memories

Dear Mom,

Happy Easter! We are so thankful that Mercy and the talented staff at your facility took the time to do your hair for Easter. Look at how you impressed the Easter bunny! In the midst of stay-at-home celebrating today we are reminiscing about one of your favorite places in the world…

Think back to your honeymoon. You and dad were high school sweethearts and managed to keep your relationship going through college in two different states. When you married and began planning your honeymoon, you wanted to go somewhere fresh and not too far away. Fortunately, Goggie read an article in the Chicago Tribune about a destination called, “The Cape Cod of the Midwest,” only five hours up north. After your downtown wedding night in the Palmer House, you packed up the ghost-white station wagon and headed into the unknown. Dad described it as a miserable drive, “Rained the whole way and your mother didn’t feel well. We checked in and wondered what tomorrow would bring. The entire area looked bleak and black.” But when you woke up, you saw the June sunlight tilting through the conifers surrounding your cottage. I imagine you two stepping out and letting the screen door slam behind you— inhaling your first breath of what would become 50 years of Door County pine scented air.

Door County. It is a huge part of the life of all my grandparents, both sides of your family and now our own family. Thanks to your 1950’s trekking up north along that Lake Michigan coast, here’s what happened:

Grandma and Grandpa followed you and built “just a little hot dog stand” on highway 42 between Ephraim and Sister Bay. That little hot dog stand became a full service restaurant known as the Red Barn complete with cottages for rent, a driving range and their summer house. The restaurant is still there and is now known as the Summer Kitchen.

We jammed our massive Lehwald family into their little summer house, heated by a Coleman stove and baseboard heaters for many Thanksgivings. We spent my first birthday eating dad’s favorite strawberry shortcake out on the concrete patio.

Uncle Jay and Janet rented the “big, grey house” on Cottage Row and cousin Leslie and I played with the electrified dollhouse more than we played outside.

Dad and Grandma battled over which fish boil served the best meal. Dad swore allegiance to the White Gull Inn and Grandma and Grandpa loved The Viking. Both of these restaurants still do fish boils. The White Gull Inn won the family contest. Who wants to pay to eat a fancy dinner off an army mess hall, stainless steel tray?

After baking countless apple and cherry pies and picking up legions of golf balls on his riding mower, Grandma and Grandpa sold The Red Barn and built their dream house just up Maple Lane from the Sister Bay Bowl. Erica and I stayed in the guest house and snuck out at night. Me and Uncle Billy and Dad and cut down our most gigantic Christmas tree and we all made the ornaments and chains out of paper. Grandpa taught me how to play cribbage. Grandma cheated at pee-wee golf. We killed each other over slap-jack and Fool Your Neighbor card games.

Our kids spent many Presidents’ Day weekends running down hotel halls and jumping off the sides of the High Point Inn pool. Summers lazily wandering orchards picking cherries, skipping and heaving rocks into the water, hiking in Peninsula State Park. Nathaniel got lost in the woods at the Wilson’s Eagle cottage and Pebble Beach provided hours of rainy day entertainment by painting rocks. Pebble Beach and the surrounding land was recently purchased by the Door County Land Trust so it will forever be enjoyed by generations of rock painters and skippers.

This past Christmas you spent with all of us up at High Pines, sitting beside the second most gigantic Christmas tree, looking fly in your cheesehead hat and sipping cherry bounce. Snoopy the dog ate all the sugar cookie ornaments off the tree and we enjoyed the best hot chocolate in our individual whipped cream topped teapots at the White Gull Inn.

Generations of cherry juice running down the arms of children who jammed more cherries into their mouths than their pails and everything else happened because you listened to your mother who read the newspaper! Thank you for taking us to shuffleboard courts by the bay at the Evergreen Beach Hotel and snowmobiling on New Years Eve from the Hotel DuNord and everywhere else in Door County. As the worlds battles the Coronavirus, the beauty of birches by the lake remains untouched.

Gratefully loving you from a distance this Easter!

A single question, asked on this couch changed everything. Thirty-one years ago today I lived in a tiny apartment in Chicago on Dearborn street, worked in an advertising agency and stopped for groceries at Treasure Island after getting off the El-train. Snowflakes mixed with yellow gingko leaves on the sidewalk as I slushed my boots into 1100 N. Dearborn. I pressed the 19th floor elevator button and checked out my hair in the mirrored glass. We’d decided earlier in the day to go pick out a Christmas tree that evening. After dropping my groceries onto the only counter in my “galley” kitchen, which is a romantic city term for inadequate kitchen, I changed into jeans and a Christmas sweater. This was the end of the 80’s — people wore gaudy sweaters for real, not as a joke at corporate Christmas parties.

Over on Rush street a bar with outdoor seating beckoned commuters, a busy watering hole called Melvins. During holiday season they filled the red-painted wrought iron furniture with Christmas trees beneath multi-colored lights, the old fashioned kind our grandparents hung on their trees with single colored, large light bulbs. The evergreen smell and warm, holiday glow created an oasis in the city rush.

He tucked his gloved hand into my mitten. We found a tree that might fit. I took the top and he carried the trunk. City lights and taxi horns mingled with the “Charlie Brown Christmas” theme song as we carried my first “big” Christmas tree back to my first “big” one bedroom apartment.

“I think I’ll take a shower,” I said. The tree sap pinned my fingers together and I felt sweaty. Radiator heat equals boiling hot, unadjustable indoor temperatures. We’d wrestled the tree into the stand and moved the furniture around to make space for it. “Oh, okay,” he said with a puzzled look.

I emerged in a yellow robe and hair up in a towel, (we’d been dating for six years so this was not a big deal.) Slumping down next to him on the couch I noticed he looked pale, almost gaunt. He gathered my hands in his sweaty palms, “We’ve been together for awhile. We both love family and I want that to continue, to grow. I want us to have our own family someday. I want what we have to go on.” Oh, how I could not believe I’m sitting in a robe with no make-up on at this moment. He slid off the couch onto his knees. “Will you marry me?”

“Of course I will!” I laughed, screamed, and surprisingly did not cry. Being sneaky, he’d tucked the ring box behind a pillow on the couch. After we finished hugging (and of course, kissing) we sat back and stared at each other, he handed it to me. Laughing louder, I opened the black, velvet box and to my shock there was a ring inside, his grandmother’s ring which I knew nothing about. I’d been expecting a cigar band with a cute message written inside, something like, “I.O.U. an incredible ring when I’m a successful lawyer someday.” We’d never looked at rings or even talked about them and he slid his grandmother’s beautiful ring on my finger. My “of course I will” went silent. To this day, it is the most special ring in the world.

The view this morning from this couch is a world of white. First rain, then ice, then snow coated all the trees in our neighborhood and it stuck. Just like his question 31 years ago today. It stuck. In an age of IKEA furniture that ends up out on the curb and disposable Joanna Gaines signs, I hope this Advent we seek after something that sticks, something that lasts. My parents bought this couch on their honeymoon for ten dollars off the porch of the Thorp Hotel in Fish Creek. WI. It still says “ten dollars” in pencil on the bottom. Then it moved to our back porch in Geneva, IL and held many dressed up girls at birthday parties, then on to my studio apartment and down the hall to apt. 1901, my one bedroom and now it’s back home where it began. We changed the color from white to forest green and each spring we take the wicker furniture outside and touch up the chipped paint. My mother and father take naps on the couch they bought on their honeymoon, our friends laugh and cry as we tell stories and drink craft beer around the fire. This couch…his question…the pure joy of something that lasts. And today, “Of course I will, my love.”

Part one of a four part Advent series on the tangible and intangible aspects of life that last.

Author. Gardener. Teacher.

Letters to My Mother During Covid19

This Couch