CLASSIFIEDS: Tomorrow is a long time
My grandma turns 100 and I turn 30 on the same day
Friday Classifieds are my shorter posts. These posts are organized into three loose sections: what I’m thinking about right now, updates on the property, and some links.
You can find Part 1 of the longer form story on how Another Place came to be here (Returning to a place after 20 years) and Part 2 (Arriving through rejection) here.
Thank you for reading.
What I’m thinking about
Since returning from Europe—a trip I made sure everyone on the internet knew about—I’ve been reminding myself that a life can be expansive, unplanned, life can be a plenitude of time full of experiences that I, sitting here writing this and you sitting there reading it, won’t ever be able to predict. The past six months have been a lesson in panic, perspective, and scale, and in short, I’ve calmed down. One night in France, I sat up in my attic bedroom with the window swung open to the crickets and read one of the only books written in English that I could find on the shelf, which was a children’s history book about the nearby fortified city of Carcassonne. The book was published in 1964 and read like it, with statements like, “It was a grand time for all!” which certainly wasn’t true because I did the walking tour and I saw the dungeon. But reading it that night, sitting in a house that was six-hundred years old after spending the day mostly with people twice my age, I was comforted remembering my scale on this timeline.
My maternal grandma, Doris, turns 100 years-old tomorrow. We share a birthday, which means I turn 30 years-old tomorrow, alongside my best friend who also turns 30. It feels fitting to spend my birthday celebrating two people who have made me; I understand now, in a way I certainly haven’t in the past, how good it can feel to extend myself, grateful to have more time here to show love. I’m celebrating myself, too, by inviting a group up to Another Place next weekend to pretend to be on Survivor the teevee show / turn the property into the New England summer camp experience I never had but always wanted.
Lately, my mom tells me that my grandma has stopped understanding the concept of time. The other day in her studio apartment at the assisted living community where she lives, she pointed to the XXXL red numbers on her digital clock and asked my mom, “What do those numbers mean?” She’s seventy years older than me; she grew up in poverty, stopped going to school in 8th grade, and never had many friends but did have a twin and three sisters. She lived through the great depression, world wars, her husband dying, then her son-in-law, all of her siblings and most of her friends, then her own son dying. The top song in 1923 was “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and as I write this it’s “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus. I’m fairly certain she’s never camped. She has also never typed on a computer and once, when I asked if she’d like to, she bashfully shook her head, no, no she had no business doing such a thing. She sewed hundreds of beautiful quilts over her lifetime before arthritis surgery made that difficult, and when she was younger, she made all the clothes for her five children until they reached high school and could drive to the Bay City mall. When I was little and we’d go up to her house in the farmland, I’d lay on one of the quilts she’d sewed, softly rubbing the backs of my knees on its stitches and seams to a soundtrack of mourning doves and distant revs from the dragstrip. I still sleep with a stuffed fish pillow she made, one of its fins missing that I could reattach if only I knew how to sew.
Doris didn’t mean to be here this long, my dad didn’t mean to be here for such a short time, and later this summer, Carcassonne, built over 1,000 years ago, will host Bob Dylan (82 years-old) in concert. I wonder if he’ll sing “Time passes slowly.” Life is strange and now I can’t get enough. There were times this past year that I thought would never end, or times I didn’t want to end because I couldn’t imagine what was beyond. The idea of Another Place existing at some point in the future kept me moving. In a way, a living document like this newsletter allows me to clip in along the wall, to meter my falls. It keeps me accountable to you and to the visions and now we have momentum. Still, I wonder, Will I still be writing about Another Place when I’m eighty? Will I be here? Will any of the visions come true? Will it be better than we could’ve imagined? Will you visit?
By then the trees will be bigger, and that is all we know.
Property update
I camped at Another Place for the first time a couple weeks ago with my girlfriend and two friends. The first night, I couldn’t sleep from excitement. I fell asleep to an owl and I woke up as soon as the crickets stopped around two a.m. The night sounds entered that deep gap of dense, forested silence and I laid in that for a while, holding my breath. In college, I started to get intense bouts of fear in the night, and I sank realizing that almost a decade later, at Another Place, amidst the adrenaline and bliss, I felt afraid. That night, laying there in total silence, I tried to settle into the fear and ask it some questions. I wondered what it’d be like to let myself sleep and when I woke up it was dawn and the thrush had begun its swirl.
Ellen dug a firepit and surrounded it with rocks she’d collected from the property. Hadley brought out a card game about forgiveness, and Adam revealed bottles of real and N/A champagne. Bella, an eight year-old pomeranian, was there with a recent haircut but only for her body as her mane got filled with sand and moss, and she slept quietly in Hadley’s arms while Hadley asked us to recount a time we’d let pride get in the way of forgiveness. The buck moon was full one night and we all stood on the hill at midnight letting the moon’s light wash over our skin still hot from the sun. One day, we went to a beach I hadn’t been to since I was a small child right next to the marina where my grandpa and dad used to keep the boat.
It felt good to sleep there for the first time with these people; they understood the significance and met the moment by moving toward it with appropriate celebration, recognition, and mutual play. They gasped at the trees I wanted them to gasp at and followed my finger with excitement as I pointed at a moss rock. I realized I was filled with the exact feeling I’d dreamed of: inviting people I love to a place that I love and watching them feel belonging. I don’t remember most of my time at The Place, my family’s old cabin on the Betsie River. I remember fuzzy vignettes: waving a smoking stick at my brother, swinging on the tire swing out front, the checked pattern of the blanket on the couch, the slam of the screen door. The specifics are gone, but I felt belonging, and it’s all coming back to me now.
Up until early July, I’ve planned on building a small log cabin in the coming year with a log cabin kit I bought from Doug, a new local friend. Those logs are sitting on my property now, but turns out most of the logs are rotted through after spending the past five Michigan years contracting and expanding in storage in a Maple City forest. Several logs are broken in half, and when I picked up a piece, I could crush it to red pine dust in my palm. This was disappointing at first but has yielded to a feeling of excitement at the possibility for something else that feels more fitting for the space anyway. I imagine this lesson of disappointment, acceptance, and expansion will repeat hundreds of times. The plan now is to work with local builders to create a small 12’x20ish’ unfinished cabin and to do the interior finish-work myself with the help of my girlfriend, friends, and my gaggle of older friends. I had the chance to work with friends on a couple of house rehabs in Detroit this winter which gave me rudimentary but wide awareness, if not skills, of how a structure is built and finished and the enormous cost you can save by doing it yourself. I plan to take a residential carpentry workshop in the winter to learn how all the parts come together. This all may happen next year, or the year after, but there is no urgency around it.
More pressingly is the need for an outdoor shower and toilet, a tent platform in the woods, and an outdoor kitchen.
More updates include:
The permanent campsite is coming together. I purchased a tiny camper from a friend and soon it’ll be nestled into a cove on the property. This means there is a comfortable, dry place to sleep, a firepit for cooking, a grill, a covered rain and shade tent, and a croquet set. There’s still no power, still no bathroom, and water vessels are filled at a friends’ house a few miles away.
In a week, we’ll test the campsite’s limits when twenty people camp there at the same time and only one can win
Some new friends are starting a residency nearby in Elberta, MI called Sawbill Surf Club
Nancy from Labrys has invited me to the local elder lesbian bonfires; she says there, “the girls will look out for me”
On that, I’m writing the first of a series of essays on my queerness and how that’s shown up in Northern Michigan through history, communities, and festivals (shoutout Camp Trans), and I would love your help:
Are you queer in Northern Michigan? Maybe you live rurally somewhere other than Michigan. Where do you feel belonging? Do you wish you had more or less of something?
If you feel like it, you can comment on this post, or, I’ve created an anonymous Google Form where you can share privately and at-length. You can do that here.
Some links
Ellen Rutt (@ellenrutt) and Aaron Glasson (@aaronglasson / @janakoya) have a show up at Cedar North until September, future site of Cedar’s first sculpture garden, and it’s very special:
“Like a walk through the pages of a sketchbook, Site & Cite features drawings, notes, thoughts, photos, material samples and formal studies that will inform the design of a first-of-its-kind sculpture garden in Cedar.”
You can view all of the pieces, and buy some of them, here
I’ve been reading Gender without Identity after watching this incredible talk by psychoanalysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. If you fancy yourself interested in gender theory, psychoanalysis, and critical views on both, explore!
Gender Spiral podcast is very funny and has me dangerously close to replacing the gender neutral “y’all” with “sweet people”
I don’t use the word addicted lightly, given the steep family history and opiod epidemic, but I am addicted to the 1978 Billy Joel song Honesty. I’m listening this very moment.
Lastly, Asa Seresin’s essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Couple Form in this spring 2022 issue of Spike magazine. Particularly this part:
This is what being in a couple feels like to me: a whole forestful of possibilities for how to arrange your sexual and romantic life, most of them completely uncharted, and still, many of us find ourselves alighting on a “chosen spot”, a place where others have been, hoped, desired, failed, tried. I used to think it was only for lack of imagination that people find themselves in this well-trodden place. Now coincidence rings with purpose, and I am not so sure.
A note on giving
I’ve decided to donate a proceed of my monthly earnings from this newsletter to an organization that promotes housing security, equity, and reparations. This month, that’s Black Women Build, a home ownership and wealth building initiative that trains Black women in trades-related skills by restoring vacant and deteriorated houses in West Baltimore.
It is my goal to focus future donations on organizations who center experiences of indigenous populations and other marginalized groups in Northern Michigan who have experienced historic racism and crimes that make it hard to live. If you have an organization in-mind, I’d love to hear about it.