An Ode to Michigan

21 Jun 2010 1 Comment

by Becca in Normal Blog Entries Tags: creationism, family, farm, food, friends, michigan, mom

This state gets a lot of flack. It’s in flyover country. The mildest of its winters seem to last years and years. Half of it is ridiculously flat, and the other half seems to have a pine tree infestation. Quite frankly, people who didn’t grow up in Michigan rarely understand it, along with a whole bunch of folks who grew up here.

As I prepare myself mentally for leaving Michigan for two years, I find myself immersed in all of the things that I most love about this state. I happen to appreciate  winter: icy landscapes are really pretty, hot cider never tastes so good as it does the night of the first snowfall, and walking across a vast silent lake with the stars shining down is an experience that cannot be replicated. And even though summer gets very hot and humid, that’s tempered with a rainbow of sweet corn, blueberries, zucchini, peaches, tomatoes, and eggplant.

People who live without distinct seasons are completely clueless to how fantastic spring is. When I lived in California, spring was just a transition from mildly rainy and 50 degrees to more mildly rainy and 50 degrees. The river rose from spring melt off and it was beautiful, but it didn’t really affect my day-to-day. When spring comes in Michigan, the world and all its living creatures are more happy and beautiful than I could ever fathom. Seeing everything erupt in a cheer of color and breeze and early season energy is awe inspiring. And canoeing down a river with fall colors, fresh apples, and late season vegetables is enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Today was a day that I’ll remember for a long time, that makes me so grateful for everything Michigan offers. An early morning thunderstorm preceded the beautiful and breezy first day of summer. I picked three cups of gooseberries (currants) from down by the lake and quickly made a pie. Then Mom and I jumped in the car with the dog and three neighbor boys to go pick cherries at the farm.

A quick stop to the bees on the roof of the market indicated that one of our hives there is ready to start making honey for us full time. Hoorah! Sweltering in our bee suits, we peeled them off and ran to the orchards where we plucked ripe red sour cherries for forty five minutes. Then, just as the eleven-year-olds were starting to get bored, we followed the dirt path past the pears and grapevines to where another seasonal beauty awaited: black raspberry, ready for the picking and all ours. Grandpa doesn’t sell them, so it was our own private stash of delicious wonder.

We grabbed three quarts (and ate another two straight off the branch) before heading home. Mom and I decided to check the blueberry patch ‘just because’ (just because everything is two to three weeks early in this El Nino year) and picked ourselves a few handfuls each. The aforementioned handfuls didn’t even make it back to the car.

After a dinner of black raspberry, Mom and I washed and laid out the day’s result. Watching the sun set over one of Michigan’s numerous lakes is a dream, one I followed by delivering the pieces of the fresh pie I made earlier to my neighbors as a evening snack.

Leaving Michigan will be difficult, because it’s really a lot that I’ll be leaving. And right now, I will leave you with this poem. Read it to yourself, out loud.

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

“A Primer”, by Bob Hicok