Eagle Harbor

I never went back. Though in my mind I am always going back. To the place my once husband gave me, which his family gave me, the Keweenaw. Crooked finger on the Upper Peninsula, Michigan’s maiden aunt, taking her tea. Past relatives in Houghton parked on steep hills, past abandoned mineshafts, ghost towns, tourist traps selling geodes and copper bracelets. Along the Superior shore, its rocks and its stamp sand. To the busman’s holiday afforded a minister and his family by the Episcopal Church of Saint Peter’s by the Sea, now just a summer chapel, though old-timers still had homes there, still welcomed their grandchildren to what would become the family cottage when they died. A slower pace, in a different space, year after year; but after, I never went back. To the big freighters on the horizon. To the eagle sightings, never up close. My animal was not the eagle. My animal was the chipmunk, all nerve and scuttle between the rocks. My animal expected to be prey. How could I go back? To my prayer walk in the mornings, before the children knew I was up. Monarchs and swallowtails flitting among beach peas and black-eyed Susans, mason bees mud-nesting, mining bees the only miners left. Blueberries wild in the cemetery, thimbleberries by the roadside, soldier beetles in the goldenrod. The sound of waves lapping on the sand, the treasures found there: driftwood and beach glass, agates in the rough. Did I find God on those walks? I found solitude. I could hear myself think. For a time, this proved God enough.