ANNUAL MIGRATION

ANNUAL MIGRATION

     

     When I started my blog back in September I truly intended it as a place for reminiscing, ruminating, thinking about the past, about my parents, about les neiges d’antan. But then I got caught up in the heartbreak on our Texas border with Mexico and the asylum seekers and volunteering with World Central Kitchen, and then this spring the world was hit with covid-19 and everything stopped. 

     In the months since then—three long months of quarantining—my book came out, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming, at a time when bookstores were closed and the multiple book events planned for the summer were canceled or deferred.  And so this blog stopped its ruminations and instead told bits and pieces of the stories of the twenty amazing women in that book, their stories, not mine. And I will continue that until I have presented all twenty, but today, with my front hall filled with the boxes that will accompany me on my annual migration from New Rochelle to my Long Lake cottage—including two cartons filled with copies of that book--I will indulge in a little rumination about those migrations.

     Keeping my birdfeeder generously filled with sunflower seeds always opens my eyes to the changing season as migrating birds stop off, now a goldfinch, now a red-winged blackbird, now an oriole, welcome but transient visitors on their journey northward to their summer homes.

I’m grateful to the constant residential birds, cardinals, blue jays, woodpeckers, and of course the myriad little sparrows and finches, because they never leave so long as I continue to provide for them.  One ambitious pair of house sparrows has been building a nest on one side of the feeder.  Will there ever be eggs in that nest?  It has been growing ever larger for two months now, and it’s clear over the past few days as the male or female dives into the great hollow at its center, that they are now bringing carefully selected small supplies to line that center.  I hope that will soon mean eggs, and then chicks.  Very soon, or I will miss them, because I will be leaving soon for my own migration.

     Every June I migrate north and west to my lakeside cottage near Traverse City, Michigan.  That trip is as much a part of my DNA as the migratory impulse for the transient birds or for the monarch butterflies, with many of the latter also journeying to northwestern Michigan all the way from Michoacàn in Mexico.

     My earliest childhood memories include the same long drive with my mother at the wheel, I and my four big sisters crowded into our station wagon along with a half dozen standard poodles and sometimes even a large bird cage with our African grey parrot, Bella. The highways were less developed then.  Starting out from our home in Baltimore we’d traverse the Pennsylvania Turnpike holding our breath as we went through those long dark tunnels, making pit stops always at a Howard Johnson restaurant.

     The turnpike ended before Pittsburgh, and my mother, with one of us following the AAA triptik map and directions, had to navigate that city and its polluted air, in those years almost as impenetrable as the London smog described by Dickens. Our goal was to reach Cleveland in time to load our car with girls, dogs, and parrot, onto a ferry that would transport us overnight across Lake Erie. Disembarking early the next morning in Detroit, our mother would seek out another Howard Johnson for breakfast, and then head on north to our lake, the cottage built for us in 1946 where we would spend long leisurely summers swimming, fishing, turtleing, riding horseback, exploring the five islands on our lake, or happily reading.  Life was very good. World War II had ended.  The good guys had won though at devastating cost across the globe. Here at home returning soldiers were welcomed with ticker tape parades and, more important, with the GI bill.

     In those long gone days the lake was a quiet place, no water skiers, no jet skis, no powerful motorboats speeding from one end of the lake to the other.  The few boats venturing out belonged to local Sunday fisherfolk with motors rarely exceeding 4-5 horsepower.  I still own one such motor, scorned now by children and grandchildren, though not by me.

     Bill Gates and the other whiz kids hadn’t yet invented computers.  Our telephone was a quirky, unreliable party line. We had no modern appliances like dishwashers, not even a washer or drier. A local woman came weekly to carry away our dirty laundry in her big basket and to return the previous week’s laundry, clean and smelling of sunshine from open air drying. Life was very good.

     Life will be very good when I get to my cottage this June—not my mother’s cottage, my sister inherited that one--but my own, built in 1967 with my then husband, summered in ever since then with my three children and later with my grandchildren. With no TV in the house and no longer a landline—party or private—just my cell phone, it’s still possible to escape from the noise of the outside world, although of course it’s all there on display on my computer screen any time I’m willing to look. And in this tragic year of the 2020 pandemic—a scant century after the 1918 pandemic—I have to look, have to share messages on Facebook, have to donate to myriad desperate causes, have to urge everyone to wake up and vote in every election, local and of course, God help us, national and presidential in November.

     But what matters is the journey, the migration, the homecoming, something that I shared with my kids until they married and moved out, and also with the animals who lived with me and traveled with me over the decades.  Until they died of old age a couple of years ago I had two amazing cats, their homing instinct as sharp as Lassie’s.  I would put them in my car each spring here in New Rochelle, their familiar haunt for 9 months of the year.  They rode loose, not in any kind of carrier, but no one would have known they were in the car because, once on board, they dove under the seats, terrified by the noise and motion of passing cars and trucks.

     And each year as I pulled off N. Long Lake Road onto the entrance to the woods, still more than a half mile distant from the lake and my cottage, they would emerge and ride in the front seat with me, sometimes reaching up to look out the windshield.  The reverse was also true.  Heading back east from Michigan, they disappeared into that safe cave under the seats until, once again, they recognized the turn onto the street where we live in the winter months.  I was always amazed, but they never failed in this.  Like me, they recognized two homes, and like me, they loved them both, and like me, they did NOT enjoy the long migratory drive that separates the two existences. Two long days to cover almost 1,000 miles is increasingly daunting with every passing year, but such joy in arriving!  Vaut le voyage.

     One final word about New Rochelle, the starting place for my migration, the town where I have lived for 50 years, where I raised my children.  New Rochelle is now infamous internationally as the first covid “hot spot,” undeserved fame because had that unfortunate lawyer who unintentionally spread the virus to hundreds as he attended a couple of religious and/or festive gatherings lived a mile or two to the north or the east or the west it would have been Scarsdale or Bronxville or Larchmont or even the Bronx to receive such attention.  But he lived in New Rochelle, and so my city is infamous.

Last night there was another tragedy, a man shot and killed here by a policeman as he ran away from his car, a familiar scenario in many places in our nation, but not in New Rochelle.  It’s too early to know his history, why he was there, why he ran, why the police shot at him, but what I learned this morning increased my pride in New Rochelle at the same time that I grieved for the death and, once more, for bad news from my city. This is the first time in seven whole years that a policeman has shot someone here.  Given what we have been watching all week across the nation, that is an extraordinary record. I take comfort where I can find it these days while the virus continues and the unemployment and the racism. 

     I am proud to live in two states that have strong governors whose top priority has been to save lives, to contain the spread of the virus. Cuomo and Whitmer both stood their ground under attack, and the dramatic reduction in new cases and in deaths vindicates their actions. The majority of New Yorkers and Michiganders observed the protocols even while they grumbled. This chart from June 5 says it all.

     We will get through this. Where we are now is not who we are, not who we want to be, but that better self is still there and still strong and in the words of the 60s, We Shall Overcome.