"Me and my sister and several of our cousins were making cookies one day from scratch, and my grandma got so mad at us because several of us apparently were like tasting the batter and licking our fingers and she was just like could not handle that we were doing that, and she was so mad and gave us all like a stern little, this is my other Grandma so two separate Grandma's. She gave us quite the little talk about how we should not be putting our fingers in our mouths when we're cooking and how we shouldn't be eating the raw cookie dough and that's a very clear memory of that Grandma."

Yeah, so I guess, like, purposeful road trips. And then the last few years we've been kind of making a point to do canoe tours down a river. And I think that's probably my optimal way just because you really get to feel, like, the pace of fall. Whereas, when you're driving like it is pretty, it is cool, but when you're on the river, you can kind of appreciate the quietness of it. It's weird, you know, like most of the bugs have died down. Yeah, and it's just -- it's like, you know things are still active in the woods when you look into it, but it's this sense of like determined preparation. You know, even -- even on nice days. And really the only thing that you can hear are squirrels and chipmunks kind of scurrying around and the occasional nut falling onto the ground or into the water. Which, I feel like I've talked about this before so I apologize. But yeah, I just -- I just love it out there. I love hearing the water and it's speed at which it's going across and through the woods. And yeah, even the birds are like quieter for the most part. You tend to really only hear, like, the occasional blue jay, the occasional crow.

You know, I lived in California for a long time. And when I first moved out there and then when I first came back and then I went back out there, that people always say, I have an accent. I don't hear it. I've never heard it. But like when I first moved there, and I went to the vet. I remember, I took the dog to the vet, and I was only, I hadn't been there very long. And I remember the lady looked at me and kind of chuckling and she says, "you're not from around here. Are ya?" And I said, "no". "It's just that you have an accent" and I'm like, "no, I don't." It's - but my friends say that all the time. They all say that I have any accent and I don't ever see. I don't hear at all and I know my daughter, they always used to laugh at her. The kids are always be like, "say dollar, say dollar" and she say it and they just think it was so funny.

I have always thought that we are not a part of the Midwest. We're in the Eastern Time Zone and I feel like we're more of a Great Lakes Region than the Midwest. Midwest to me seems more like the Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and I feel like in Michigan we're so far removed from that. I mean, we do have farms in agriculture and stuff, but I think the Great Lakes are very defining characteristic for Michigan. And the whole idea about going up north, that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the Midwest. And we share so much with our Canadian friends, I think, you know, Windsor is even a little bit south of Detroit. So I've always thought that that was kind of a fun fact when telling people about where we live, and it's right of passage to go to Windsor when you turn nineteen because you could enter clubs and go drinking once you turn nineteen, you didn't have to wait until you were twenty-one. So then when I went to college in Indiana, it was not a thing to go to the bars cuz you definitely needed to be twenty-one and there was absolutely no place you could go, that would let you in as a nineteen-year-old. So I feel like my friends from Indiana and Ohio in Illinois were just - found it to be a very novel idea that we just went across, the border every weekend, and hung out in Windsor.