Not Rich, But Lucky

When we tell people we own a house on Lake Superior, they think we’re rich.

We’re not rich, but we are lucky.

We are also old and our oldness is making owning a house on Lake Superior more of a challenge than it once was.

For years, I had the goal of spending an entire winter here. It would mean being snowed in, pretty much all the time, unless we hired a guy to come plow us out – not every day, maybe a couple of times a day, because the snow falls here but then it blows. It’s the blowing and drifting that is life threatening along with the thinking that one can walk through or over all the snow to get to the store or to the truck. Knee-deep. Thigh-high. I’ve been in snow that deep and that struggle along with the northwest wind off the lake nearly made me keel over on the spot, panting and seeing my life flash before me.

I had a friend once who spent a whole winter alone in her house on Lake Superior, writing and knitting, getting into town on her snowmobile, doing just fine until she broke her leg and had to call Uncle! and have the volunteer fire department come haul her out. She was as embarrassed by this as she was proud, having made it most of the way. She did tell me, and I thought this was interesting, that she wasn’t nearly as creative as she thought she’d be, having all that time alone and stranded. She was disappointed, on top of breaking her leg. A sad business.

“We’re never going to spend the winter up here. It’s not on the list anymore.” I said this to my husband while we were walking our dogs in Munising, a 45 mile trip through the woods from where our Lake Superior house is. And just like that, I gave that idea up.

Of all the things there are to do, I can’t do that thing. It would be unwise to do that thing, I think. Stupid, silly, self-indulgent. Like thinking you can climb Mount Everest because you walked up a really steep hill once. This is more than a steep hill.

It’s not the first thing I’ve dropped from the list. I’ve dropped ice skating down the Red Cedar River and scuba diving anywhere. But I am sad to give this one up. I wanted to see the ice shelf form on the lake and watch the herd of deer wind its way down from the woods at the top of the hill and maybe once more watch a fox and a coyote, yards apart, eye each other and rearrange themselves like puzzle pieces in an ice world. I wanted to make pea soup and beef stew and wear my long johns and turn up the heat and write beautiful essays and keep a fire in the fireplace all day and night.

I’m not going to have that. But I still have this.

Which is why I say we’re not rich, but we are lucky.