outdoor vendors and if we went with another couple instead of the dog, we’d let them pick where we’d eat. One time four of us went into a cozy bar and grill and everyone in the place started singing, “You’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time…” but it didn’t dawn on us right way that we’d walked into a gay bar. Not until a guy asked our male friend to dance and that’s when we all took a good look around at the other patrons. What happened after that became a funny tale that lived in Don’s bank of entertaining stories for the next thirty years.

I like our senior center. It offers a wide variety of activities to do and I sign up for many things. At first I thought by being active there I’d network my way into some friendships. But it’s not working out that way. Take these day trips, almost everyone shows up with a ‘travel buddy’ they’ve invited from who-knows-where and they do the tourist thing in tantrum. Our meals are shared at group tables but you never sit next to same person twice so building up a kinship over time doesn’t work. I swear if it gets any lonelier here on Widowhood Lane I’m going to sign up for OldPeopleMatch.com if there is such a thing. Wanted: a friend to pal around---not interested in romance or playing kissy-face. Either sex may apply. I really wouldn’t want to pal around with a guy, though. That would be too weird after spending 42 years with Don. I sat next to a guy during the dessert course of the crawl and after he got through quizzing the three women at our table I felt like we’d been interviewed for a position as his future nurse. Having twelve years of experience as Don’s caregiver, I was nervous I’d win the contest. Oh. Lord, save me from needy men!

Recently I found a dead tree in my back yard, big enough to hit the house if it goes over in a storm. The neighbor lost the top of a giant pine tree last week. The top 40 feet impaled into the ground and is standing straight up in the air. What a strange sight that is and all I can think of is how easy the top of my tree could end up impaling my bathroom. With the string of bad luck I’ve been having lately I’m holding my breath between now and Monday when a tree cutter is coming to give me a price on cutting the tree down. On the good side, if it wasn’t for home ownership my “social life” would be cut in half. Tuesday, my new front-loading washer and dryer gets delivered, Wednesday the lawn care guy shows up like clock work, and Thursday is a senior center lecture on great summer reads presented by the library. The rhythm of my life goes on…so why does it seem so empty and full at the same time? ©

painting above by James Brandess

Please Remember Me, Don, and Johnny Appleseed

Lake Michigan Shore

It occurred to me recently that I’ve been “Johnny Appleseeding” Don’s ashes over two counties and seven places. Half were buried in April at a cemetery in a little town he loved. But this week---at seven months out from his passing---I scattered a quarter of Don’s ashes at Lake Michigan. Also this week I scattered smaller amounts in two other places: 1) under the white pine trees we planted right outside the window where I sit at my computer, and 2) along a nature trail. The nature trail runs close to the back side of the 160 acre farm where Don grew up. A month of two ago I poured some of his ashes in the river in the heart of Rockford where Don grew up. It was near the dog park where we used to take Levi. Then there are the ashes enclosed in a four inch tall ash urn kept in a velvet box, plus the tiny amount enclosed in my sterling silver ash urn locket.

In the 1800s Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed had a purpose when he went across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania planting apple trees but I have no clue what my purpose was in dividing Don’s remains between so many places. Maybe I really believe that out of the ashes new life grows and I wanted be sure at least one of the places I deposited them will remain undisturbed until that new life comes forth. (It’s never been my style to put all my eggs in one basket.) Or maybe I just like the idea that Don gets a choice of places to haunt until his soul gets tired of hanging around earth. And then there is the strong possibility that I just didn’t like the idea of having to go to a cemetery to remember Don on days when we’re supposed to honor the dead.

It’s a popular myth that Johnny Appleseed randomly planted trees in his travels as a missionary but the fact is he actually planted nurseries and built fences around them. Back in his days on earth, there was a law in the Midwest that required people who claimed frontier land to plant orchards to hold on to their claims and that made the land around Johnny Appleseed’s little nurseries popular plots to homestead because bargain priced nursery stock was close at hand. When he died his sister inherited 1,200 acres of his apple saplings, and to this day several locations claim Johnny’s gravesite. I can see how my decision to strew Don’s ashes over two counties could cause confusion over Don’s final resting place so maybe someday Johnny and Don will have a where-is-he type dispute in common.

The day I spread the ashes at Lake Michigan with my oldest niece and her husband in tow it was a beautiful, sunny day. We went to Don’s favorite antique mall, had lunch where we could watch boats going by and, of course, we drove down to the beach. From there, we walked a short distance down the shoreline where we left the ashes---some in the water and some at the top of a sand dune that is near where the burnt remains of a small town is buried underneath the sand. Mother Nature took what the fire didn’t and now Mother Nature will have her way with part of Don. Don loved the folklore of that old ghost town and he had read everything ever written on the subject. I still have $3 Banknote issued in 1837 from the bank in that ghost town---Singapore, Michigan.

All of Don’s ashes have been spread now but I had a hard time stopping myself from dividing them even more. On the way home from Lake Michigan I was trying to figure out why it was so hard to bring an end to my Johnny Appleseed-like mission. Did I do the right or wrong thing leaving Don in so many places? Imagine my surprise when just after that question entered my thoughts I got a sign that I took as a seal of approval. As I turned a corner a rainbow, big and bright appeared in the sky and at the same time Tim McGraw was on the radio singing the song, Please Remember Me. ©

 "Remember me when you're out walkin'
When the snow falls high outside your door
Late at night when you're not sleepin'
And moonlight falls across your floor….

 .....please remember me.”

Top of the Sand Dune

The Big Wedding Widow Style

This past Saturday I went to my first wedding since Don passed away. Actually it was a long weekend away from home to an upscale tourist town in the northern part of the state. My great nephew got married on a Lake Michigan beach with a reception on the tenth floor of a 139 year old hotel with a panorama view fit for postcards. From all I’d read about going alone to a big event like that for the first time after being part of a couple for so many years I was anticipating  all sorts of emotions---awkwardness, being sad or scared, feeling out of place and lonely in a crowd. But I was riding up and back with my brother and his lady friend, how bad could it get? I was staying at my brother’s cottage with a boat load of family. How bad could it get?

Packing for the trip I thought about taking my locket with some of Don’s ashes inside, thinking if I kept him close to my heart the whole time I wouldn’t feel like a lost lamb surrounded by celebrating couples. But it didn’t look good with my dress and as I debated the wear-it-anyway question it struck me that I was being a king-sized, melodramatic widow. If I had thrown the back of my hand to my forehead and dropped down on a fainting couch, it wouldn’t have surprised me. A cartoonist would have drawn me as a Victorian lady covered from head to toe in black with a tidy bun at the back of my head and me clutching a heart-shaped ash urn locket the size of a box of a Russell Stover candy. What to do. What to do. That scene in my head finally made me smile. I was being silly to worry. I put the locket back in its box. I was a big girl. I could go to a place where a good share of the guests would be related. And for the bonus round I could even have a couple of fuzzy navels and not worry about being the designated driver for the first time in twelve years.

The biggest problem I had getting ready for the trip, though, was finding a kennel for Levi. I interviewed three before finding one I trusted not to seriously damage my little guy beyond repair. The first kennel I checked out had 15 or 20 dogs all running wild together in a sun drenched field on a 97 degree day. Levi likes the air conditioned comforts of home too much for that. At the second kennel the owner had forgotten we had an appointment and in the 20 minutes I waited around I discovered I could have walked right in an open garage door at the back of the building and let all the dogs out to play in traffic or worse. The third kennel passed the worried mom test and I was confident I’d found a weekend sitter who wouldn’t be spending all her time making prank calls involving letting Prince Albert out of the can. If you don’t get that joke then you can rejoice you’re not old like me.

The weekend was a wonderful break from life as I’d come to know it in recent months. I had such a good time. I laughed until my sides ached and the only time I got teary-eyed thinking of Don was during the exchanging of vows. At the reception unbeknownst to me my niece, niece-in-law, great-niece and assorted other relatives had all plotted to get me drunk and they kept the flow of champagne punch coming my way. There wasn’t enough liquor in the punch to get a mouse drunk but eight glasses later---which was seven more than I’d normally have---I was on the dance floor trying to keep up with the kids doing the Macarena. Don once told me I looked like a refrigerator on a dolly when I roller skated---he could literally skate circles around me---and while I was dancing the thought crossed my mind that I probably didn’t look much different trying to make my old bones find the clave rhythm. Hey, Macarena!

The bottom line? It was a beautiful ceremony, well-written and perfectly timed around a rain storm just off shore. The reception was fun and the stay at my brother’s cottage gave me a chance to spend some quality time with people I don’t see as often as I’d like. Thanks to my family who surrounded me with love, I made it over the widowhood hurdle of going to my first big social event without Don at my side and I not only lived to tell about it but I had a great time. ©