Category: Michigan Stories

Daydreaming while walking around Thurston Pond last Sunday, I realized I was feeling quite chipper.  It’s always great to walk around the pond, but what in particular was giving me such a lift?  Then a bird sang, “Babalu.*”  Ahhh.  The red-winged blackbirds are back.  Spring will come.      When we were in elementary school, we… Continue reading Babalu

There must be a doozy of a temperature inversion today, because sounds are carrying forever.  Rascal and I were walking in the south end of the Sugarbush woods when we started hearing the train this morning.  It must be crossing Traver, I thought at first, enjoying the engineer’s whistle.  Now it seems possible the sound… Continue reading Voices

Hood up and chin tucked deep into my scarf, one cold recent morning, I heard welding.  Peering out from under the hood and over the scarf, I found myself at one of the vantage points from which it’s possible to see into the site where the new Logan School is under construction.  Sure enough, there… Continue reading Sparks and Trinkets

     We had a wine-and-cheese get-together with the neighbors last weekend.  Before we set off on the two-house trek to the host house, we prepared a platter of veggie balls and grabbed an unopened bottle of cocktail sauce to serve with them.  As the cocktail sauce hadn’t been opened before, I took the precaution of… Continue reading CSE

Raising the blind on the window at the top of the stairs this morning revealed a world in soft focus.  Snow continues to cover the ground, as it has most of the winter, and lies on every horizontal surface from rooftops and tree limbs to the ghosts of last summer’s flowers.  More snow had fallen… Continue reading Following Tracks

Creak.  Creak.  Creak.  When the weather is really cold, walking on snow produces a creaking sound with every step.  When the weather is colder still, the snow makes a new sound.  It still creaks, but there’s another sound below that.  The pitch is deeper, and there’s a sharp linearity to the noise.  It’s more of… Continue reading Sounds and Stars

My friend Paul and his buds grew up playing hockey on the lake near his home.  There was a current on one side of the lake, and the ice was thinner there.  The kids knew they needed to stay away from that area.  They also took their hockey seriously.  For those reasons, the preferred area… Continue reading Bobsled

You never know what you’ll learn at the Thrift Shop.  Usually it’s customers who enlighten us, breezing by the counter when we’re trying to figure out the function of some donated item or how something works or the last three lines of the poem about the penguin. (“He can hold in his beak/ Enough food… Continue reading Fake Winter

     “I’ve got the funniest song running through my head, and I don’t know why,” I greeted my sweetheart as he strolled into the room this morning.      “What is it?” he was kind enough to inquire.      “‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.’  It’s an old one.  Herman’s Hermits sang it in the… Continue reading Cloud Day

     Hoo-ee, is it slippery outside.  I have cleaty things on my boots, but the dog has none on his paws.  He had a hard time keeping his feet organized under him today.  He even fell right down with his legs splayed out to the sides.  That had to hurt.  We knew an ice storm… Continue reading Ice and Trees