This fall I worked on a collaborative art piece with the talented watercolor artist Alexa Grambush. Alexa splits her time between Traverse City and Malibu and water finds its way into much of her work. I loved creating this piece with her, featuring a watercolor print from her series “Our Mother Lake”. The 8x10 print is of her painting entitled “Your Baptismal Waters”, and my poem “Tideless Lake” is letterpress printed onto the page. It is available for purchase in my online shop. Printing done by Freshly Squeezed Print Shop out of Grand Rapids.

Tideless Lake

You move as though the moon
pulls you, but its sway is nominal
when compared to the wind,
the atmospheric pressure,
the will of your waves
to creep up the shore
and caress the dunes,

reminding me I do not need
a moon to move.

Originally published in Issue 11 of Driftless, along with an essay entitled “Secret Beach”.

It begins with the Lake. It always does for me. The story of how I found myself in a small Northern Michigan town on the brink of my thirties, living alone in a tiny house and writing poetry every chance I get, only makes sense if I mention Lake Michigan.

It begins before I can really remember, sometime before I was five when the memories are still hazy and exist mostly as colors and objects. The green leather couch in my Grandparents' family room, the worn wooden steps that led from their house down to the beach, smokey sunsets where beach fires mingled with the sun's glow to turn the horizon and the Lake, and my recollection of it all, a warm orange. Faint memories that are mostly feelings––a cool stone placed in my hand, crashing waves that knock me over––are embedded in my body. I return to them now as distant dreams.

The memory-feelings stayed tucked away for awhile as I tried on different places to call home, different relationships, different jobs. I bounced between cities, between coasts, in and out like the waves. Always I would return to Northern Michigan––for a long weekend of camping, for a family vacation, for a friend's wedding––but for years I let myself walk out of this place, intent on finding somewhere else to call my own.

I tried out Northern California for a while, and while living in a cold apartment in the city, I would lay on the couch and listen to music that reminded me of Lake Michigan. It made me cry with a desire that surprised me. Through the light and noise of the city moving outside my window, I dreamt of the quiet air of the lakeshore, the breeze moving through the maples on a summer night, the feeling of walking on the sand after midnight with nothing but the moon to light my way. As the soundtrack to my dreams, I heard Lake Michigan touching the sand, sometimes wildly with the crash of mighty waves and sometimes with the soft touch of a mother on her sleeping child. The hazy beach fires of my youth warmed my sleep with their memory.

Eventually, the warmth of those dreams begged me home, begged me to the shoreline I always tried to visit but had never imagined living on. It was vacationland, and living in the community full time seemed largely reserved for retirees. I couldn't picture a life there in my late twenties. I was afraid I would get too lonely or that I wouldn't be able to do the type of work I wanted to do without the hustle of city life. Still, my body knew its home and I moved anyway.

Returning to this lakeshore awakened something in me, required me to pay more attention than I was prone to doing elsewhere. What is it about nature that has a tendency to do that? I walked barefoot in the sand and would feel the way it pressed up between my toes. I smelled the opening lilacs in the spring and suddenly noticed the whole world opening. I was opening too. To myself. To the life I really wanted. I started writing every day, mostly to Lake Michigan, and mostly as an expression of the sense of home I had found. I had searched all over the country to find it, had spent years trying to create it in relationships, and here it was the same stretch of shoreline where I visited during my childhood summers: home.

I am just thirty miles from where my Grandparents lived when I was young, from where we sat on the beach and looked for stones and made s'mores around a fire that was licked by the shallow waters of the Lake. There are new memories being made in a smaller house a few more steps from the beach. They look differently and the breadth of what I experienced between my first Lake Michigan memories until now has changed the way that I interact with this magic place. But even with all of the travel and heartache and life that has been lived, Lake Michigan still calls me, as always. The Lake still begs me in to experience the crashing waves, to pick up stones from along the edge. To find myself on this shoreline that is changing and unchanged all at once, in much the same way I am.

Essay originally published in the Spring 2019 issue of Northerly Quarterly.

Barefoot days. We have waited all winter for them, for the chance to slip out of our shoes and dip our toes into a still-cold Lake Michigan. You sense them approaching on the wind, each morning slightly warmer than the last, but it is the light that truly ushers the season in. The way the orange fades to red at sunset, the way the sun creeps its way further north every day. Light slants through the window to wake you in the morning and however quietly, announces the arrival of Spring.

The light changes first and then the landscape, brown and barren, then suddenly bursting bright green. Wild onions and trillium carpet the woods, and soon the maples explode neon. Next comes the forsythia, yellow and wild through the streets of town, calling forth the arrival of the lilacs. They are the true crown of a country spring, the air fragrant with their scent, and all of Northern Michigan becomes drenched in it.

It is in the early months of spring where our daily patterns change. We trade our boots for sandals far earlier than we really ought and step outside every chance we get. The first warm day when the thermometer reaches fifty feels like a miracle, feels to us in April as eighty degrees will feel in August. We trade hats and winter coats for bare arms and excitement.

On these early spring days the answer is always yes to the invitation to go outside. Winter was filled with excuses––The roads are too icy or I just need a night in––but spring is the casting off of responsibility. There is nothing more important than being in the sun, nothing you need more than running down the sand dunes to stand on the shore of Lake Michigan.

So we take to the dunes every chance we get. The dunes themselves call to us, shining like beacons in the glow of the sun as it returns from its winter hiding. Staying out later, showing itself from behind the haze of clouds where it spent the last few months, the sun lights up the hills like a neon marquee. It announces Tonight Only: Warm Sand on Your Toes, and we act accordingly. We forget that spring turns to summer and we have months before we must return to icy winter. We roll down the dunes as if its our last chance to do so.

Moving through the seasons in Northern Michigan causes us to pay attention. To prepare. To change our patterns. The length of the days changes, the scenery goes from brown to neon to dark green to white, and we track our lifetime within the colors. For now, spring has arrived and we track mud from ground that was recently frozen into our houses and our cars. All of it is a reminder that time is passing. All of it is an opportunity to pause and smell the earth, to listen to the rain as it glides through the gutters, to try and catch sight of the first bud as it emerges from the trees.

We move into this new season with renewed energy. Winter had its own place in the cycle of the year, created space for us to rest and to plan. We needed it. But the arrival of the wild plants in the woods and the sun lingering later over the dunes is another necessity entirely. It is one we welcome all the more fervently for the many dark nights we spent waiting for it.

The arrival of spring invites us into a world of color and sound, of carelessness and adventure. It invites us to first swims in water that is barely above forty, to bonfires on the beach welcoming in later nights. It invites us to climb the dunes so that we may take in the sun, take in the view, and then dares us––with all the reclaimed recklessness of warmer days––to run down as fast as we can without falling.