Of Place

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Every time the plane banks over West Michigan: yellow sandy soil, grey-green haze of leafless trees, the endless blue of Lake Michigan, I wonder: is this the last time I will come here? J. is getting older, almost 16.

Though: a pandemic. Though: the airplane packed for the quick flight between Chicago and Grand Rapids. Though: I wore a Kn95 mask and a cloth mask for 14 hours, listened to women next to me complain about their single-layer surgical masks, how awful they were, how they didn't understand how anyone could wear two masks at all. Let's throw all the masks in a fire, the man in the seat next to me said last week, democrats made this virus.

In the woods, wild onions. Beech leaves a dry, pale gold. Downy woodpecker, cardinal, nuthatch. If you stand still enough, you can hear things growing, a soft rustling in the dry oak leaves, one deep green fern emerging from a nurse log. 

Boxed wine, bread, cheese, pears. Expensive chocolate. 












***

The first time I went to Michigan, I was seventeen, and my grandfather had rented a house--really, a double-wide--in Ludington for all of the family to have a vacation. I drove with my dad in his powder blue Chevy pickup: the endless Chicagoland suburbs (we never ever ever took 94 through the city, but the endless loop of 294 through the suburbs), the ugly steel scrape of Northern Indiana, then Michigan where the highway split, a trough of trees in between lanes; where the forest wasn't contained in Forest Preserves, where farmland and stands of white pine stretched away from the car like a dreamscape. This is what I would think when, years later and heavily pregnant, I walked through the Augusta Experimental Forest and the trees opened to a field of pumpkins, hillocks repeating themselves until a distant silo pierced the paleblue sky: that there was a world of open space, sky, trees and leaves and rivers and, to the west, the Lake.

I spent eighteen years in Michigan, grew up, learned who I wasn't and who I might be. But it wasn't my place. I felt, always, like a sliver (though maybe now, Michigan is a sliver in me).

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What will I be if I never return?

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Portland is the first place I have chosen. To stay in Michigan was an act of folding my life into a man's life. In some ways, moving to Portland was the same: I moved here because I had fallen in love with a man from here. But the first time the plane banked over the Cascades, glided into the Willamette valley, I knew: my god, I love this place. There was nothing here to scare me. There still isn't. Until I came here, I did not understand that a person could live in a place without fear. 

This is not Michigan's fault, but a person's fault. But mine for making bad choices in my twenties. For getting cervical cancer and believing I deserved only something small, only to serve, only to fold myself into the shape of girl, a thing, a fragment of a fragment of a thing. 

For doing the best I could. I did the best I could. 



*
Yet I wonder: when my boy stops needing me to fly with him, when I stop paying for him to visit, will I ever return? So much of my heart is lodged in Lake Michigan, in the beech-maple forests, the foredune ecosystems; in cardinal song and nuthatch and downy woodpecker. There, I know the names of everything. Here, I am learning: sequoia, red cedar, hairy cress (invasive), staghorn lichen, doug fir, basalt, lesser celandine (invasive). The ways that chickadees sing differently here, and robins have paler breasts; bushtits and scrub jays and year round hummingbirds.

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Spring is in its slow burlesque in Portland: cherry trees, magnolias, daphne, tulips, daffodils, clouds of pollen shaken from the trees. My boy and I walk the dog through the blooming, the wet petals on the pavement, bushtits building nests in the cedar.

Someday, the pandemic will end. Someday, my boy will grow into a man and leave me. R. is waiting for me on the couch, he has poured me a glass of whiskey, and my window is still open and smells of blossom, of the chickens, of approaching rain.

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Here we are, here we are, here we are.




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