Superior Still Life

The book is “Ahab’s Wife” and I got it out of our dear Cousin Claudia’s Little Free Library when we pulled up to her house too late to say thank you for loaning us lawn chairs for the baby shower and passing down a passel of baby gear for our new granddaughter. We missed her by minutes, she’d gone to catch a plane, but she left her beautiful library behind and so I partook.

The hat is from an unknown decade, certainly one that started with 19. It is remarkably unbecoming but extremely comfortable and can be folded up and jammed in my pocket if hat wearing becomes tiresome.

The mouse and the laptop under the hat are awaiting duty as the means by which we watch the Bucks play the Hawks in Game 6 of the NBA Semi-Finals. See? I know sports stuff.

The lamp was brought down from upstairs a couple of visits ago to cast a warm glow on the table, for what purpose I can’t remember. It was pressing at the time but nothing stays too urgent around here.

The lighthouse plate (obscured) is from my friend, Karen, who for twenty years has found lighthouse-related things for our place. The bowl is from St. Vincent de Paul, like most of the rest of the furnishings here because when our first house burned down, we only had insurance to cover a new house not to put anything in it. I told this to a rare pair of rich guests one night, thinking it a source of pride, and the man looked around as if to say, “yeah, looks like the inside of a thrift store in here.”

The bananas are turning too soon as they are wont to do right after you already made a batch of banana bread.

The birdhouse is new from Ace Hardware in Manistique, bought to replace a forty-year old ramshackle birdhouse that blew off its pole in one of last winter’s Lake Superior gales. It’s super sturdy and smells like cedar and is so well-made that tiny elves could move in and live forever if there were tiny elves, which I have learned since my brother died don’t really exist although he told me they did. The decision now is whether to paint the new birdhouse – red or blue or yellow or all three – or let it be natural.

The window looks out on the eastern edge of the Pictured Rocks which, at this end, aren’t rocks at all but giant sand dunes. At the very tip of the peninsula is the Au Sable Light Station, a lighthouse perched on a piece of beach known as Shipwreck Coast. There are still the bones of sailing ships there, marooned on the beach. It has the feel of a cemetery. The window is just a hair askew, something has gone loose in how it fits into the frame, another casualty of the battering the house takes when the wind comes out of the Northwest in the winter. Things get pretty weathered around here but they still hold up.