Scenes from the UP and a Poem

We spent most of the week on a driving trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the UP. My husband and I like listening to books on tape, and have developed a fondness for Lilian Jackson Braun's cozy "Cat Who" mysteries, set in the area "four hundred miles north of everywhere." It was through these little novels we learned about the abandoned copper mines that dot the rocky landscape. I took this picture of a crumbling building at the Delaware copper mine.

Animals are on the move, many meeting an early demise on the roads. We saw lots of porcupines, raccoons, skunks, deer, and this turtle.

We stayed at the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, a lodge and cabins and a golf course built during the Great Depression. The setting is peaceful and serene, very quiet after Labor Day. In the UP some of the maples are turning red, though the overall look is still summery. I took warm clothes and was too warm.

We stayed near Copper Harbor, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. One day Dick hiked and I went poking through stores in town. This scene was right outside a bookstore filled with current best-sellers.

We took a boat tour over to the Copper Harbor light, which is part of a state park. The skies were clear, the water calm, and Lake Superior was a blue jewel every day. Hard to believe that summer is essentially over, especially considering the sunshine and warmth.

Cicadas at the End of Summer

by Martin Walls

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin,

As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of

titanium;

They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern

slowing into town.

But all you ever see is the silence.

Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves.

With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do

just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space

museum —

What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory;

The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned

The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk

in the bottom of a mug.

Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with

lineman's pliers.

A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry

in Brighton.