That's the number I have holding up my bun today. (I have decided that I will once again commence wearing a ponytail, rather than an updo, at work, once the temperature drops below 85).
***
The "northern Michigan" is actual U.P. Escanaba was the largest city near my grandmother (she lived in Rapid River.) So many of the place-names up there, when I see them again, they evoke memories of the long summer trips we'd take up there (Partly so my mom could see her relatives, but also partly to escape the heat - as hot as it ever got - in Ohio. And a couple years, my dad was doing some kind of groundwater research project, I remember now tooling around with him up around towns like Kipling and Theodore and places like that. (There's an Alvin, Michigan, but it's in the lower peninsula. And there's no Simon.)
There's both a Rudyard and a Kipling in northern Michigan, apparently he toured there and some of the folks were very taken with him. And there's the Big Two-Hearted River, which Hemingway wrote about.
And there's Nahma Corners. And Manistique. And Seul Choix Point, which I'm told is pronounced more like "See-shwa point," even was by my grandfather, who spoke French until he was 6years old.
And, oh, there were so many more. I used to know the whole order of towns along US 2 from St. Ignace to Rapid River, and I could gauge pretty accurately how much farther we had to drive.
(Two other things: Now I'm hungry for a pasty, the traditional meat pie, the recipe for which was brought over by Cornish miners. Pasties are pretty much THE characteristic UP food. And while a bad pasty is heavy and lumpy, a good one is really pretty good.
And I'm happy to see that Finland Calling still exists as a television program. I remember occasionally watching that (my grandmother got two television channels, three if the weather was good) on the local PBS channel. I don't know the first word of Finnish - in fact, it's a very different language, it's in a different family from the other Scandinavian languages (in which I do know a few words, mainly food-related or things like "thank you" and "good day").
***
Saturday I went out to Sherman. For one thing, I needed to meet up with Kris to pass along LOTS of magazines (I got rid of nearly all the stockpiled "Gourmets," after finally realizing that I'd never actually cook anything out of them) and some extra balls of yarn, so she could share them with her art classes.
The funny thing? I was killing time (I went down there early; I had a 10% off Target coupon and wanted to use it before Target got so mobbed with back-to-school shoppers: this was Texas' "sales tax free*" weekend)
(*on certain items. Not anything I was buying)
I still had time to kill so I went to the Hobby Lobby and got a new pack of embroidery needles (I could not quickly find the ones I KNEW I had) and a few skeins of floss. There was a woman back in one of the other checkout lines and I thought, "Gee, that looks like Diana." But then I thought, "But it can't be. She moved to California." So I didn't approach her, having had previously in my life two embarrassing situations where I went up and started talking to people that I thought were people I knew, but turned out not to be. (In one case, now that I think about it, it could have been that the person knew me but was just being cool-mean by pretending she didn't. That was high school.)
Anyway, I went to the bookstore next. And I was sort of browsing the tables they have set out in the center aisle, when she came in. And ran up to me. And grabbed me up in a big hug.
It was Diana, after all. She's moved back, because her son and daughter-in-law (and their child) moved back to Texas. And I guess Diana and her husband never actually sold their house here. She's doing art, now, as a retirement career: she has commissions to do some paintings and is doing photography.
So that was a nice surprise. (She is a friend of mine....I had kind of lost track of her. She was my first grad student, she taught here for a while.)
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