Imperial

Traverse City

9 traverse city On my way to the conference in Traverse City I drive by the toy lake where my family came for summer getaways from steamy St. Louis. The tiny cottages on the shore are still there. There is the white sand where I played with my sisters and learned how to swim from a teenaged lifeguard whose beauty put my child’s mind in confusion. My mother sat at a card table with her friends, smoking and playing gin rummy. Weekends, my father flew up from the mystery of his job and his life without us. My father dead now, my mother dead, along with the friends she played cards with. My sisters are middle-aged women, children and divorces behind them. I am older than my father ever was. Yet there are the cottages and the beach where we played with our buckets and shovels, as the children on the sand are playing now. No one can explain this. ...