home sweet home

Thirteen hours ago, I was here:

And you thought I was joking when I called Michigan “The Great White North.”

Sorry I’ve been delinquent about posting . . . Thanksgiving break from the ‘Bub was a bit of a whirlwind. I was all over the state of Michigan to see my loved ones and enjoying myself too much to remember to take a lot of photos. But here’s the quick and dirty version, from the beginning:

Tuesday night I rolled in to Grand Rapids’
beautiful Gerald R. Ford International Airport.

Everyone waiting for their baggage looked cold and pasty, and I ruminated on how 18 years of near-solid cloud cover has probably irrevocably affected my personality (West Michigan is generally lauded as the 2nd cloudiest place in the U.S., behind Seattle!).

Wednesday morning I slept in late, hung out with my Dad and then headed to Ann Arbor to see my few friends who are still left in town. For dinner I ate sushi with Matt and Alanna:

And afterwards my old roommate, Emily, and I headed over to Old Town, ye old favorite watering hole, where I had at least one too many Long Islands while reminiscing about the good old days. The next morning John drove into town from Detroit (via Baltimore, where he just started his AWESOME NEW JOB as a radio producer . . . belated public congrats on that). We enjoyed a quick cup of coffee and then I headed back to Grand Rapids for a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with my folks.

Mom had work off on Friday, so we made a quick shoe-shopping stop before my very dear friend and potential domestic partner, Mike, drove in from his parents’ house in Kalamazoo. We met up with my other ex-roommate, Andrew, who we found wandering in the parking lot of East Grand Rapids’ Middle School with skewerfuls of marinated meatballs he had brought for us.

The three of us headed downtown to Founders’ Brewery for a couple of pints and a few games of Erotic Photo Hunt at the Black Rose. After dropping Andrew at his parents’ (I had to keep the door-lock button pressed to prevent him from trying to roll out of the backseat at 30+ mph), Mike and I stopped by a party at my friend Vlad’s old apartment, where his brother is currently living.

This is Vlad. BIG HEARTS.

I’ve only recently realized that I don’t keep in touch with any of the friends I made before starting high school. Though Vlad and I somehow ended up graduating together as two of the nine Comparative Literature majors at Michigan, we actually met NINE years ago, in the ninth grade. This makes Vlad my oldest friend.

After hearing about the woes of his life as Ph.D. candidate in Slavic languages, and hanging out in a pretty amazing room-size blanket-fort, Mike and I headed back to my parents’ house for the first sleepover party I’ve had since I was 16! Of course, we did it up college-style (cheap wine, coffee mugs) and basically passed out on the living room floor watching old episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

After Mike headed home to Chicago on Saturday morning, my parents and I went to see Todd Haynes’ latest masterpiece, I’m Not There, which was thoroughly thought-provoking and probably one of the prettiest films I’ve seen in a long time. I loved it. For the rest of the night and most of Sunday I just hung out with Mom and Dad and ate a lot of delicious home-cooked food.

Sunday night I headed way up north to visit Marshall where he’s currently living in Harbor Springs. It was cold, but Lake Michigan was still very beautiful and there was more than enough firewood to keep the fireplace glowing.

We did a lot of catching up, played some Scrabble, watched Planet Unicorn on YouTube, and made a delicious dinner on Monday (though the low point of the week was probably when, while pureeing boiled squash to make soup, the blender lid came off and spewed scalding hot squash-goo all over Marshall’s kitchen and my left arm, burning me pretty badly). I drank a lot of scotch to try and kill the pain, which was only moderately successful, and was probably also the reason why I woke up groggy and slightly hungover on Tuesday morning.

Though there was no snow when I got up around 7, by the time 8 o’clock rolled around it was a downright blizzard!

I got an unexpected crash refresher-course in snow-driving, which was actually a lot of fun, and made me feel strangely more at home than I had all week. It took me four hours to get back to Grand Rapids, where I headed straight for the airport. After nearly thirteen hours of driving, flying, coffee-drinking, intermittent nodding-off, and waiting for maintenance crews to fix malfunctioning aircraft, I was met by the smiling faces of my Hub-Bubble family who drove me home and served up a different kind of home-cooked meal.

So, here we are, home again, home again, I guess. Though all of this traveling has me wondering where home really is anymore. Basically, if “home is where the heart is,” then I’m totally homeless, wandering around with a roll of duct tape and a glue stick, trying to gather the scattered pieces of my little heart and rebuild them into a big, warm house in which everyone I care about will fit. How’s that for melodrama?

What this trip DID remind me of, however, is that though I often chalk my sentimentality for Michigan up to the people I love who still live there, it is also simply a beautiful place, teeming with gorgeous landscapes, water, sand and seasons. Also, I was reminded of how much I like traveling - and I don’t necessarily mean “seeing the world.” I like thinking while I’m driving alone in the car. I like watching strangers from god-knows-where heading to their respective foreign destinations as they pass through the airport lobby. I like that one morning I can be on one side of the country, and on the other side the next. As Amy Hempel put it in Tonight is a Favor to Holly:

“Four days a week I drive to La Mirada, to the travel agency where I have a job. It takes me fifty-five minutes to drive one way, and I wish the commute were longer. I like radio personalities, and I like to change lanes. And losing yourself on the freeway is like living at the beach - you’re not aware of lapsed time, and suddenly you’re there, where it was you were going.”