We hadn’t seen our Traverse City granddaughters since Thanksgiving. They’d spent Christmas with their dad’s family in Arizona. So, our daughter Blaise brought sub sandwiches for a Saturday dinner on the last day of January.
Hours of games later after dark they walked out the door and headed home. A little bird flew from the driver’s side front tire across the car hood, fluttered in front of Blaise, and landed on the kitchen windowsill. It perched on a small snowdrift and watched the family drive away.
I looked over the stove out the window at a purple finch. It was going to be zero that night, but decided to leave nature alone. Later, the bird was gone, returned to the cedar woods for shelter I hoped.
At 2:30 a.m. our phone rang. It was the nursing home five miles north in Eastport. Wendi’s mother had passed away. Lillian knew Blaise’s family was visiting. She must have been transitioning and wanted to say goodbye.
She’d been asking to go home though she couldn’t walk. The next morning, the house alarm to her bedroom glass door kept going off. Wendi called the police. No tracks in the snow or break in were found. Weak batteries?
Since Feb. 1 it’s been a hectic year dealing with the chaos, clutter and loss that follows death. Then there was Lillian’s celebration of life on July 12, the day after Stone Circle began its 43rd year.
Her four children with spouses, eight grandchildren and spouses, and many great grandchildren with boyfriends and girlfriends returned for the event. They barely fit in a family photo. There were also a lot of old friends and neighbors in attendance.
I was asked to speak after her son. I recited a poem “Bingo” written in my father-in-law Bruce’s words about their first meeting at the Elk Rapids town hall.
They were in seventh grade, sitting on opposite ends of a long table with their mothers. Bruce said she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and they started flirting. “Jeez,” he said. “I couldn’t concentrate on my bingo cards.” I also told the story about the purple finch and house alarm.
Lillian was a very private person. Although I’ve been married to her youngest daughter for 51 years, I know very little about her early years, except she started working at the soda fountain in Elk Rapids when she was 11.
After Bruce died, I took over helping take care of her house on Torch Lake. I mowed her huge lawn and picked up sticks from the 33 trees. She liked to help and we’d talk, until she couldn’t walk well anymore.
For the last few years, I took care of her garbage she’d set outside. In the winter I shoveled her sidewalk and deck. I picked up her mail and hung it in plastic bags on her doorknob. She was slow getting to the door. She paid me with money in the plastic bags. We had our own way of working things out.
Lillian liked to follow Facebook, but seldom commented on my poetry posts. A few years ago, I shared an earlier version of this month’s poem. She wrote, “Very nice.”