Mackinac Island, a necessary breath in our life right now. When Barry’s workplace offered to take a busload, Word Raccoon tapped me on the shoulder and asked to go. Anything for WR.  

We packed too many snacks, not enough caffeine, and a firm resolve to stay politely aloof from the group tour energy—until Word Raccoon got into the pecan fudge and all bets were off. Horses clattered, carriages swayed, and wild trillium bloomed by the hundreds. These are my notes from the weekend: part travelogue, part memory, part sugar crash.

We kicked off our Mackinac Island trip with a travel day that felt equal parts midwestern fever dream and sitcom B-roll.

We boarded a charter bus with 44 other eager travelers and settled in for five rounds of bingo (none of which I won and usually I’m a very lucky person, so maybe I should’ve seen that lumpy hotel bed coming later in the evening) and the first twenty minutes of National Treasure, which ended abruptly when we stopped for lunch and never resumed. I’m still wondering what happened to the Declaration of Independence. (I actually know; I’ve watched it. Obv.)

Lunch was at a folksy roadside stop inside what used to be a Burger King play place. I could almost smell the ghosts of ball pits past, but that didn’t stop us from ordering surprisingly great sandwiches: a Reuben for me that could’ve fed two, a crispy fish sandwich for Barry I tried not to gag at when I saw it came with tomato.

I adore tomatoes, y’all, they’re practically a religion to me. But on fish? No thank you. That’s heresy.

When we spotted a solo booth at lunch, we sprinted for it like it was a Black Friday sale. Everyone on the trip was lovely, but Barry and I had made a quiet pact—not to get too chatty. We had an island agenda and didn’t want to be absorbed into the group cruise vibe. (Hey, Word Raccoon knows what she needs. She’s not unfriendly, she just knows when she needs a break and to pre-grieve.)

At check-in at the hotel, I guarded the luggage as it came out from under the bus while Barry dashed inside. We’ve got a system. Still, the front desk assigned us two queen beds instead of the king we’d requested. I said it was fine since I am adaptable, but if only the queen had been somewhat comfortable and not a runner up for the worst mattress my back has ever known.

After a quiet pizza night of recuperation, we slept in. We’d seen the forecast: cold winds incoming. So I bundled up—coat, scarf, gloves—and we asked the hotel to call a shuttle to take us to Shepler’s Ferry.

Turns out, having a ticket waiting for you does not mean you skip the line. No, you stand in it for half an hour like everyone else, just with a ticket in your hand instead of on an app. SMH.

Still, the ride over was fun, rain spattered.

Once on the island proper, we made the only logical first choice: a fudge run. Because even though I know better, I didn’t pack snacks, and we were trying to grab a carriage tour (which, of course, you cannot reserve ahead of time) and thus did not want to eat a proper meal until after. So we shared bites of pecan fudge like two sugar-starved fugitives. Was it a questionable snack? Yes. Was it also exactly what I needed? Also yes.

What the fudge did not solve was my lack of caffeine. The hotel coffee had been appalling—muddy water with a dash of bitterness, like someone had run a breakup through a Mr. Coffee. And in an uncharacteristic packing misstep, we had plenty of snacks that I for some reason did not transfer to my purse for the trip to the actual island the next day either but no drinks. With no convenience store in sight and the hotel offering zero caffeine options except that coffee, we ducked into a nearby restaurant on the island for lunch to make up for the deficiency.

I ordered brisket tacos, which I’d generously call “tourist tacos.” Not prefab, thankfully, but aggressively vinegary—as if someone had mistaken acidity for sophistication. Barry had a smash burger he declared very good. But it was a burger, so… there’s only so much lyricism I can summon for that. (Except to say burgers are their own food group. I have sophisticated tastes in some areas, and I’ve eaten food from around the world, and I am adventurous but also, burgers are life.)

Most importantly, they had Coke Zero, the official drink of Word Raccoon and me.

We opted for the scenic carriage tour because we were tourists, and it seemed wrong to leave the island without sitting behind a horse for at least part of the day. It was just us, three horses, a guide, and 35 of our closest strangers. (Technically, the first carriage had two horses and maybe a dozen or so people—twelve? fifteen? It’s hard to count discreetly and it doesn’t matter to you except I’m a counter. Eek, Word Raccoon, they don’t need to know that!)

The ride was charming in that “I’m doing this for the story” kind of way. The guide was cheerful, the horses majestic, and the scenery was lovely in the quiet, cedar-shadowed kind of way that sneaks up on you. Every now and then the driver would stop to give the horses a breath, and while we paused, he’d share trivia or open the floor to questions.

I almost always had questions. But I stayed quiet because I’m usually too curious for my own good. I didn’t want to be thrown off the carriage by the others.

Then the tour turned uncanny.

We began to pass clusters of trilliums—my favorite wildflower from back home in West Virginia. When I was a kid, whole hillsides would go white with them in spring. Seeing them again here, blooming in cool shade, something in me cracked open. I thought I should count them. Then write that many poems. But before I could get past twenty, I lost track. There were hundreds. The idea stuck anyway—a dare from the woods. Write as many poems as you need to. (See, you were going to tell them about the counting anyway!)

I remember gathering a bouquet of them from the mountainside for my mother for Easter morning once. They were exquisite. They are also protected, but I didn’t know that back then and maybe they weren’t then. Not sure.

Endangered now, as my mother is.

And then there was Arch Rock on the island, rising out of limestone and lake air, older than everything else we’d seen that day. The wind came through it like breath. It was crowded. It was the kind of place you’d want to be alone to truly feel it.

Need I even mention the lakes? Ah! Majestic.

By the time the tour ended, I was full of feelings I wasn’t quite ready to name. That’s when Word Raccoon reemerged, completely unbothered and absolutely high on fudge. She popped out of my tote bag, sticky-fingered and smug, like she’d just pickpocketed a pastry chef.

She was unimpressed with my trillium reverie, how dare she. She wanted to know where the real coffee was and whether we could sneak into the Grand Hotel gift shop and buy a magnet without paying admission. Then she left a chocolate thumbprint on my notebook and said, “You write the poems. I’ll steal the metaphors.”

Which, fair. Fine.

On the way home, she refused to sit quietly while I read because she wanted to write poetry.

“Why,” came her question, “read The God of Small Things on a moving bus full of the sound of rustling chip bags and soda bottles being screwed off and on when writing is clearly the correct choice?”

She has never swum in the silky waters of that book. Poetic, lyrical. Confusing but in a good way, because you know you’re going to have to be clever to figure it out. “A bee died in a funeral flower,” I quoted. WR didn’t care. She wanted to write, not read.

The beautiful parts: The spider, the garlic skin, the whispered “Tomorrow” are not random details, and she doesn’t get that. In The God of Small Things, these are the kinds of images where everything lives. Love, memory, grief are all distilled into gestures so small they nearly vanish. Metaphors so sharp and tender they might as well have initials carved into them. The book returns to this again and again: the world may be cruel, but love survives through attention. Through tiny, precise noticing. Sometimes “I see you” is best said sideways, through proof of life through the survival of spiders.

Word Raccoon muttered something that may have included the word “masochist” and disappeared again beneath her scarf. Possibly converted. Possibly just plotting a snack. Definitely not reading with me. Traitor.

I finished the book before the trip’s end, frustrated that I hadn’t given more time to this book that would surely reward a re-reading. But I’m all writing energy right now, not so much reading. Except the Twain bio I’m reading by Ron Chernow. I’m only a few pages in, but it’s absorbing.

I did manage to write a few poems on the trip—some full, some still in stub form. That’s what I call the underdeveloped ones: stubs. Not quite poems yet, just sharp little nuggets lodged in my brain.

Titles from the weekend include:

• List of Items I’ve Apparently Bought to Leave on the Ferry and in Taxi Cabs
• On Reading a Book I Don’t Want To (It’s Me, Not You)
• Nobody Teaches You the Essentials (How to K!ll If You Have To)
• Random White Girl
• I Don’t Like Old Man Liquor Stores
• Extra Hotel Bed: a History

Some stubs stayed stubby. Others came out already sharpened. Like this one, from a moment so fast I almost didn’t notice—except, of course, I did. I don’t know where these things come from (I can tell you where the details come from, but not why they join one another like a patchwork quilt. I wrote a poem in bed last night about a YouTube short I saw talking about a Pompeiian slave with a gold bracelet weighing a pound on her wrist given to her, the engraving said, by her master. That just didn’t sit right with me, so I explored it with my pen.

Then there was this little freak below. I saw the random white girl in the ferry line; I didn’t see Amelia. I would’ve said so if I had.

Random White Girl
Beige clip
Black jacket
Forgettable face
Climbs the line
As if part of a group
She’s not.

She’s as solo as

Amelia Earhart’s last flight.

Gotta get me a
Beige clip
Or a forgettable face.

Yeah, right.

No one counts Noonan.

What got me, maybe more than anything, was the silence. Streets without cars. No horns, no revving engines—just footsteps, bicycles, and the occasional clop of hooves. The sound of a town paced for presence, not speed.

My dream, basically.

Then…we came home. Oh reader, I’m not trying to trick you into reading this, but here’s where things fall apart. Or maybe I do. I’ve been yammering on, not wanting to face this.

I fear the time has come to tell you that my mother’s health is going steadily downhill, and that numb/painful feeling from not so long ago when we had to say goodbye to my sister is returning after a weekend away with the knowledge that it’s creeping closer, her eventual resting place beside my father, beneath that beautiful bench in the Laketon Cemetery in the plot that has accidentally become a family plot, all too soon I fear will be occupied.

I sit on that bench and talk to him sometimes. I tell him I’m sure I’m boring him, but I’m going to “catch him up” anyway. Funny thing is—I leave out the hardest parts. Like I wouldn’t want to burden him in the afterlife.

My sister, then a space yet for my mother, then my father beside his sister (they adored one another), then my aunt’s husband, a man given to woodworking. When we left West Virginia behind, we left the family cemetery, too, never thinking about us needing another.

I foresee sleepless nights ahead for myself, too many poems written, good, bad, and in-between, too many blogposts, too many books read, any place to lay my head other than this certain, sure knowledge that be it now or in the coming weeks, it’s coming, and it may well take my breath for a day or two or three…forgive me if I’m self-indulgent over here. I want to surround myself with all of the things and people I love, the things that always make me happy.

Come find me, even if you think what I need is silence.

I know how to keep from drowning, but just. (Not trying to sound dramatic. I really can tread like nobody’s business. I just don’t want to have to.)