The me in the middle

I just got back from mingling with the universe. I highly recommend it.

Spicy temps and a gorgeous blue sky convinced me today was THE day ― the official start of the 2024 kayaking season. I think my trusty red sit-on-top was as happy as I was when I slid it off its shelf in the garage and into its place of honor atop my Jeep.

If ever you are in the Jackson, Michigan area and need a place to spend a glorious hour and half slow-paddling in the sunshine, I highly recommend Lime Lake, just south of Spring Arbor. The middle of the lake (north part, for locals who are wondering) drops off deep and dark, but along the edges, a whole, lakey world is visible under and above the brown-clear water.

Oh my gosh, so many turtles. Don’t ask me what kind, because I don’t know, but they were having a glorious time lurking on logs, sometimes plopping gracelessly into the water at my approach. One poor fellow, a good five or six feet above the water on a thick branch, wiggled off his perch in alarm, only to knock into another branch and execute a full flip before tumbling to the water, little legs kicking the whole way down.

Other turtles, alert but brave, held their ground as I slipped past as quietly as I could. Equally fearless were the fish that often surrounded my boat. They were nowhere and then everywhere, zipping forward in determined lines or milling like teens outside an ice cream stand. One fish (don’t ask me what kind, because I don’t know) eased up alongside my kayak and swam with me for a while, seeming as interested in me as I was in it. I itched to reach a finger through the water and boop the fish in the snoot, but I didn’t try it. I was utterly content just being there, watching, drifting.

I thought I would think, out there on the water. But I didn’t. Sun on my back and the pleasant tug of exercise in my arm muscles, a great blue heron winging its awkward flight over my head, nobody there but me and the lake and the trees and the reeds and the fish and some frogs and the turtles and two swans, I could only exist, there in the middle of it ― exist, and nothing more.

A poem by George Gordon Byron, a.k.a. Lord Byron, a.k.a. Georgie B (I mean, I assume that’s what his friends called him), scrolls through my head often when I wander pathless woods or stand with bare toes on the lonely shores of a Great Lake. 

Byron finds healing in nature-nurtured moments, he says, “in which I steal” ― or slip away, with stealth ― “from all I may be, or have been before…”

Oh, to sneak away from the weight of all I might someday be ― the expectations I place on myself, the potential for failure, the uncertainty and what-ifs.

Oh, to escape, for a moment, all that I have been before ― the mistakes, the wretched mistakes, the inadequacies, the brightness I can’t regain, the lost opportunities.

I walk too often juggling all I may be and have been before, trying so hard to brace for the one and justify the other that I lose the person in the middle. 

I thought I needed kayak time to get it all figured out, all the past and the future and the problems and the puzzles. Turns out my brain needed the turtles and fish so it could be still and just BE, and to have that be OK, just for a little while.

Georgie B gets it. He steals away into nature, he says,

“to mingle with the universe, and feel what I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.”

Yep, sometimes you just gotta go mingle with the universe. Gotta let go of all the Stuff, all the coulda and shoulda and maybe, and breathe deep and just feel. Feel that part of you for which you don’t have words. The part nobody really knows but you. The part that gets lost sometimes and needs to be found.

Maybe that’s not nature for you. Maybe it’s planting flowers or the rhythm of farm work or watching your kid at a sporting event. Maybe it’s snuggling a grandkid or coloring in a coloring book. Maybe it’s your head bowed in prayer, heart thudding at the realization that the hidden part for which you don’t have words doesn’t need words, because it’s seen and known and loved, completely and always.

I need to go outside and pull the kayak off my roof and tuck it away in the garage for the night. I don’t want to. I want to go back to the lake, back to where I could just mingle with the universe and not think about what comes tomorrow or what I didn’t do today or what’s for supper.

The lake will be there when I’m ready to go back. In the meantime, I’m a little stronger, a little braver, a little more willing to look for and love the me in the middle, regardless of all I may be or have been before.

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In case you’re wondering, the acrobatic turtle was fine. I watched him scoot off underwater, looking embarrassed but unharmed.

The complete stanza of Byron’s poem appears below. It’s only a portion of a much longer poem, the rest of which is pretty bleak. But that’s Byron for ya. 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

- Lord Byron, 1818

48 Hours, a jury box, and the hurt we can't ignore

Last week, I got cozy with a film crew from the television series “48 Hours” to cover a three-day hearing about a small-town murder that may or may not have happened.

The attention-grabbing case involves a woman who disappeared from her rural south Michigan home in April 2021. The courts ruled the woman legally dead a few months ago, and the husband now faces a murder charge, even though police have never found the woman’s body.

I was in court, squeezed into a jury box with the rest of the media, to cover the husband’s preliminary examination (at which a judge hears testimony and decides if the prosecution has enough evidence to proceed toward trial), for The Brooklyn Exponent, a weekly newspaper near my home in Jackson, Michigan.

At one point, I had to nudge the “48 Hours” sound operator in the chair to my left when he started snoring. A Toledo radio reporter juggling two laptops elbowed into my space from the other side while a guy with a camera on a tripod blocked my view of witnesses. A local newspaper reporter who hadn’t made it into the jury box eyed me irritably from the back of the courtroom. (On the second day, he hustled to the courtroom and slid into “my” chair before I could get there, which I thought was pretty funny. Someone made room for me at the other end of the jury box.)

We all stepped politely over each other’s cords and put up with a little squishiness in the jury box because what was most important was what was happening on the witness stand.

What I saw there was a lot of hurt. The missing woman’s adult children talked about the last time they saw their mother and of their dwindling hope as they searched for her. They talked about the couple’s financial stresses and the mounting tension of running struggling businesses together.

They also talked matter-of-factly about the fights they often witnessed between their mother and their stepfather, verbal wars laced with screaming and swearing and threats to leave.

I don’t know if Dee Warner is dead, or if her husband killed her. We may never know for sure.

I do know that it’s incredibly sad to picture two people who once promised to love and support each other both hurting so badly that they tear each other into pieces.

You don’t get the whole story in a court case. Witnesses don’t get to talk about the inner demons that make one person lash out or the decades of trauma that make another person’s scars flare up in seething rage. Police reports and court records don’t tell you about the desperation behind the curses, the longing and self-loathing that makes someone push hardest against the person they most need to not leave them.

You don’t get the whole story looking at your neighbors, either. Or the couple sitting in front of you at church, or the young lovebirds who seem so compatible when you meet them for dinner.

You can’t know how many of them go home to sniping words or stony silence. Or who bury their unhappiness in busyness or work so hard hiding it from the kids that they hide it from themselves.

Most couples’ fights don’t turn into missing persons reports or murder charges. In a way, that makes me even sadder.

When something goes really wrong, we pay attention, even put it on the nightly news. But people all around us are taking their hurts out on the people they love, and we don’t see it, and we don’t do anything about it.

But, we say, as long as nobody’s killing anyone, isn’t other people’s pain their own business?

That depends on whether we’re OK with living in a world where hurt people hurt each other while we watch “48 Hours” and shake our heads and click our tongues.

I don’t know which of the people around me are struggling in their relationships, and I can’t step in and counsel each of them through their crises. But maybe I can look for actions I can take that strengthen families and ease stresses.

Maybe, at the next school function, I can sit next to the parents of the screaming kids and lend them a hand and an accepting smile.

Maybe I can take my coworker for coffee and ask her how she’s doing and let her see that I really want to know.

When I see anger brewing, instead of looking away, maybe I can step closer, gently and genuinely asking if there’s anything I can do to help.

If I’m lucky enough to have a local newspaper, I can buy a subscription to learn about and support efforts to increase the availability of mental health workers so that people in pain have somewhere to turn for help.

I can pray ― pray with closed eyes and a clenched heart and arm outstretched in the darkness toward loved ones I know need peace and grace. And I can let that prayer lead me to fight for them, for their marriage, for the healing of their wounded hearts.

We can’t look at violence on the evening news and grumble that somebody should have done something sooner and then not do something ourselves. We just can't. The world needs us to have eyes that see hurt and hands willing to reach toward it.

Somebody has to do something.

And we’re the somebody.

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I’ll share my news story about the missing woman case on my Facebook page (I’m pretty sure you can find me at julie.riddle.77770 – don’t ask me where all those sevens came from, because I don’t know), or you can find it on the website where some of The Brooklyn Exponent’s stories are posted, theexponentlive.com. If it’s not there yet, it will be soon.

You can also google Dee Warner and learn more from other media outlets. But my story is better. : )

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On my author website, you can read about the book I’m writing about another murder case and what we can learn from it about ourselves, our communities, and what we can do better to stop the next one.

Publishers only accept book proposals if the author can prove people want to read his or her work. If this blog provides something you want or need to hear, it would help me in my book-publishing mission if you would subscribe to be notified via email when I post something new. Sharing my blog with others and suggesting they subscribe helps me, too. You should find a signup box on this page. If not, email me at julie.j.riddle@gmail.com and I'll get you added. (One of these days I'll become an internet expert and make these things happen more smoothly.)

Thanks. And thanks for reading this. Writing with nobody on the other end is lonely, but writing knowing someone cares about what you have to say is glorious.

The Driftwood

The motel room smelled like home and sadness and hope, all at once.

The husband and I were back in Rogers City so he could conduct a funeral for Betty, a force of nature who knew how to get her way even after she had gone to Heaven. The trip to northern Michigan from our downstate home was just far enough for an overnight stay at the Driftwood Motel, one of three or four mom-and-pops in town.

Michigan’s west coast boasts a barrage of swanky resorts hulking along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The east side of the state, though, is a whole different world. In Alpena, the biggest town along the Sunrise Side stretch from Tawas City to the big bridge, you’ll find a proper multi-level hotel or two, but most lodging up that way consists of low-slung motels that don’t concern themselves with swank.

Folks don’t visit Sunrise Side towns for fashionable streets packed with boutiques and eateries. They come for the lake, that behemoth slathered all across the horizon, rolling and rocking and gliding under the seagulls and whooshing up to your feet, leaving behind water-weathered gifts and whispering backward in a roll of bubbles and quicksilver.

They come for the nearby woods, too, quiet and bright and full of birdsong, and for lattes at MI Northern Espresso and Plath’s bacon and tiny treasures at the Painted Lady and charming live theater and Gary’s poems someone illustrated and enlarged and hung on a downtown fence.

What they don’t come for is the motel room.

If they did, they’d probably be disappointed. The Driftwood, like many other small-town motels, keeps it simple. The furniture shows subtle signs of wear and tear, and the bedspread is all-purpose shiny polyester in stripes of colors no longer in vogue. Bedside lamps are just lamps, with no built-in USB ports. Towels range from fine to a little scratchy, and ain’t nothing plush about the toilet paper.

But step out the sliding glass door at the far end of every room, and you’re treated to a million-dollar view people dream their whole lives of seeing.

Lake Huron, laid out in all its splendor, gazed back at us from under a fading sunset as we stepped onto the room’s back deck the evening before the funeral. At 2 a.m. I gaped at a grayscale lake glowing up at the Big Dipper, and a few hours later we held our breath as the sun crawled from a watery horizon.

No, the Driftwood isn’t about glamour.

It’s about being OK with where you are because you know something glorious awaits just outside your door.

***

We were a collective bundle of nerves the first time we stayed at the motel, back when our kids were young. My husband had just received a call to one of the churches in Rogers City. After a long drive progressively farther from civilization, we arrived in town tired and nervous about the impending upheaval in our lives.

We checked in at the front desk, as instructed, and discovered some thoughtful church members had left a surprise for us ― snacks for the adults and activity books for the kids. That gesture of kindness helped us believe everything was going to be OK in this new, unknown world.

Years later, I reconnected with the motel during another time of uncertainty. I had walked away from a meaningful job without a plan, heeding a tug I felt but didn’t understand. God was telling me He had something else for me to do, and I had to let go of the security of my full-time position to find it.

To keep a paycheck coming, I took part-time work cleaning rooms at the Driftwood. I vacuumed and wiped and folded and sprayed, mind engrossed in trying to figure out what God had in mind for me next.

The day we arrived for the funeral, I stepped into room 201, breathed in, and instantly had to blink back the pinpricks in my eyes.

This place meant uncertainty. It meant worry and hope and not knowing what comes next.

How perfect, I realized, to find myself once again at the Driftwood, here in a new time of transition and wondering and flinging myself on a God I trust to catch me.

I didn’t know, back when we munched snacks and worried about uprooting our kids and wrenching ourselves out of our former home, that what lay ahead in Rogers City was beauty and joy and life-changing friendship.

Later, as I cleaned and questioned, I didn’t know I was about to launch into a new career that opened my eyes and rewrote my heart.

A few days ago, sniffling and reaching for a tissue in the low-key motel room, I wondered once more what’s coming next as I start over again, redefining myself and pursuing a Big Idea I’m compelled to turn into a book, not sure where it will all lead.

There is a next, the room seemed to say to me.

You’ve been here before. And there’s always a next.

***

We had a little spare time before the funeral, so we went to Seagull Point, our go-to hangout when we lived in town. We meandered the beach, where I stooped to pick up pocket rocks and the occasional water-smoothed stick.

I sometimes like to picture the journey a broken branch or stray piece of wood takes before it winds up, rounded and silky, sunbathing on a beach. I run my fingertips along a piece of driftwood and imagine it bobbing on the watertop, rocked up and down and jostled side to side and sometimes flung when the wind gets fierce.

The driftwood doesn’t know what’s ahead any more than I do. We’re both riding the current, shaped by sunshine and rain into something new. Something we couldn’t have imagined we would be.

In the uncertainties, in the waves and winds, there is a next.

There is a Something Ahead, something you can’t see as you wait and work and wonder.

In the meantime, grab a snack. Maybe clean something. Dream a little. Where you are might not be glamorous, and it might even be a little scary. But just wait until you see what’s right outside your door.

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If you haven't visited the Rogers City, I highly recommend it. Not all of you at once, though ― we don't want the beaches to get crowded. If you go in summer, make sure you pick up a treat at Ice Cream Lane and climb on the rocks on the marina breakwall.

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When you have a minute, read my description of what I want to write and why. If you believe it's a project worth supporting, please share my website with people you know and encourage them to sign up for blog post notifications. The site includes several places to sign up by sharing your email address.

You can also subscribe to the blog in the box that appears with this post...I hope. It seems to have a mind of its own.

Total eclipse of the heart

I don’t understand why I’m crying.

The eclipse is four days and a hundred miles behind me as I work on my computer in a Detroit coffee shop. I’ve got a long to-do list and there’s no time for sniffles. Yet here I sit, eyes welling, scrolling through online descriptions of what happened when the sun disappeared and millions of people simultaneously gasped in wonder.

A few minutes after the moon started its slide across the sun, my daughter and her friend and I spread a blanket at a park in a small Ohio town, popped on our eclipse glasses, and looked up.

I swore, softly and fervently.

Expected or not, the sight of the moon gobbling up the most stable, predictable thing in my universe shocked me. I spent the next half an hour or so exclaiming to anyone in earshot, “This is SO COOL!”

As the moon bit deeper into the sun, I grabbed my camera and wandered our part of the park. At the picnic shelter, several nattily dressed young men traded eclipse glasses and jokes. Children climbed over a wooden train, and a group of slightly drunk adults played a noisy card game. In lawn chairs and patches of grass, people talked, laughed, looked up.

From behind a wall of trees, carnival music and children’s squeals said a party was in full swing to mark the occasion. A woman tossed a toy for her dogs. Nearby, three girls took turns jumping across a small stream.

We looked up and waited.

Time grew quiet as the minutes ticked down to totality. I shivered against the growing coolness as a dimness settled over the trees, an odd dusk with shadows falling at all the wrong angles like a horror movie filter.

The air thickened, silencing whatever little noises usually fill it. The card game had stopped. The children on the train now huddled against their mothers, eyes uncertain.

Thirty seconds. The fingernail that remained of the sun shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, and panic clenched my chest with the sudden certainty that the sun was melting, sucked backward into endless darkness and would never reappear. I had to stop it, but I couldn’t breathe, I could only look up and watch and gasp and gasp and gasp and all around me the air swelled, not with sound but with the pressure of a hundred people, two hundred people, all ready to burst with the silence and the waiting and the melting sun, a dull, throbbing roar of aching longing and then the sliver of gold winked and was gone.

The park erupted. It wasn’t a cheer. It wasn’t a celebration. It was a cry wrenched from our mouths unbidden. As one, we yanked off our paper glasses and gasped and pointed and said words without thinking and gaped at the 360-degree sunset and the black afternoon sky and the hypnotizing, blazing ring, tears in our eyes though we couldn’t have told you why we were crying any more than the birds could tell you why they were suddenly whirling in frenetic loops above our heads.

For nearly four minutes we stood, awestruck, clinging to every second.

And then, oh, glorious then ― just when I couldn’t stand for another moment the thought that this moment had to end ― a flash of whiteness, purer than anything I can imagine, shocking as lightning.

“THERE IT IS!” hollered an exultant voice, and it was my voice, and I once more had tears streaming from my eyes and jubilation streaming from my face as I stole one more look at the sun, the sun, the blessed sun I had no idea I missed so dearly until it came bursting back from out of the darkness.

Around me, other cries, other voices gasping to express that which has no words, other eyes wide and bright as we watched dawn glide down over the trees in pink and yellow and gentle lightness.

I breathed deep and felt the breeze against my cheek. From behind the trees, the sounds of carnival rides started up again, and children giggled and dogs barked. I stretched out stomach-down on the blanket and took close-up photos of the grass.

I read that animals behave strangely during an eclipse. At the San Antonio Zoo on Monday, flamingos snuggled, whooping cranes danced, and meerkats raced in mobs. 

Lots of folks, in pieces I’ve read online, say the eclipse moved them because it made them feel, physically FEEL, a part of the universe. Others sensed, in that irresistible sense of awe, a breathtaking connection to their Creator and the perfection of His creation.

I’d like to have a profound explanation for why I reacted the way I did. Really, though, I think I cried and hollered and melted into the planet a little for the same reason the animals acted weird. Which is to say, I don’t know why it happened. It just happened, and it reset something inside me over which I had no control, something I dearly hope won’t drift slowly away while I’m looking the other direction.

Dozens of metaphors are tugging at my pant leg, begging to be allowed in. This ring, this light, this death and glorious resurrection, this darkness and coming together and blotting out and making new…they are rich with Deeper Meaning just waiting to be given words that make people nod and say, “Ah, yes, now I see.”

But this moment doesn’t get a metaphor. I don’t know why this thing that happened hit me right in the gut and still, even as I type this, makes me drip tears on my keyboard. But it did, and it does, and that’s enough.

Awe, inexplicable and glorious ― all by itself, it’s enough.

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If you would like to tell me your eclipse story, I'd love to read it. Share in the comments, or email me at julie.j.riddle@gmail.com. I'll happily enjoy your photos with you, too, if you'd like.

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My new website remains imperfect, but I still like it. Check it out at juliejriddle.com and let me know what you think.

I hope you find something to bring you awe today.

Change of plan; or, Easter dance party

The Riddle Easter Extravaganza swings into high gear in less than 24 hours. I’d better get my dance move ready.

Like most holidays in our household, this year’s Easter didn’t go as planned. The day started off with a glorious bang as son Jonah whommed on the timpani in the church balcony and the congregation belted out some glorious Easter-morning tuneage. Afterward, we trotted home, visions of spiral-sliced ham dancing in our heads. Our adult kids were coming that afternoon, and I was all eager anticipation to celebrate a special day in my favorite way ― hanging out with Peeps and my peeps.

Then my son texted. He was sick, the kind of sick nobody wants to be around.

My daughter texted next. Her work shift went longer than she’d expected, and she couldn’t get to our house until late.

Doggone it, I had the day all planned. I’d remembered the pineapple and everything. I wanted my special day, and it wasn’t fair that it wasn’t going according to plan.

Fortunately, the little pity-party I threw myself passed quickly, and we chucked the plan and agreed the kids would come this weekend, instead.

The husband and I spent Easter afternoon and evening napping, watching basketball, and eating Hungry Howie’s, loving every minute of it. Tomorrow, we’ll try our family day again, and I can’t wait. The hash brown potatoes are still in the freezer, canned green beans still in the cupboard, jelly beans still in little bowls around the living room, and I still get to wrap my arms around my kids and celebrate with them the unfathomable Love that hung on a tree for me.

My eldest, excited about the reboot, dubbed our second-chance holiday “Easter 2: Electric Boogaloo.” Always ready to crank the silly fun up a notch, my daughter suggested we all prepare a dance move for the occasion. I suspect she’s going to hold us to that, so I’d better get working on mine.

The day before Easter, while picking up the last of the groceries, I bought the prettiest little bundles of yellow tulips to brighten up the house. At home, I tucked them in glass jars, smiling at the thought of sending flowers home with each of my much-loved guests.

A week later, the tulips are still in their jars, but not standing upright. The stems lean from the jars in dramatic curves, the heads of the flowers dangling from them like soft lemons.

The flowers may be droopy, but they’re still pretty.

It’s just a different kind of pretty.

Our holiday didn’t go as planned. But that’s OK. In fact, it’s better than OK. It’s dance-party good.

When our plans don’t go as planned, it doesn't have to be the end of the world. Sometimes it’s just a different kind of pretty.

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Too often, I yelp and snarl when a surprise comes along to change my plans. I don’t WANT this or that to happen, I pout. I don’t want this rain, this train, this inconvenience, this intrusion. I don’t want to have to put the ham back in the fridge, not when I had it all figured out and knew what would make me happy and make life feel right.

And then the pout passes, and I realize everything is OK. Sometimes even better than OK.

I don’t know about you, but I spend way too much time in the pout phase. It’s too easy, and too tempting, to get so rooted in what I want and how I think things should go that I forget that the people around me have plans, too ― plans that slip out of their grasp and turn their lives topsy-turvy.

I fuss that my car ran out of gas or my wallet is empty or I have to wait in line or I can’t be as lazy as I’d like. Meanwhile, people around me are reeling from the real plan-changers. The abrupt door closures that smack you in the face. The surprises that knock the feet out from under you and leave you sprawled on the floor, gasping for air.

Yeah, sometimes when plans change without our say-so, we need a minute. Maybe our pout is little and silly, but it’s real, and the Heavenly Father who let nothing stand in the way of his plan of making us His is ready to listen to even our petty problems as we lay our heads on His lap and sigh a little sigh.

But we need to be ready, then, to hear his gentle urgings to get up and get going, looking past our own upset plans to see a world that needs us. A world of people who need to be seen, even when it inconveniences us to see them. A world aching for people willing to set their own plans aside to take a stand for what’s right and reach out a hand to those who need it.

Will that upset our plans? Absolutely. Being God’s hands and feet means you’re going to end up with a lot of droopy tulips. But, you know what? Droopy tulips are just a different kind of pretty.

And, once in a while, you even get to have a dance party.

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On this weekend after Easter, I find myself thinking about people who didn’t get to have an Easter dinner at all. Or a Monday dinner. Or a Tuesday dinner.

I think I’ll do some poking around online today to see who might need a donation of food that I could pick up next time I head to the grocery store. It’s not a be-all, end-all fix. But little actions add up to big things.

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To those of you who know my husband: I’m offering a candy bar to anyone who can get video of him doing his dance move. If he tells you he doesn’t HAVE a dance move, he’s lying. He does, and it’s adorable.

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To the new folks who have joined my blog mailing list since the last time I posted: Welcome! Not all my blog posts are about tulips and dance moves. Honestly, I’m not really sure WHAT they’re about. But I’m glad you’ve joined us. Here, I have some flowers for you.

The Writing on the Wall; or, how to live forever, sorta

Spring break demands adventure. So yesterday, the husband and I took our teenage son Jonah and his friend, Matthew, to check out some rocks an hour north of us.

(That ain't the kind of spring break revelry some envision, I grant you. But, hey. We’re a couple of middle-aged parents with a mortgage and knees that are starting to creak when we stand up. For us, looking at rocks is pretty good.)

I first heard of the Ledges in Grand Ledge from a woman who cut my hair last spring. I was looking for cool places to explore near our new home in Jackson. The Ledges ― I’m not sure if that's their official name or just what everyone calls them ― might be a good option, Kat suggested, snipping in the general vicinity of my head.

All summer I thought the next weekend might be the right time to give Kat’s suggestion a try, but months came and went and we never got around to it. Fall filled quickly, with its cross country meets and marching band extravaganzas, then winter with more running and drumming and busyness. 

When spring break rolled around and Jonah announced he and Matthew planned to go hiking, I was happy for them. When they invited us old folks to come along, I was even happier and suggested we finally make our Ledges outing happen.

We took the back roads, parents in front, singing along to bad 80s songs on the radio and talking about summer vacation plans, young people in the back, talking about whatever young people talk about. I was eager to get where we were going, having waited so long to see this place that looked so enticing in Google Maps photos, but the drive was a peaceful kind of slow, and good.

You can access the Ledges via an east trailhead or a west trailhead, but I’d been told the better option was to skip the -heads altogether and park on the north side of the Grand River, in Oak Park. We expected something more official-looking than the gravel parking lot and muddy grass spreading under a few trees, but when we trudged to the edge of the park and looked down, we knew we had hit the jackpot.

The Ledges is a misnomer, in my opinion. The striking feature of that part of the river is not ledges but cliffs. Vertical, thick, in some places shockingly smooth, in others bumpy and gnarled and creviced, the sandstone walls fall away from your feet as you stand on the top and rise enticingly above your head once you follow a treacherous set of steps to their bottom.

White scratch marks scaling the otherwise yellow-gray walls showed where professional climbers worked their Spider-Man magic and where climbing instructors, on sunnier days, urged novices to keep going. The cliffs aren’t extravagantly high ― in some spots, if the husband stood on my shoulders and our son stood on him, Jonah could have peeked over the top, except that by then I’d be sprawled on the ground like a four-limbed pancake.

On the ground nearby lay giant slabs of rock that had broken off of the cliffs years ago, landing with a thud I could still feel in my chest as I climbed on top of them.

Rivulets of water excused themselves as they trickled between our feet, easing their way out of some mysterious place in the cliffs in tiny, mossy waterfalls you had to bend over to examine closely. Under an especially bulky overhang, a portion of rock right at the base had worn away, crawling some 15 feet under the cliff until it formed a small cave where leftover firewood made my imagination boil with thoughts of dark nights and coyote howls and adventure.

Here and there, where the wall was smooth and had large expanses of bare space, hikers and climbers and other passers-by had scratched letters and words into the gritty surface of the rock. Names, sentences, illegible words and collections of letters, even a giant mermaid gave evidence that someone had been there, had marveled at the same cliffs, bent down to look at the same little waterfalls, imagined themselves in the same fire-lit cave.

One inscription, the only one I saw with a date, read “1931.” A time not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, but it felt old as I traced the numbers with my fingertips, wondering what the person who carved it was like, what they worried about, what they dreamed of, who they loved.

On a wall surrounded by other scratchings, a large heart encircled four letters, the lovers’ declaration frozen in time: “SB+SH.” I wondered if S and S still loved each other, or if they regretted that cliff carving, regretted that they had once believed love lasts forever.

The pocketknife I didn’t have with me itched in my pocket. I looked at the walls and the letters and the river and the people there with me and I wanted to make a mark that said I was there. A mark that said, in some tiny way, I exist, I see, I feel, I love. I am not nothing. I have stood next to this wall and smacked it with my hand and laid my cheek upon it and somehow that makes me real, a part of this world even though I am infinitely small and infinitely meaningless as the water keeps flowing and the wall keeps crumbling and people keep falling in love and growing old and turning to dust.

Leaning on the wall, its thickness blocking the wind that had made me pull my jacket tight when I was up at the top, I watched my husband take pictures and my son climb a stack of fallen slabs. Soon we would need to knock the mud off our shoes and pick up some subs and head home for track practice. For a moment, though, we were just there, separate but together among the cliffs, quietly being, and listening to geese squabble on the river.

Maybe I didn’t have my name on a rock. But I have made a mark on the world. I have given it my children, and they are the most extraordinary humans I know. I have taken up space, not always doing right by it, but sometimes making something better for someone else. I have loved people and they have loved me back, and I can’t ask for anything of greater or more lasting value than that. Not even if it were scratched on a cliff.

Before we left, I had to duck under a go-no-further cord and clamber over to the imposing leg of a railroad trestle, standing sentry at the edge of the water. It was rusted and crumbly and solid and steel and will last another 100 years, easy. 

One side of the metal was scrawled with more names, more letters from the past written by hands like mine, reaching out to me, connecting, speaking, existing.

I fished in my pocket and pulled out my car key. With its metal tip, I scratched my initials in the battleship-gray paint.

It won’t last forever. The paint will fade and chip away, disappearing into the river.

That’s OK. I’m here now. And I have people I love and work to do and back roads and bad 80s music and cats and a fireplace and maybe tacos for supper. Really, that’s all a person can ask for.

And it’s pretty doggone good.

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If you live in Jackson and need a good haircut, I recommend Kat at FiveOneSeven Salon. But don't tell her I sent you, because I went back to cutting my own hair and she'll be disappointed in me.

If you visit Grand Ledge to see the cliffs and need something to eat afterward, a grinder from Mancino's might take a while to make and not be all that spectacular, but the woman who takes your order is really nice.

If you are having a really bad day, or know someone who is, and need help dealing with it, you can call or text the national suicide and crisis lifeline any time for anonymous help. The number is 988, and they want you to call.