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.