Tag Archives: Michigan

Waking Up

Posted on by under Sound & Place

I am three, and I’m waking up from my afternoon nap in the right way: Slowly. Contentedly. In my own time and space.

I’m in no hurry to open my eyes. The bedroom is dim from the pulled curtains, anyway, and I’ve memorized every sight I would see from my place on the bottom bunk.

6259167128_a64b881939_bAn airplane flies overhead. In our house, below a well-traveled flight path to the airport, it’s a sound as common as a truck roaring by on our busy inner-city street. Whenever the house is quiet and I’m quiet, it seems there’s the sound of a plane somewhere in the sky.

The window is open in the bedroom I share with my brother, who, at almost-six, is too old for naps. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing outside. Laughter and shrieking, then protests, complaints.

Now the sound of a hose as more water is added to the plastic wading pool in the yard next door. I can picture the blue pool, the grass clippings floating on the glistening water.

There’s the voice of the bossiest girl, who is not the oldest but is the most sure of what she wants and how to get it. Just the tone of her voice conjures a snapshot of her hands on her hips, one hip jutted out to the side.  

My eyes are awake now, primed by scenes my ears have fashioned. I get up, my pigtails lopsided from their time on the pillow, and leave my bottom bunk to follow the sound of humming to my mother.

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We lived on the ground floor of the house on Walnut Street until I was five. It was my first home. There are photographs to inform my visual sense of that place, but I can’t really claim them as memories. What I truly remember, from deep in some audio file my mind, are sounds.

Like the sound of my mom humming.

Our living space was small, making it easy for sounds to travel from one room to the next. My mom loves silence, but sometimes I think she loves it because it’s like a blank canvas—an open space for her to hum or whistle into as she folds laundry or chops vegetables. In the house on Walnut Street, her humming was my homing beacon as I navigated the waters between independence and security.

Sometimes upon waking from a nap I could hear my grandmother’s musical voice coming from the kitchen—a one-way, joyful conversation that meant an “audio letter” had arrived in that day’s mail. With my grandparents far away in California and long distance phone rates too costly for either household’s budget, my mom and grandma regularly recorded newsy updates on small, table-top cassette players. The tapes were mailed back and forth in padded manila envelopes.

If Mom was recording a letter to Grandma rather than listening to one, she would announce my appearance into the small microphone, inviting me to talk. “Oh, here’s Krissy! She just woke up from her nap. Krissy, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa! Tell them what kind of cookies we baked this morning.”

My dad’s arrival home each evening was inevitably announced through the stereo speakers: the pop-and-crackle of the needle touching an album. When Dad was home, there was always music playing. Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Bela Bartok, the Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary—their electrifying, silky, surprising, earthy, and complex notes were the soundtrack of my childhood (the volume always a bit too high for my mom’s taste).

During warmer months, the sounds in our home mingled with the sounds of the world outside. In 1970s Michigan, no one had air conditioning—certainly not those of us renting old houses divided into duplexes in the city’s core. We opened windows, turned on noisy box fans, and spent as much time as possible playing outside with water, or sitting on shady stoops. Private lives were aired to the neighborhood: Everyone’s music and arguments, their clattering pots and pans and crying babies, were heard alongside the passing boom of car stereos, loud mufflers, and barking dogs.

After being tucked into my bottom bunk each night, the sounds of Walnut Street played on, each sound telling me a story. Some were as comforting and present as the hum of my mom’s sewing machine on the kitchen table; others were as mysterious and distant as another plane in the night sky, its seats filled with strangers traveling who knows where. 

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Kristin bio YAH

The Apprentices

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

The peanut-gallery chatter was almost as entertaining as the 1970s-era slide show my dad was projecting on the wall. Not that I was surprised—I‘d expect nothing less when the Tennants and Sysyns got together.

Our two families have been spending time together since before my life began, but the regularity dipped considerably when us four kids grew up and started moving off on our own. Those stretches of years and miles made this particular reunion, in July 2015, especially epic: 14 of us from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon were gathered at a house on the Oregon coast. Our group represented three generations of two families: my dad’s and “Uncle” Pete’s, my dad’s best friend from college.

In preparation for the reunion, my dad—forever the obsessive photographer—had scanned five decades of slides to share. We watched the greatly-anticipated show our last night together.

photo 2 (2)The early 70s photos showcased my dad and Uncle Pete as beat-poet wannabes. Their weary faces suggested all-nighters spent drinking wine and listening to Miles Davis, scrawling verses in composition books and debating philosophy. But the scene around them tells the real story: four kids under the age of five, joining miniature forces to raise full-sized havoc. As adult versions of those kids, we laughed at the scene our little selves had created in the cramped apartment. Those poor beat poets had no idea what had hit them.

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My beautiful picture

Pete (perhaps working on lyrics to the opera my dad scored).

Dad and Uncle Pete lived next door as college freshmen. Their love for the arts and their well-matched senses of humor sealed their friendship from the beginning, and they lost no time conjuring up the epic pranks they would one day tell their children about (again and again).

There was the time, for instance, when they changed the alarm clock of their dorm’s earliest riser, who had taken on the responsibility of pounding on everyone’s doors up and down the hall each morning to ensure no one overslept.

“You should have seen the guys all coming out of their rooms at three in the morning, ready to pummel poor George Lowe,” my Dad would say, hardly able to get through the telling of the story due to the laughter that erupted from within as he recalled the scene.

When my dad finds something really funny, he laughs in an extreme, choked up way, as if he’s on the verge of crying. My brother and I agree that watching Dad laugh is often more funny than whatever it is he’s laughing at.

The telling of the Alarm Clock Story was often paired with other classics, like the Co-ed Visiting Hours Story, about the time when my dad and a couple other guys on the floor managed to “lock” Pete alone in his dorm room during the university’s first ever co-ed open house.

“He missed the whole thing. We never heard the end of that,” Dad would say, his shaking shoulders indicating a level of laughter that was so extreme it was almost silent.

Not surprisingly, the hilarity at the core of Dad and Pete’s friendship inspired laughter and eye-rolling in the women who eventually married them, which later spilled over into our regular family gatherings each spring break, New Year’s Eve, and summer.

Soon us kids had a whole new generation of funny stories to recall together, from the dance routine we choreographed to the Xanadu album (one of my favorite gifts that Christmas), to the time our families met at a no-nonsense campground in Ohio late one night, unknowingly setting up our enormous shared tent terrifyingly close to train tracks. The rumbling and whistling of the train that woke us up in the dead of night set a new standard for a “rude awakening.”

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The Epic Reunion slideshow continued, shifting from photos of busy toddlers and tired parents into a series of photos Dad and Pete staged for the singular purpose of annoying and alarming our mothers.

My beautiful picture

“Billy” on the brink of disaster.

“Look, there’s the time Billy almost fell into that canyon,” Uncle Pete said, pointing at the projected image of my brother’s eyes peeking over a stone ledge, apparently hanging on for dear life with his fingernails. “We were so relieved we made it back with him alive” Pete added in a stage whisper, ”We never would have heard the end of it from your mothers.”

Uncle Pete is the master of the elaborate aside, holding one hand flat along the edge of his mouth as if trying to keep what he’s saying from a select person or two. And my dad is the master of egging Pete on.

Together, they’re masters of laughter, and as the slideshow came to an end, I realized my brother and cousins and I have been their apprentices. I looked over at the faces of my own daughters—the third generation of this heritage of hilarity—and felt satisfied that our reunion week with the Sysyns had served as a solid orientation in their own schooling of stories and silliness. May they grow into adults who fully grasp the value of friendship, traditions, and pure, uncontrollable laughter.

 

The Creek Less Traveled

Posted on by under Memory & Place

There were many bodies of water to enjoy and explore at my grandparents’ cabin—it was Northern Michigan, after all, where bodies of water are as common as fields of corn where I live now, in Central Illinois.

The small, inland lakes had their appealing features: sandy shores for digging, floating rafts to dive from, and glass-like surfaces that perfectly mirrored the evening sky until the canoe you paddled broke through the stillness.

But of the many tempting bodies of water, it was the creek that enticed me most. The creek had something the lakes didn’t: It had mystery, a destination.

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We called it simply The Creek, but on a detailed-enough map it has a proper name: Canada Creek. It probably winds for miles, but our encounters with the creek took place in the far upper-east corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula—right where the cuticle of your index finger would settle in the mitten-shaped map.

As elementary-aged kids, my older brother and I were allowed to walk together down a curving sand road until it became a one-lane bridge at the creek. The road was rarely traveled, like all the roads in the area—we were somewhere in the midst of 20 square miles of woods and water known as Canada Creek Ranch (only a fourth of which was dotted with a few hundred cabins).

At the creek, my brother and I stood on the bridge for a while, tossing stones into the water to hear them plink and plunk their varying notes. Then we slid and scrambled down the gravely bank to the creek’s shore, where we inevitably ditched our canvas sneakers and sweaty socks to wade in the cold, clear spring water. It was sandy and shallow by the bridge; I liked to stand very still, hoping a dragonfly might land on me, while the tadpoles investigated my toes.

But how long could a kid stand still in a creek? After all, the creek had places to go and things to show us.

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PICT0023I’m guessing that we schemed and planned our first creek walk when I was about seven, sitting around Grandma’s breakfast table, pancakes piled high and studded with wild blueberries we had picked the day before. I’m sure my brother and I were persuasive in our desire to follow the creek. Not only did it beg to be further explored, but the creek held potential for so many stories. The grownups were apparently just as intrigued, because a new summer tradition was born (one that continued into our teen years, as seen in the photo): The Creek Walk.

On Creek Walk day my brother and I set out as adventurers, eager to play the characters in our favorite books—to live out their stories, or more likely a compilation of their stories. Laura Ingalls, Davey Crockett, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea each took a turn being embodied by us as we forged the stream.

Sometimes we talked through our stories as we walked, staying in character as we navigated over or under a fallen tree. At other moments I broke from character to yelp as I slipped on a rock and nearly went under, or to complain when my brother, leading the way, fooled us with his favorite trick: gradually bending his knees then walking on them until the water was up to his neck, which suggested it would be well over my head. (A few times he wasn’t joking, and it actually was that deep.)

And then there were spells when all of us were quiet, amazed by just how quiet the world could be, save for the swish of our legs displacing the water as we walked, and the song of a Goldfinch from somewhere above. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall ever encountering another person on our many creek walks.

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After three or so hours of pressing on, the heat and deer flies became more bothersome, as did the ache in our legs and the rumble in our stomachs. Grandma began searching for a place to exit the creek—an opening in the tangle of brush where the bank wasn’t too steep and we could make our way from the creek’s winding world into the woods.

How Grandma had any idea where we were, I’ll never know. But she had hiked and skied those acres for years, and could confidently point us in the direction of Little Joe, one of the remote lakes on Canada Creek Ranch. We followed deer paths or forged our own way in the direction she pointed, motivated by what we knew we would find at our destination: Grandpa, firing up the grill for hotdogs. Each year on Creek Walk day he put the cooler Grandma had prepared into the car and drove the two-track roads through the woods to meet us at Little Joe’s lone picnic table.

After our feast, we all packed into Grandpa’s car, soggy and worn, to drive back to the cabin. The hotdogs and the lift home were luxuries Sacajawea never had, but by that point I was ready to be a modern-day little girl again, tucked into bed where more creek adventures could be spun in my dreams.

Stuck, Unstuck

Posted on by under Travel & Place

It was January—that moment when, in Michigan, you are still descending into the depths of winter. (Never mind that the days are getting longer, lighter.)

I was continuing to descend, too. My descent was more deceptive than winter’s—a postpartum swirl of hormones and emotions that could just as easily trick me into believing I was rising as falling. There were moments of brilliant sunshine on fresh blankets of snow, joyful baby squeals, and the sense that I had never quite been whole without this little one in my arms. In those moments I felt buoyed. Was the falling sensation I felt actually a rising—a trick of the mind?

No, that wasn’t the case. At least not in any comprehensive, lasting way.

It’s hard to say what exactly triggered me to finally shut down that January day—to batten the hatches, boarding up windows and barricading with sandbags as if to protect myself against a storm I had been watching move toward me. Now I know this about depression: the “what” or “why” hardly matters. It’s not as if identifying “what” means it could all be easily “fixed.” It just was what it was—a mix of chemicals and hormones, disappointments and anxieties, fear and regret, converging and swirling. And suddenly that day, that moment, I couldn’t keep up the charade that had kept me inching forward on previous days.

I could only sit, blankly. Sometimes with quiet tears forging new paths down my cheeks.

Finally, while my baby napped, I called my mom. I couldn’t speak, of course—couldn’t begin to explain a thing about what was happening inside me. But she still heard me, like mothers do. She heard the tears from 70 miles away, where she sat in my childhood home, and she knew I was stuck; she knew I needed to move.

“I’m coming to get you,” she said matter-of-factly, not asking or suggesting, only stating the fact in a way that allowed me to breathe a bit deeper.

So I sat as she drove to me through the frozen world. I don’t remember her arriving at my house, or helping me pack a few bags, transferring the baby’s carseat from my car to hers. I only remember the drive home—to the place I still considered home. I was, after all, only a decade removed from the time I had last lived there, the summer I was 19.

291654079_bc3cf3ce06_bMy mom had dark chocolate in her car, and as we traveled she told me to eat as much as I wanted—that it was good for me. She didn’t ask me to explain anything, didn’t ply me with questions or ask what I wanted or needed. She simply directed and gave, taking the wheel both literally and figuratively as she moved me from point A to point B.

As we traveled I felt the panic and confusion within me dislodge and begin to move downstream. I cracked open the shutters on my mind and began to take in where I was: The warmth of the car and bitter-sweetness of the chocolate. The beauty of the snow stretching out from either side of the two-lane highway—the way it was whimsical decorating the evergreens, and then sophisticated blanketing the ground, seeming to change color as it rose on hills and dipped into valleys, the late afternoon sun slanting onto its smooth surfaces.

I took in the one-stoplight towns in a way I never had before, even though I’d passed through them dozens of times behind the wheel of my own car. There were people on the sidewalks, bundled against the cold: a mother walking slowly as her snowsuited toddler kicked his boots through the snow; a group of three teenage girls who seemed to meander and stall, in spite of the cold.

The towns were then behind us, the speed limit rose, and I saw the sad, sinking homes down along the river, a man getting out of his rusted truck, pulled up alongside a satellite dish. Closer to home, the terrain flattened, presenting farm houses and sleeping winter fields. There was nothing remarkable along that stretch of road—no one, I imagine, living remarkable lives. There were just lives, and I noticed them as my mother carried me along.

Toward the end of our journey she told me a story about when she was a young mom—not to say “I know exactly how you feel,” but just, I suppose, to broaden my perspective and help me see beyond the walls of my confining mind, just as putting me in the car helped me to see beyond the walls of my house, my life, which had become too small.

What my mother knew, what she taught me, is that becoming “unstuck” involves some form of moving, traveling, even if you don’t know exactly where you need to go.

 

The Mourning House

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

I currently sleep in the guest room of my house. The other room I used to sleep in—which I have been calling the “hospice room”—is now a more hallowed space. That room was redesigned just prior to death of the woman who had accompanied me through life and parenting for 27 years. We’d only been married for just over six months, due to a five-hour period during which same-sex couples were allowed to marry in Michigan. The death was unanticipated; diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, just one year earlier, had led us to believe we had “years” instead of a year to share our lives together. Once a partner, spouse, and co-parent of two daughters, I must now try on the identity of widow, while existing inside of a house that no longer feels like home.

In the hospice room, the hospital bed is gone, but there are many artifacts put in place for healing purposes. A Buddha statue from Sri Lanka donated by sister for good luck; framed photos of orchids taken by our daughter when we went to the orchid show last year; a print of the magnificent sand hill cranes whose visits to the wetlands of Michigan we witnessed every October.

When I walk through that room I see not the space where my partner and I once slept together, did our nightly roundup of the days events, and watched our favorite television shows. Once I had listened to Nancy whisper “sleep with angels, darlin’” each night before we switched off the lights. Now, I see a kind of vacuous shrine that I don’t wish to disturb.

The hospice room is artful. Our antique mahogany bed is spread with a treasured cover from Nepal, and its geometric purple and green hues are echoed in the pillows and in the lilac paint on the walls. Nancy has left many objects containing memorabilia—cigar boxes, a pewter bowl, an old candy tin. When I am brave enough to look through them, I find weathered photos of her father and grandparents in sepia, small jewelry boxes containing antique rings and pearls, the invitation to her parents’ wedding in 1950, the baby shoes of our daughters. It contains remnants of a life I once was part of.

In the guest room where I sleep, I still feel like a visitor. The room remains the same as when it housed guests, not particularly inviting and disturbingly impersonal. The colors clash: pink curtains, a blue patterned quilt, walls painted a jolting lime green. A large unadorned bed dominates the smallish room. It’s not designed for comfort or charm. But in my current uncomfortable frame of mind, it seems to fit my requirements.

A perennial basket of unfolded laundry resides in the corner of the anonymous space where I now reside. My computer, my refuge, stands ready for my use, although I still can’t find a show I want to watch or a book I want to read. Scanning Facebook, reading through emails, I seek connections to fill the stillness that stretches before me.

The rest of the house is also still alien territory, transformed by the permanent vacancy of one of its occupants. My sprightly teenaged daughter, whose easy laughter hasn’t changed much since toddlerhood, begs me to go upstairs with her at night. She will not go back downstairs again without me, spooked by a house that is devoid of her other mother. She asks me to accompany her to the bathroom at night and in the early dark mornings. She fears that Nancy is somehow here in the house as a ghost, but perhaps not as much as she fears living in a house where Nancy no longer exists.

Nancy’s mother says she cannot bear to visit us in this place, not while the painful memories of her daughter seem to bounce off every surface of the house. But my daughter and I must live in this mourning house, trying to find our way to another kind of home where we can co-exist with what is here and what is not.

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JuliaGrant“The Mourning House” was written by Julia Grant. Julia lives, writes, and works in higher education in East Lansing, Michigan. She and her partner, Nancy, were one of the 300+ same-sex couples who were married on March 23, 2014, in Michigan.

Where I Came From: 5,000 Miles and Back Again

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

When I was a little girl with two brown pigtails and bangs cut straight across my forehead, home was a grey-blue ranch-style house situated in the middle of Michigan’s palm. It was also a musty-smelling blue canvas tent, the sweaty brown vinyl backseat of a station wagon, and the open road, always leading to someplace new.

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If “home” is defined as a specific place, then my answer to “Where are you from?” is clear: I’m from St. Johns, Michigan, a town of about 12,000 people with a two-stoplight Main Street that’s anchored on the south end by a classic Midwestern courthouse. My parents still live in the house they bought when I was just five, and when we visit today, my own daughters sleep in my childhood bedroom.

All the kids who went to my elementary school lived in town like me, but by the time we were in middle school, our classmates were pretty evenly split between “town kids” and the “country kids” who grew up on surrounding farms. (My best friend Rhonda was a country kid with horses we rode on the weekends.)

Besides sleepovers and football games, there weren’t many parent-approved things to do for fun, at least not until we were old enough to drive the half hour to Lansing for date-worthy restaurants, movies, and malls. But St. Johns was a good place to be a kid. Growing up in a sheltered town meant plenty of freedom to bike everywhere—the city pool, friends’ houses, the library, and the bakery for custard-filled long johns. We didn’t wear helmets or lock our bikes—the only requirement was a wristwatch so we wouldn’t be late for dinner.

But even with such deep roots in a single place, I also grew up with an understanding of home that was nomadic: Home was wherever you stopped and pitched the tent when it was time to cook dinner. bluetent

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers offered more time than money. Flying from Michigan to visit relatives on the West Coast wasn’t in the budget, so each summer we packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and hit the road for about six weeks.

I was prone to carsickness, so there were just two ways I rode in the car: sprawled asleep across the backseat or awake and perched dead center, leaning forward until I was almost as much in the front seat with my parents as I was in the back. Luckily, my big brother was never the sort to draw a line down the middle of the seat and enforce it with punches or pinches. Besides, I think he was happy to let me chatter away to my parents, leaving him in relative peace with his books.

The ultimate destinations we drove toward—a visit with our grandparents in L.A. or our favorite cousins in Portland, a week spent hiking in Glacier National Park, or a few days exploring San Francisco—were well-worth the 5,000-or-so miles we covered each summer. But so many days were devoted to just getting there, driving through endless-seeming states like Nebraska or North Dakota, only stopping for gas, bathroom breaks, and to eat the sandwiches Mom had made at the campground that morning.

After a full day of driving, as the sun was lowering in the sky and Mom’s voice was hoarse from reading aloud Little House on the Prairie books, we pulled out a thick campground guide and chose a place to stay—with a pool, if my brother and I were lucky. At the campground, Mom pulled out the camp stove and started dinner while the rest of us got to work setting up the tent and filling it with sleeping bags and pillows. The next morning it all came down again, was packed back into the car, and we drove some more—to the next place we would call “home” for a night.

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Now, when I think about where I come from, I still envision that ever-present grey-blue house, first. I am very much a small-town Michigan girl. But it occurs to me that my rootedness in that place has always been filtered through an understanding of other places—of treeless plains and impressive peaks, of rugged beaches with magical tide pools, and of Chinatowns and subways, operas and contemporary art. I knew where I was back home in Michigan because I also knew where I wasn’t.

And in that sense, I come from places that protected me as well as places that exposed me—from a small Michigan town and big Montana mountains; from the inside of a station wagon, where my entire family was always close enough to touch, to a crowded San Francisco sidewalk where strangers pressed in as I absorbed glimpses of the world.

stationwagonPhotographs by William E. Tennant