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This past weekend we went to South Haven, Michigan for friends' wedding. Despite tons of weekend traffic and construction on the highway, we got there right on time....except for the fact that Michigan is an eastern time zone state. Oops. This meant we got there right on time for the wedding, but an hour late for when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dommeyourass needed to be there since she was reading part of the service. The weather was a bit choppy and changeable all morning, but by the mid-afternoon it cleared up perfectly, and we sat in folding chairs on green back lawn overlooking a bluff, with the backdrop of Lake Michigan behind the bride and bride. It was a fairly lesbionic wedding, but in all the good ways, not the painfully awkward ways. And yes, I cried. A lot. But c'mon, someone read Mary Oliver's Wild Geese early on and I knew I was done for after that.
Later that evening, after dinner and checking into the hotel and changing clothes, we went back to the house and watched the sunset over the water. Its funny how driving 100ish miled can completely flip your perspective on the time and space of the world, not just with the time change, but more with the sun setting on the water, rather than rising up on it, as it does here for us in Chicago. My internal compass is usually tuned not to the magnetic fields of the north, but to whatever direction a significant body of water is. I would be screwed if I lived in Kansas.
I watched most of the sunset alone, away from the cheesey dance music and the bugs and the children and chatter of adults, poking along the beach and looking for rocks, as I am wont to do, and the scattered thunderstorms from the west were coming towards us -- not dark ominous clouds, but smaller grey ones that looked like misty fingers touching the surface of water. They moved in front of the sun as it got lower, but I walked fifty yards up the beach to a piece of driftwood and sat down and could see the glowing orange perfectly, just on the other side of the clouds. Occasionally I would see lightning flash a few inches to its left, which was surreal. Especially since it was only the night before that I got home around midnight and was standing in our middle room, looking out the south-facing window at the clear sky and the near-full moon, then I walked a few feet to the east-facing window in the bedroom and saw lightning approaching there. Weather has been strange lately all over. I knew I would end up writing about it here, even though I don't really like reading about weather, if I can't experience it directly, I prefer paintings or photos of it, I suppose.
While in Michigan, before coming home on Sunday morning, we cruised around to check out all the houses for sale, we're not looking to buy right away, but we are plotting, scheming, looking, fantasizing. We found one house that was breathtaking. A 1950s yellow house in immaculate condition, with enclosed porches in the front and back. Between the house and the road was two acres of a maple tree grove. This house, like the one rented for the wedding, was also on a bluff up against its own private beach. It was for sale and it was empty, probably someone's seasonal home, and so we traipsed around, nervously at first, then getting more bold we wandered, the more we talked about all the things we loved about it. We knew it was too soon on our timeline, it would be expensive. We wrote down the info anyway. 'Its probably a million dollar home.' But the market is bad. Maybe its been on sale for awhile and it would have cut the price drastically. Maybe it would be close. Maybe it would be tantalizingly close to our range and we'd just be torturing ourselves. Maybe I could work full-time for a year or two and make it happen. Maybe, maybe. We got home and I looked it up and immediately started laughing. Cackling, really.
"How much do you think it is?"
"$1 million?"
"Try $3.6 million."
Well, so much for that dream.
Coming back home, I keep thinking about Virginia Woolf and her struggle with how the city overwhelmed her and made her anxious with its stimuli, but the country could be equally maddening with its silence and space. Right now, I'm longing for that silence and space, so I don't feel the latter, but I understand the mixed reaction to the city. Everything I love about it is also what can sometimes overwhelm my daily existence.
dommeyourass needed to be there since she was reading part of the service. The weather was a bit choppy and changeable all morning, but by the mid-afternoon it cleared up perfectly, and we sat in folding chairs on green back lawn overlooking a bluff, with the backdrop of Lake Michigan behind the bride and bride. It was a fairly lesbionic wedding, but in all the good ways, not the painfully awkward ways. And yes, I cried. A lot. But c'mon, someone read Mary Oliver's Wild Geese early on and I knew I was done for after that.Later that evening, after dinner and checking into the hotel and changing clothes, we went back to the house and watched the sunset over the water. Its funny how driving 100ish miled can completely flip your perspective on the time and space of the world, not just with the time change, but more with the sun setting on the water, rather than rising up on it, as it does here for us in Chicago. My internal compass is usually tuned not to the magnetic fields of the north, but to whatever direction a significant body of water is. I would be screwed if I lived in Kansas.
I watched most of the sunset alone, away from the cheesey dance music and the bugs and the children and chatter of adults, poking along the beach and looking for rocks, as I am wont to do, and the scattered thunderstorms from the west were coming towards us -- not dark ominous clouds, but smaller grey ones that looked like misty fingers touching the surface of water. They moved in front of the sun as it got lower, but I walked fifty yards up the beach to a piece of driftwood and sat down and could see the glowing orange perfectly, just on the other side of the clouds. Occasionally I would see lightning flash a few inches to its left, which was surreal. Especially since it was only the night before that I got home around midnight and was standing in our middle room, looking out the south-facing window at the clear sky and the near-full moon, then I walked a few feet to the east-facing window in the bedroom and saw lightning approaching there. Weather has been strange lately all over. I knew I would end up writing about it here, even though I don't really like reading about weather, if I can't experience it directly, I prefer paintings or photos of it, I suppose.
While in Michigan, before coming home on Sunday morning, we cruised around to check out all the houses for sale, we're not looking to buy right away, but we are plotting, scheming, looking, fantasizing. We found one house that was breathtaking. A 1950s yellow house in immaculate condition, with enclosed porches in the front and back. Between the house and the road was two acres of a maple tree grove. This house, like the one rented for the wedding, was also on a bluff up against its own private beach. It was for sale and it was empty, probably someone's seasonal home, and so we traipsed around, nervously at first, then getting more bold we wandered, the more we talked about all the things we loved about it. We knew it was too soon on our timeline, it would be expensive. We wrote down the info anyway. 'Its probably a million dollar home.' But the market is bad. Maybe its been on sale for awhile and it would have cut the price drastically. Maybe it would be close. Maybe it would be tantalizingly close to our range and we'd just be torturing ourselves. Maybe I could work full-time for a year or two and make it happen. Maybe, maybe. We got home and I looked it up and immediately started laughing. Cackling, really.
"How much do you think it is?"
"$1 million?"
"Try $3.6 million."
Well, so much for that dream.
Coming back home, I keep thinking about Virginia Woolf and her struggle with how the city overwhelmed her and made her anxious with its stimuli, but the country could be equally maddening with its silence and space. Right now, I'm longing for that silence and space, so I don't feel the latter, but I understand the mixed reaction to the city. Everything I love about it is also what can sometimes overwhelm my daily existence.
