along the road

I know that my chronology is all shot to hell her at 550. Apparently I’m not abiding calendrical time very well. But you’ll just have to take what I can offer in fits and starts. The start tonight is getting my “honeymoon” pictures a bit organized. And those aren’t errant quotation marks, either. Our post-wedding get-a-way wasn’t your typical drinking-sweet-cocktails-with little-umbrellas-in-the-Caribbean kind of trip. Instead we drove 420 miles north of the wedding to Jacobsville, Michigan, a nearly uninhabited hamlet on the Keweenaw Peninsula. My mom and her husband own an old strawberry farm—or at least the farmhouse—on the top of some pretty majestic red rock cliffs.

I’ve been there before, and in the past, I’ve found something to renew myself along the slow dirt roads and in Superior’s icy waves. This time, though, was different. I was different. I was so—so, so, so, so—anxious about the wedding that I had imagined once it was over, I would be able to blissfully relax, to let it all go. This is what J did and boy did it look nice.

I should have known, knowing me, that it wouldn’t really feel like that in my head. Instead, my wedding anxiety followed us, transformed now into a feelings of terror and guilt that I hadn’t thanked all the people who had helped us have such a lovely day. I just couldn’t let it go. All of these people, people I love, had given so much and I worried that they were seething with rage because I hadn’t thanked them enough or in the right way. And so here we were in the middle of summer’s awesome beauty and all I could do was draft appropriately conciliatory thank you notes in my head. Even recounting it now makes me worry about my sanity.

As J read on the hammock, alternating mysteries with “real” novels and catnaps, I had to find a way to redirect my anxiety (how else can I account for thirty years of handwork?). So I started looking, really looking at our place on Red Rock Road. In looking through the viewfinder of my camera, in finding parallel lines and brocaded landscapes, aging fonts and glistening steel, I started to unwind. I wandered through the little sleeping cabins and newly-painted sauna looking for vestiges of former visitors. I found yellowing Life magazines from the ‘50s and an alabaster Buddha perched cliffside. Mostly I found colors and patterns, traces of light and shadow. Looking closely around me, I started to feel the energy, the anxiety petering out. I just need about a month instead of a week. Next time.