I'm up at my folks' house in Michigan and couldn't get on-line with my on-its-last-legs laptop, so some of these entries will be posted post-dated. Besides, the whole wide world doesn't need to know that my apartment is currently unguarded and unoccupied, until it's not.
I got in late Saturday night, after a pretty smooth flight. I took public transit out to LaGuardia after one of the local livery guys tried to charge me $45 for a fifteen minute ride from Parkchester. It was actually a pretty easy ride, if you don't have a lot of luggage. Not like the train to the plane or anything, but still not bad. Mom and I will probably take a taxi home, since we're getting in late and won't be much traffic.
Sally picked me up at the airport and brought me a fabulous dinner which totally cracked me up. She went home from work and made an amazing mushroom and tomato tart with a mushroom and breadcrumb crust, a lovely pork roast with new potatoes and collard greens, and then brought it all to me still warm on a tray, with a glass of wine in her car. Beats airline food! We drove home the back way to avoid all the construction on US 23 and narrowly missed a skunk in the road, which would not have gone well with either the food or the wine.
Got up around ten this morning and pottered around the house with Mom and Dad most of the day. Put her stereo together, listened to some jazz then took a walk this afternoon, from across the street at the lake (as opposed to the Lake, which is Lake Huron) up the road to the "dam" which is really just a couple of spillways that drain into the little creek that's the outlet for Cedar Lake that drains into Lake Huron, about a mile away and after much meandering through the woods. The creek was of course called Indian Creek by all the kids I played with, and there was a road in the more or less defunct subdivision, Timberlakes, through which it ran called Indian Creek Road, but I think we thought of the name first. I sort of remember a bunch of us following the creek through the woods from Cedar Lake to the Big Lake, though it went through some pretty tangled undergrowth, and coming across the sunken remains of a little log bridge someone had built at one time, long before the subdivision was there. These many years later, I'm still not sure whether that was a dream I had or if it actually happened, but the bridge has remained a vivid image in my mind.
The comfortable and yet kind of spooky thing about Timberlakes is that it doesn't change much. It never really took off the way Lakewood Shores did, so it's almost a ghost subdivision, scattered with just a few houses, none of them conforming to any master plan. Not all of the roads are either inhabited or paved anymore, and several have signs saying "Seasonal Road. Not plowed by Alcona County Road Crews." They're still kept neat and mowed, the old log fences in the traffic circles have been removed when they deteriorated too badly, but no one uses either the boat club on Cedar Lake which faces my folks' house, or the beach club on Lake Huron, which is twice as big and used to be a disco when we were in High School, and it's strange to see it slowly but surely going back to the wild. In the greenway in the middle of one of the lesser used and uninhabited roads that opens onto the road my parents live on, the small pine tress planted there have grown into enormous conical evergreens that overshadow and almost block the road. The place is full of deer and animals and birds. I saw two big ravens hopping around the entrance to one road, and there were squirrels scolding at me everywhere.
Walking along, I began to see Tolkien's landscape overlaid on my childhood landscape as it had been when I'd first read the books. I was about 13 when I first read Lord of the Rings and had been playing in these woods and walking the trails through them for years by then. Parts of the woods here are very thick and reminded me then (and now) of Mirkwood or the Old Forest. Black squirrels are ubiquitous up here the way they are in Mirkwood, though I don't remember any big willows or spiders, happily. The trees aren't as big as I imagine they would be in Tolkien's old growth forests, either, but they seemed enormous enough when I was a kid and have grown enough now to make what was once my sunny room at the back of the house a bit dank and dark. I used to wake up with light dappling the spread (the room faces east) and now it doesn't get sunny until late morning or early afternoon. Things change slowly up here, at about the pace trees grow, as opposed to New York, where you can be gone for a week and half of your block will have changed.
So the fall weather smells the same as it ever has: cool and fresh with an undertone of the decay that's just beginning. There's not much color in the trees yet, which is surprising, but I guess that's because it's been a dry fall. A few of the maples have turned a brilliant red, and one or two birches are turning bright yellow, but the oaks are still green and not many leaves have fallen yet. There were milkweed pods bare along the roadside, but no cattails, and the ferns have all gone brown now. It's a good season to go through the trails because there aren't any mosquitos now. I'll have to do that before I leave again. Last time I did it it was spring and buggy and I couldn't stroll through the way I wanted to. I'll revist my favorite trail before I leave. Unfortunately, there will be no Ents.
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