In St. John's Michigan, I was writing in my car, running, and I became an item of notice to patrons smoking on the sidewalk outside Sirens. A couple, the woman who had been motorboated by a friend, and a man in purple dress shirt and deeper purple vest, came to my window and knocked. I was 100 feet or more from the bar, so it wasn't as if I were hawking events. I was just writing up my notes while they were fresh in my imagination. I rolled down my window and he asked my business. And I told him what I had just told you. The owners of the complex, restaurant and dance club and small hotel and banquet center, had just opened their doors and were wondering if I were some kind of undercover agent. Having cleared up that mystery, he asked me to give the woman a ride home. She didn't look dangerous, so I accepted. Let's call her Arizona.
She opened my passenger door and spotted my bottled water. She asked, I agreed and she cracked open my final bottle of Dasani. She needed the water. She spoke articulately but she had had plenty to enjoy at the wedding party.
She liked that I was a writer and decided she should write a book. I still agree. Anyone who can convincingly describe a birthday party thrown for Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels has material for a book. Her children and she had just flown into a Michigan airport from Arizona, and all they had they carried in luggage. She never seen it coming but her ... casting about for a noun ... partner had put them on a plane to grandmother's. The partner had taken care of Arizona and her children for a period of time, not related to me by memorable and peaceful to her. Grandmother's landlord had protested at extra occupants, so now she was looking for an apartment. Arizona wasn't too worried. She was quick to line up an apartment and a job when she needed one. Already she had an offer to cater events, cooking from special recipes.
We drove M-21 west, past the grazing deer, and then south two miles and then west two miles. She wondered why I was in St. Johns in the first place. So I told her I was driving to the family farm in Owosso and she asked if I were single. One of my friends had suggested finding, using Craig's List, a single mom to live rent free in my mother's farmhouse and look after my mother. It would be an European solution. I had no idea, and neither would my mother, how to screen such a talent.
We arrived at a trailer park with well kept lawns and decent cars and she explained. She didn't want to sleep at her grandmother's house, so she had called her best friend's ex-husband and he had invited her over. Really, I saw his car beside his doublewide once she remembered back a decade and we located this home. It took some wandering through the complex. Last words we exchanged: "Don't leave me. He might not be awake." "Go ahead and take the bottle of water with you." "I'll be back", she said and closed the door. He had the sliding door open by the time she reached the deck. She waved me off. I drove to the old I-127 and found a Shell. I threw out her bottle of water, lipsticked spout, and bought two bottles of Dasani.
I drove easily to Owosso and turned south and drove to Perry. On the way, I passed an open Valero and Pittsfield, Michigan. Mom and father saw a doctor at the practice there. I have suggested finding a new doctor to mom. I stopped in Perry, where Perry Fest had just featured a team of country western music impersonators. Impersonators of all sorts must be the rage in Shiawassee County, but more about that later.
I am pretty certain our deer have guessed no one will shoot slugs, buckshot or arrows at them when all four feet are set on a roadway. The cars the deer can see coming from miles away. Maybe they sense that shining a light to hypnotize a deer is illegal. Maybe they know it is unsportsmanlike and banned to shoot from a motor vehicle. So I had to blow my horn seven times to clear the dirt roads before cautiously rolling forward. When I arrived at the farmhouse, dawn had lightened the eastern sky and I stirred up all the deer sleeping upon the front lawn. Five bounded off into the soybean, leaping over the knee high legumes, performing in my headlights. I heard the hoots of owls as I slammed my car door and honks from Canadian Geese in the sloughs and swamps of a nearby lake.
This morning I was startled awake by a pigeon slamming into a picture window. Mom and dad had hung stained glass from suction cups attached to that window, just like the Audubon recommends. I heard the call of the Sandhill Cranes as I came out to the porch with my coffee. Some one had cut plywood and two by fours, I think for repairing the porch roof. The house has three porches. Only the western exposure doesn't have a porch.
The wind has always been strong over my parents's farm and today good gusts shake maple leaves to rustling music and birds and insects keep a steady sound track going, an endless bit mapped organic song.
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