When I was a kid, my mother was heavily into antiques and she did -- she had furnished our house in completely, for the most part, antiques. The chairs were not very comfortable and it was -- very much a lot of antiques in this house. Anyway, she didn't want a regular grill in the backyard because it bothered her look. So, she bought a big giant kettle and got ma- had a stand made for it and she got a grill for the top of it and then she put the wood, or the charcoal in the, in the kettle with the lid, and that was our grill. Okay, fine. It was kinda dorky, but it was okay. My dad grilled. My mom did not usually do the grilling. My dad did, but my dad couldn't really cook.  So anyway, one Friday night, it was kind of late, and my mom had gotten home from school late, and my dad had gotten home from work late. And it was probably in May or June, it was fairly warm outside. Not much was going on, but it was starting -- looked like it was going to rain and my father said, "Oh, I'll just go out and I'll cook some hot dogs on the grill." And my mom said, "Well, you better hurry up ‘cause I think it's gonna rain." Well, my dad took lighter fluid out to the grill and doused the charcoal with, with lighter fluid, stuck part of the newspaper on top of it, and lit the match. It kind of exploded. He bounced back very quickly and he was not hurt, thank heaven. But the fire that it -- the fire in, from that grill went very, very tall and went up the tree that was next to where my mother had parked this grill. And, fortunately, the hose was there and my father put the whole thing out with the hose and was running around. Everybody was running around, my mom was screaming. The hot dogs are, you know, just sitting on a plate. Everything is running around like a, I don't know, circus. But the tree was kinda severely damaged through this and eventually we had to have a tree person come and eventually that tree had to be taken down. And it's one of those things that I always -- I never really…

But I also used to play this game with our dog Brandy. So Brandy was acquired by my dad to be a hunting dog, but she actually didn't have a really good temperament for it, so she ended up being a pet. So she kind of knew the concept of fetch. Not -- I don't think she was very good at it. But we had this fantastic garden and we always grew, like, way more zucchinis than we could eat and there’d always be these giant zucchinis that would just grow to just prodigious size in the garden. So I would sometimes pick one and then I would take -- I'd be out with Brandy, that's the dog, and we would play kind of like this combination of sorta fetch and keep away and football with the zucchini. So, like, I’d throw the zucchini and she'd grab it in her mouth and be running with it. And you know, zucchinis, when they’re that size, can be really bi- heavy. So she wouldn't get real far. And even though she was a big dog, it, like, would slow her down. Or she’d drop it, then sometimes she'd stop and kinda, like, be taking a bite out of it and I’d, you know, run up to her and, like, act like I'm gonna grab it from her and she’d pick it up and run and we would just, like, wear each other out until at some point the zucchini was like -- had been dropped enough or she’d chewed on it enough that it would just break into pieces and the game would be over and she’d just eat some of it. Anyway, I just was like -- I'm not exactly sure what sport that was, but, you know, it was -- you don't normally do stuff like that with a zucchini. It was just kinda a fun, fun thing to do.

I grew up in Detroit, the city of Detroit, Michigan, and never had my first glimpse of Lake Michigan until my first teaching job. I fell in love then. My second year of teaching, I rented a house with a couple of other teachers at the end of a long road in Montague, this -- which was close to- close to Lost Valley Beach. Lost Valley beach is a private- private beach. Pristine. It's for members of the Lost Valley community only. I was smitten. I would go down to the beach as often as I could, sit on the dunes in the quiet, watch the waves either lapping quietly, rolling in, or sometimes thrashing, and contemplate the big questions of life and the little questions of life. By that time I had abandoned God, but as I discovered sitting on that beach, God had never abandoned me. After I moved away for another teaching job, Lost Valley Beach kept calling to me. I purchased a small parcel of land in a property association in the Lost Valley community. Not on the beach, but very close to it. And for the next several summers, I spent my entire summer in a camper at Lost Valley Beach, becoming a part of the community, and still in love with the beach, and the water, and the dunes, the whisper or roar of the waves. I stopped going when the -- my property association rules banned campers. Fast forward several years, I got married, had a child, sailed with my husband on Lake Huron for a few years, and then we just did not do much after we gave up the boat when our daughter was born. We were busy raising a child. The call of the lake and Lost Valley Beach was still strong. I finally convinced my husband to rent a cottage there, so we went there for several years. He fell in love with it. My daughter fell in love with it, and sometimes she would bring friends. Later, her boyfriend, who is now her husband. And we went there until my husband passed away. I didn't go back to the beach for quite a few years afterwards, but I just -- it never left me. I finally convinced a friend from England who had never seen Lake Michigan to go for a day trip to Montague and to Lost Valley Beach,…

Probably when I climbed my first fourteen-er in Colorado. And the thing is, I didn't really stick close to my friends, and that's what made it kind of difficult. I, I was out of shape. I was not acclimated to the elevation out west. We decided to climb a 14,000 foot mountain less than a day after my arrival from Michigan. And these are not excuses, I don't excuse anything. These are the literal reasons: bad shape, didn't have the hiking experience, no acclimation to elevation, it made everything extremely difficult.  And I -- I tried to stick with my friends. I remember the first 50 minutes of that hike or so, I cranked right along with them, and I was feeling really good. I was like, “Gosh we're gonna, we're gonna reach the top of this thing in no time.” And then we stopped to look at my friend's pedometer, and we were like one tenth of the way up. You know, probably not quite that bad, but it was, it was rough. We had just broken the tree line, and turns out. You know, the toughest portion of that climb was through the snow above the tree line, exposed, with -40° temperatures.  And I wish my friends could have stuck with me, but I was going so prohibitively slow that they had to push forward a little bit. And I really remember just seeing them up above me and not wanting to lose sight of them at all. And they did a relatively good job of waiting for me at certain checkpoints before they pulled away again, but really rough day, and they never truly left me. On the way down we stuck together, and it was pretty miserable. We made it to the top. That was great. I sustained the worst burns of my life on the portions of my face that weren't covered. It was altogether a pretty miserable experience, but I'm proud to have done it.

A couple of hikes that I remember in particular -- one was in the Canadian Rockies. I was in Banff and we had done -- we did, we did two different hikes, like one after the other, one day and then the next day. And, of course, I can't remember either -- what either one of them was called. One of them, there was a tea house. We ended at a tea house, and I think that it might have been like, a tea -- something with that tea house. And I think that you left from Lake Louise. I feel like we walked around Lake Louise and then took, you know, went up, went up into the mountains from there. Possibly -- boy, I should really look this up, I don't know. But we ended up at this tea house and all I kept thinking the whole time is, there's a tea house up here, and all of the things that are in this tea house, someone had to trek up this mountain, and all of the fresh supplies that they have at this cafe are brought in daily or weekly or whatever it is, and somebody literally is trekking them up the mountain. There's no, you know, no way to get them up there other than somebody’s, somebody's bringing them up on their back or something. So, I thought that was pretty impressive.  But I was really grateful to get there. I was, I was ready. And apparently, that's not -- I mean, that's not the end, it’s not as far as you can go. You can keep going. But I was, I was pretty much done when we got to that little tea house, but it was, it was a nice little tea house. 

So, our first trip to Florida, we went to Disney World. It was in January. And there was no snow to speak of in Michigan. It started snowing a little bit in Ohio, but it was not a big deal, just a little bit of snow. We hit Kentucky, still a little bit of snow.  But the state of Kentucky freaked the f*** out, pardon my French. And so the National Guard came in and they had tow trucks and they, they routed -- after like eight hours, they routed I-75 back North. This was over like an inch and a half of snow. So, we're just like, "Are they insane?" It's like, can we just show Michigan Driver’s Licenses and be like, "Look, we know what to do, can we just go?"  But what we ended up doing, because we still wanted to go to Florida, is we decided to get off on one of the mountain roads and so we drove through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, off on just those little mountain roads. Pretty much nobody out there. We saw one car with Ohio plates, and snow plows. And that was it. And we got there safe. 

And so, I had just finished all my finals in college. And it had been, like, a grueling week of finals for me. I don't remember much about it other than I was like, so over it. And I was like, I have -- ‘cause -- you know, when you're, when you're writing a paper, or you're doing something that takes a lot of focus, you feel like you're very kind of closed in and you're very focused. You have like, tunnel vision and you’re -- every little word has to be right, and every period has to be in the right spot and your I's have to be dotted and your T's have to be crossed, blah, blah blah. You know. I wasn't writing in cursive, but it was a lot of focus involved, and it's like the little tiny things have to be perfect.  And after that I was like, I just wanna do the opposite, and I wanna get messy and chaotic and have everything be crazy and nothing in its place. It was like, I have to just balance this out. And I called up my friend, and I was like -- this was -- I don't think it was in December. It would have been in the spring, it would have been Spring semester. So, it would have been like May. And it had been raining a lot. And I knew of a place where there was a lot of mud, it was a soccer field complex. And it was just mud everywhere, if you went on the edges of the field. And I said, “Hey, I need to get crazy. Let's go to the soccer field and just roll around in the mud.” And he was like, “Hell yeah, let's do that.”  And so, we got on like, clothes that were, you know, second-hand, like crappy old beat up clothes, and our boots. And we -- it was nighttime, it would have been like midnight, 1 a.m., around that time period. And we parked at the -- we parked far away so like, the cops wouldn't know we were there, cause I'm pretty sure it was closed after dark.  We got into the park and we found where all the gross, sticky, gooey mud was, and we walked through that mud, up to our knees, and just slogged through it, and we sat down in it, and we had a mud fight, and we threw mud at each other. And it was great. It was just what I needed after a very grueling week of finals, just to like, go crazy, get dirty, and just not care about anything. And yeah, it was, we -- you know, it was totally planned out, so we, we had our, you know, newspapers in the car to sit on and everything. It was like, perfect, it was the greatest thing, and we got pictures of it afterwards and we’re covered in mud. And we're like, giving a thumbs up, like “Yeah!” That was one of my most fun experiences, like, of my life, just doing that. 

Sometimes you look at a really big job as a mountain, and I had that a couple years ago when my, my mom passed away. And she had been on hospice in her home, so we were able to keep her there and we had some very wonderful caregivers that cared about her just like she was their own mother. So, it took -- it was about five months from May till October first that she was on hospice. And she would have times when she really thought she was just gonna lick it, and continue on for another 10, 15 years, but she was 99 when she died. So -- but then she would, you know then it would come back, she had congestive heart failure. So she'd have some moments when she felt pretty good.  But she had lived in the house that she had for probably 40 years. And, I was able to -- I inherited the house, so I had the job of cleaning it out. And that was a mountain because she -- being 99, she had saved really pretty much everything you can imagine. Every bill, every -- all of her insurance papers, deeds from places where -- that they owned property -- they owned, that they hadn't owned for years, that they’d sold many -- just, all kinds of tax records but tax records from 50 years ago. And her and my dad had a business and boxes of papers from 50 years ago when he had sold it. So -- or before he had sold it and just all the bookkeeping. So, it was a mountain to go through everything because I did not want to just hire somebody to do it. And it -- we went, I went through everything. So, every week I would load my car up either with a bunch of papers to recycle, or things to go to Volunteers of America to donate, or -- and then I would also -- there was a dumpster there that I would just fill my car. I would fill up that dumpster every two weeks with things that were useless that she had hung on to and it just, it really makes me like the minimalistic idea much, much more so that I don't do that to my family.

My baby cousin, the one who got my tooth when I was little, that was an interesting story. My tooth fell out. I was six. My baby cousin, who was toddling around, she was about eight months old and we went over to visit and I had lost a tooth. And my mom told me the Tooth Fairy gives children who don't have teeth, she gives them teeth. So last night I'd lost my tooth, the Tooth Fairy came, gave me money. We went to visit my baby cousin. She broke a tooth through that night. Well, that's all it took to convince me that the Tooth Fairy uses teeth and passes it on to the babies.

This is a story that I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time and -- but it popped back into my memory a few days ago and I just can’t let it go. When I was a young married person, my husband -- now ex-husband, now deceased ex-husband -- is -- he was in the Army. This is back during the days of Vietnam. He'd been drafted -- no. He had enlisted, but he enlisted because he had a high, or a low draft number. Back then they had a draft lottery and he was number four, so he would have been drafted. So anyway, he had signed up for three years in the Army. We were stationed at [name of base]. We lived across the state line in a very, very small town. And, uh, we'd gotten married. Um, I was pregnant. We adopted two kittens, Pumpkin and Pepper. Pumpkin was orange and white. Pepper was black and white. And had them, uh, our daughter was born in July. And then about a month later, so in August, we were gonna take a trip back North to see our parents and so they could see the baby and so on.  So, we're like, we weren't sure what to do with the cats. You know, we didn't have any friends down there. And, so he said that one -- he said that one of the guys in his company had a farm nearby and would be willing to take the cats. You know, farms always need cats. So, supposedly, he took these two cats and took them to the farm. And the guy was happy to get them. That whole thing, once you think about it seriously, it was just absolute bull.  First off, none of the guys in the company, you know, they were from all over the United States. There was nobody, nobody who had a farm nearby. So pretty sure what he did was he took those two kittens out and dropped them off in the woods somewhere. And me being very gullible at the time and him obviously being a very good liar, never questioned it. Even when we got back from our visit to our parents and I said, "Let's go get the kittens." And he made up, I have no idea what excuse he made up for not going to get the kittens,…