Where I Live

Have you ever seen deer play tag?

1. I live in Grand Haven, Michigan—which is to say, I live near a giant freshwater lake. I can walk there, if I’m feeling ambitious, which I rarely am. Driving is more conducive to flip flop wearing and beach toy hauling, so I choose that mode of transportation most often. I’m not sure if you get the picture when I say “giant freshwater lake”, though. We have beaches, plural, in the town I live in, that stretch for miles. When standing on the shore, you cannot see across to the other side, and the waves are sometimes the height of ocean waves. I know this because every summer all the people who live by real oceans come up here for vacations from their impossibly hot environments and say, “Wow, this is a lot like an ocean, but without salt.” And without sharks, I might add. Anyway, I live here, and I always know which direction is West. 

2. I live on an acre of land backed by suburban forest. I do not live in the city, or the country, but I don’t live in a new development with a fenced in backyard or man made pond, either. I live where all the animals have gone to find a place to rest in between the bustle of human living and commerce. I live where a neighbor's ring camera captures raccoons scurrying in the night and where deer prance and chase each other in the rain. Have you ever seen deer play tag? I have in the morning as I sip tea and set the cup down on top of the dryer to switch over a load of laundry. When I hear a honking car, I wait a moment and listen for the gobble of turkeys being hurried across the road. The front of my house is the thoroughfare to the beach, and the back is a natural playground for little boys. A small creek and soccer goals. A clover filled field and a set of swings. The edge of a bog and the shade of a massive silver maple. Sticks, rocks, piles of sand, and the evidence of creative adventure. I think I’ll call it Neverland. 

3. I live in an old 1950’s ranch house where everything was hand done by the original homeowner, wrongly and out of square. My husband and I have re-done many things in the home, but looking around, you may not notice much. The kitchen, for instance, wouldn’t make it into any design Instagram photos—except maybe as the before picture. Our carpet needed replacing a decade ago, but we built a deck outside last year instead. I like the decisions we’ve made, most especially the one to love what we have. The rooms are filled with books on every surface, dog fur, LEGO creations, papers and drawings, and there is always music floating through the air. I think my favorite part of this old ranch house is the breezeway connecting the house to the garage—it’s one of the few rooms we remodeled. We painted the knotty pine white to give the illusion of cleanliness and newness, and hung hooks and shoe storage in an attempt to bring order to chaos. It is a constant mess, and constant evidence of a home well loved—a life well lived. 

4. I live in my quaint perennial garden. It is a humble patch of land that lines the front of my house and boasts years of small vignettes of plant pairings bought with the money earned from designing other people’s expansive gardens. Last year, I added three shrubs to mirror the other side of the flower bed. They are half the size and will take years to catch up, but they smile up at me with new growth and promise.  Often people say to me “You must have the most beautiful garden!”, and they are right, but they are also wrong. My garden is beautiful to me, but my beauty is not their beauty, so I just say, “Yea!”. Nothing is sacred in my garden, everything has a cycle and an end. I dig up and move and replace and divide and sometimes things just never come back again. Except for one plant. One plant is sacred. There is a tree peony that I got by a wish and a prayer from a wholesale nursery the year before they became so popular that I never again would be able to find one. The deep magenta blooms are the size of dinner plates and last less than a week, but they will stop you in your tracks and make your heart sing. The first year I planted it, my husband crushed it with the hose reel. Yes, we are still married. It is crooked and gangly from its missing limb, but this year it formed a new shoot near the scar. This is my sacred plant that will never get moved. Unless I do, in which case, it’s coming to wherever I live next.

5. I live in the far right corner of my worn, hand-me down, brown leather couch. Legs tucked up under me to the side, blanket on my lap, piles of books around me—I sink into the same spot everyday. I push the books out of the way to welcome my son’s warm body into a snuggle, and when he’s off to school I pull the books back around me again. I retreat to this smashed cushion every evening to read to my children or will words into sentences on my laptop. This is where my legging adorned behind rests as I laugh at old episodes of New Girl with my husband or exchange a download of information about our days. You’ll find me in this spot watching birds eat at their feeder on the window, or observing the various dogs that are walked by their various humans down the bike path. It is from this perch that I rest, that I take in the elements that make up my life and cherish them. It’s also where I accidentally fall asleep when I should be up doing something else. It’s exactly where I am right now, writing about where I live.

Inspired by Nora Ephron’s Where I Live essay from I Feel Bad About My Neck. Click here to read the next one in the series.