One day in an Albuquerque parking lot, I noticed a car with a bumper sticker that read: “My heart is in the UP, but my butt is stuck here.” It reflected what I often feel during fall and winter. For the first few months after I’ve left the Little Cabin in the Big Woods, I remember the events of the summer past. But then, in the new year, as the days lengthen, I start anticipating and planning for my return. Instead of being like a kid moping through the opening weeks of the school year, I become like one counting the weeks and then the “sleeps” until the big day arrives when I’ll turn off Michigan Highway 94 and start driving down the dirt road to the place that had seemed long-ago and far away.
The Window and the Wall
The picture window above my desk in Albuquerque looks east to the Manzano Mountains. Often during the winter, I watch the changing predawn colors above the skyline and the gradual appearance of the silhouettes of the peaks. In the late afternoon, the sun shining from the west reveals foothills and valleys that had hidden themselves during most of the day. Today, the sky is gray above the Manzanos, but the hills are dusted with snow. It isn’t much, but it will bring a little moisture to our drought-stricken land.
Unfortunately, the window also looks out on Eastern Avenue, which stretches from our house through what the locals call the “War Zone.” Frequently, the predawn is illuminated by the flashing red and blue lights of police cars and other emergency vehicles. During the day, homeless people push their overburdened shopping carts along the edge of the road. It’s not unusual to see a person walking down the middle of the street, waving arms wildly and carrying on a loud conversation with an unseen listener.
When the mountains are covered with clouds or the scene on Eastern is too much, I have a simple remedy. I turn my chair around and look at the wall. I’m not throwing in the towel or becoming a Stott-family version of Melville’s catatonic character Bartleby, the Scrivener. I’m looking at three pictures Clare took of Crooked Lake. They’re a Christmas gift, twenty by thirty inch enlargements forming a triptych of the lake taken from the dock on which I have spent so many golden hours.
The first picture looks south along the shore. In the foreground, the hemlock we call the Tom Thomson tree leans out over the water, tenaciously clinging to the bank as it has for decades. It was Carol’s favorite tree. Along the south shore, the home of Joe Lakosky peeps through the willow trees. He’s a year-around resident who grew up at the north end of the lake and, when he decided it was time to leave home, jumped in his boat and headed for a spot a mile away.
Hankie, our aussi-doodle, dominates the central picture. He’s just come out of the lake, leaving pools of water on the weathered planks of the deck. He seems to be staring at something that isn’t in the picture. In the distance, you can see the “Rooster Tree,” a tall, spindly hemlock whose top looks like the silhouette of a barnyard fowl. It’s the favorite resting place of a bald eagle who regularly visits us from his home in the Seney Wildlife Refuge, twenty miles away.
The third picture is a view of the lake facing east from the dock. A patch of morning sunlight brightens a few planks of the dock, the ripples sparkle, and the tops of the maples and birches across the lake catch the light of the young day. There are no boats or boat-wakes on the water. Jutting from the edge of the photograph is someone’s arm. Perhaps it is Craig or Alberto or even me sitting on the loveseat, sipping coffee and absorbing the beautiful serenity.
As I gaze at the wall and the pictures that are windows to another place that is now far away, I smile and think that in a few months I’ll be sitting on that dock, a part of the scene that’s in the pictures Clare gave me for Christmas.
The (Blueberry) Muffin Man
On a Saturday
