Sneak Peek: Current Project

I wish you could’ve been there. 

It was a couple of sun-filled weeks past Labor Day when Samson declared us overdue for one of the “pod people” dinners he and Donna had been hosting since the pandemic.  They seemed to know when Jim and I needed comfort food, and we’d both been a little brittle since we’d dropped Mable off in Ann Arbor for her freshman year. Our condo didn’t feel like home without her and her sister Meredith, aka Merry, who was now back in Kalamazoo for her junior year. Jim might’ve been finding his new normal by this point, but I continued to feel like someone had taken a whisk to my insides.

Behind the wheel of our Suburban, Jim listened to my litany of worries about the girls as he drove from downtown Harbor Springs to Samson and Donna’s house on the outskirts of town. As he turned left along “the bluff”- my favorite part of the place we now called home - I made myself stop stressing and enjoy the serene views of our little resort town cradled between rolling green farmland and the sailboat-dotted blue bay. The multitiered mansions lining the bluff, even those whose ground floors were obscured by ornate fences or partially hidden behind decorative hedges, added layers of prettiness to the narrow, tree-lined street. 

When we turned eastward on the road that led to Samson and Donna’s place, I rolled down my window to smell the fresh mown lawns of the still stately but more middle-class homes along the way.

“Good thing we’re doing this tonight. It’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow,” Jim said as we walked up to the front door of Samson and Donna’s two-story white farmhouse. Something about Jim compels him to give me a weather report every day. I honestly don’t know if this is a holdover from his early career in airfield maintenance where the weather was a key factor in each day’s activities, or if it’s just a midwestern man thing. I just know I’ll never need to look at a weather forecast while Jim’s in my life.

He shouldered a small cooler full of beer from his favorite local brewery and I cradled my ceramic pie dish as we walked through the open front door. Petite Donna greeted me with a wholehearted embrace, her close-cropped afro tickling my cheek. All these years of shared dinners had us like peanut butter and jelly, so you wouldn't know it had taken her some time to warm to me after I’d hired Samson. It was not with food that I’d eventually wiggled my way into her heart, but through her immediate adoration of my daughters and, from there, our shared investment in their wellbeing. Merry considered Donna a mentor while Mable simply soaked up what she called Donna’s “doting aunt vibes.”

These dinners had started with just the four of us and our girls, but before long we’d absorbed Greg “the Rev” into our quarantine pod. We’d continued the tradition long after the end of social distancing, even though all of us adults but Donna saw each other at the cafe almost every day. July and August had galloped by without us gathering, but our pace had at last begun to slow from summer’s frenzy. 

I’d made Donna’s favorite pie, a strawberry chiffon. That woman loved strawberries like Samson loved small-batch whiskey and Jim loved lake trout. After depositing our contributions on the picnic table, we followed Donna to the kitchen bar where she handed us appetizer plates and pointed us toward a row of Mason jars filled with Samson’s homemade pickles. My favorite were the zesty dilled carrot sticks, and Jim loved the clove-spiced Montmorency cherries. I noticed a jar of the Rev’s favorite, capered asparagus spears, ready to be opened if he got early parole from the meeting of his church music committee.

When I walked out to the far corner of the cedar deck where Samson was grilling, he handed me a Faygo Redpop without bothering to offer the chardonnay he’d uncorked for Donna. At work, Samson teased me for having the tastebuds of a toddler with my preference for sugary beverages, but as a guest in his home, I was allowed my pop without the public insult. 

Why did my throat start to choke up at that simple gesture? Maybe it was the feeling of being seen and known in a place where I sometimes still felt I didn’t belong. I wondered if I’d been leaning more than I’d realized on my daughters’ activities and friends to connect me to the community. A quick gulp of the sweet strawberry fizz reversed the rising pressure in my throat as I stared out at the meadow where Samson kept his bees. 

What does it even mean to “belong” in a place? Four years after jumping off the merry-go-round of Jim’s Air Force career and moving to this tiny resort town on Lake Michigan, three years since buying the cafe downtown and hiring Samson to help run it, and two weeks past dropping our youngest off at college downstate, I shouldn't have been so unsettled in this place. 

There’d been a logical reason for my feeling unmoored when the military moved us every two or three years, but what excuse did I have now? Being here for this long, owning a business right on Main Street, I could think of no reason for my disorientation and directionlessness. I was beginning to think this wasn't about where I was so much as who I was - an orphan adrfit, a misfit for life.

Donna’s voice brought my attention back to my friends. “Well, we’ll take the gas station pizza over the chronically overused ranch. Right, Vera?” she asked as she sat down in the deck chair next to me. This was the latest skirmish in our neverending game of Midwest vs The World, which pitted Washington state, where I’d graduated high school, and Donna’s Washington D.C roots against the midwestern ways of Samson’s Chicago, Jim’s Duluth, and Rev. Greg’s Marquette.

I nodded my agreement as a grudging convert to gas station pizza. After overcoming my initial revulsion at their locale, I had to admit the majority were delicious. I’m especially fond of the breakfast pizza they have at a gas station near Jim’s folks’ place in Minnesota (as long as one doesn’t dredge each piece in ranch dressing like his dad does). These Midwesterners have no boundaries when it comes to their deployment of ranch dressing, and I said so.

“It’s not dressing, it's dip!” Samson and Jim barked in almost perfect unison from their corner of the deck, where Samson was toasting buttered buns on the grill’s top rack and Jim was leaning against the railing with a bottle of blonde ale in his hand.

“It’s the same substance no matter what you call it, and you all put it on things it has no business being on!” I fired back.

 “Amen! She said what she said,” Donna backed me up.

Samson held fast. “We aren’t debating soda versus pop here! That’s just word choice. Dip and dressing are actually different substances. Dip is thicker - perfect to dip your pizza crusts in,” he concluded, and Jim raised his beer in agreement.

“Really? Can you dip things in dip?” Donna asked, feigning shock with her fingertips pressed to her breastbone. “I had no idea!” 

If I’d mocked him, Samson would’ve seen my sarcasm and raised me some sass. But Donna he just waved off with, “Fine, fair point.” 

It weirded me out a little when Samson was chill; I was used to his more curmudgeonly side at the cafe. I still wondered if his mellowness at home was due to being off the clock and out of the public eye, or just being with Donna, who he called “my anchor”. (I know -  Awww!)

At work, Samson was a verb. When he stood at the griddle with his wiry torso on pause, waiting for shredded potatoes to brown or runny eggs to solidify, his feet tapped an irregular little ADHD rhythm. If his legs were ever still, his muscular arms were whisking or chopping - sometimes both, because he had this (usually awe-inspiring but occasionally flat-out creepy) ambidexterity to perform one rhythmic task, like stirring, with one hand while keeping a completely different cadence, like kneading, with the other. 

We gathered around the picnic table and started dolling up our cheese-filled  “Juicy Lucy” burgers with toppings. Samson offered me another Redpop and said, “You know, Boss, if you make any money off your catering guy’s rent, you should buy a new toaster.” 

He’d expressed mild skepticism about my recent decision to fund some of our much-needed renovations by leasing the cafe’s kitchen to a local caterer during the hours we were closed, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t think the rental fee would cover the equipment upgrades he wanted or if he just didn’t like the idea of someone being in his workspace without his supervision. 

“If I got a new one, what would we do with our perfectly functional, not at all haunted toaster?” I asked. 

“You mean the murder robot,” he corrected.  I rolled my eyes. It was Samson’s assertion that the cafe’s commercial toaster was both sentient and malicious. I just thought of it as quirky, like everything else in that kitchen. Thus the need for some renovations, and hence the kitchen lease plan.

While we chowed down on his burgers, Samson regaled Jim and Donna with tales from the cafe. Most of the night’s highlight reel featured the teen staff who’d just departed with the start of the school year. 

“You should’ve seen the Moose’s face when I told him I was trained by the CIA,” Samson laughed. Bruce “The Moose” was the one teen we’d hired at the end of the season who hadn’t now left us for college. 

“Oh, Samson, you’re terrible!” Donna scolded. It was true the Navy had sent Samson to study at the CIA, a.k.a. the Culinary Institute of America, in the early years of his career. But our teen workers didn’t know the culinary world, where the CIA doesn't train spies and ICE (the Institute of Culinary Education) has nothing to do with immigration.

“That’s why Bruce asked me if he was allowed to tell people he worked at the cafe!” I realized.

“Oh, no! Did he really?” Donna asked.

I nodded. 

“Kids, man,” Jim said with a laugh, but the slight widening of his eyes told me he was having a mini freak-out at the idea of our girls at college and, if not themselves behaving like imbeciles, being surrounded by plenty who were. 

A few people had asked if Jim and I were enjoying being empty nesters. I hate that term. Like I’m a mama eagle who’s happy to have booted my fledglings out for their first flight. That image matched how I felt when each of the girls started kindergarten, or went off to their first sleep-away camp. Not now. 

Now I wasn’t the mama bird. If anything, I was the nest. Vacant real estate. An empty vessel. A hollowed-out shell of a human whose heart had been bisected and then shipped off to two different locations.

Not to be dramatic about it or anything.

How can we even call them adults when they still need so much parenting? Samson and Donna were familiar with the preposterous phenomenon of their child suddenly becoming an adult. If Jim and I wanted a model of how to parent our young adult offspring, we had an ideal example in their relationship with their daughter Shonda, who was now raising their only grandchild out in Dallas. I admired and envied how close they were as a family across the distance. I hoped we’d eventually get to that point with our girls.

After dinner, Jim carried the remnants of our meal into the kitchen before joining Samson outside while I helped Donna load the dishwasher. When I mentioned how out-of-sorts I’d been feeling, she murmured her empathy. Besides my long-distance bestie Belinda, Donna was the only person I talked to regularly who understood the tempo of all those years as a military spouse, and how that constant motion shapes you.

‘Where are you from?’ is the innocuously-intended question most people ask sooner or later. When you’re a military brat like Jim or an orphan like me, the question feels complicated. ‘A lot of places!’ is how we usually answer. I’m not a finished product born of a single location. I’m the still half-baked outcome of many homes and frequent moves. I feel as jumbled as the boxful of recipes collected from one squadron family after another as we crisscrossed states and countries, always leaving one home base on our way to the next. 

Some places I used to live still live in me. Not as the places they are now, but as the places they were in the time when I lived there. The Spokane where I graduated high school 25 years ago. The Oahu where both our girls were born. The Alexandria, Virginia of a decade ago. Some of these places I’ve returned to visit, joining Jim on TDYs and meeting up with old friends who point out all the new subdivisions and retail developments built since we were there, all our old haunts now gone. 

But even the places I never had cause to revisit still visit my dreams. More so since the girls have been gone. Last night I dreamed of this beach on Tybee Island where we’d once driven for a weekend escape from base. I was pushing the girls on the swings while Jim unpacked our picnic. A trio of aggressive seagulls were dive-bombing our beach blanket, so he pretended to be a ninja, leaping up and karate-chopping the air as the gulls swooped down, giving preschooler Merry and toddler Mable the biggest giggles. The playground on that beach was probably dismantled ages ago to make room for another stack of Lego-like condos, but it darts into my dreams like a butterfly kiss from the past.

“It’s like vertigo, isn’t it?” Donna asked, pulling me back out of my memories. I nodded. “You just have to give it time,” she said as she opened a cabinet and took out dessert plates. 

I love Donna, but that has always been my least favorite piece of advice. Why does everyone say patience is a virtue? Life is short, and more people should recognize the virtue of hurrying the hell up.

“Transitions are just hard, no matter how much practice we have,” Donna continued. 

I agreed with this point, and she knew at least as much as I did about transitions after all the PCSs and deployments of Samson’s long career in the Navy. It’s just weird that I feel like an exile in a place I so thoughtfully chose. After 23 years of living wherever the military sent us, Jim had left our post-military location entirely up to me. We’d visited this area of Northern Michigan years ago when we’d been stationed in Ohio, and I’d been as captivated by the history as much as the beauty of this “charming waterfront community” as the tourist brochures like to call it. It’s charming all year, but I find it more so when the summer invasion ends after Labor Day and “locals’ summer” begins. 

I still loved the location, but I didn’t feel like I belonged here. Maybe I’d never belong anywhere.

As I carried my fluffy pink pie out to the table,  Donna followed with the dessert plates and forks. After I dished up our slices, she asked, “Did Samson ever tell you about my first cruise?” 

When Jim and I shook our heads, she said, “After Samson’s first deployment at sea, I turned around and made him get back on another ship,” she confessed with a smile. “I’d won a pair of tickets for a 5-day cruise. Samson was a good sport about getting back on the water, but worried about me getting seasick because I’d never been on a boat before - not even a canoe in a pond!”

Donna paused as she took a bite of her pie and sighed with appreciation. “I did fine on the ship, though. Just a few hours of feeling slightly queasy right after we left shore.”

Donna’s phone buzzed from the kitchen counter and she looked to Samson, who picked up the story as she walked over to check her messages. “The problem started when she got off the ship,” he said. “She was swaying around and telling me she felt like she was riding waves. I’d never heard of it before, but one of the older guys in my unit told me it was landsickness.”

“Landsickness?” Jim’s eyebrows lifted, assuming Samson was setting up a joke.

“It’s weird - and pretty rare - but I’m not making it up. It’s a real thing,” Samson assured.

“Mal de débarquement syndrome,” Donna said, returning to her perch next to Samson. “It’s French for ‘sickness of disembarkation’. I thought I was moving when I wasn’t, and I couldn’t sleep for days! You can’t imagine how disorienting it was, feeling like I was bobbing around, stumbling because I couldn’t find my balance. The only time I felt ok was when I was moving, like in the car.”

“It’s a type of vertigo?” Jim asked, having seen plenty of incidents of that in his years as an airfield operations officer. 

Samson answered, “Yeah, so most of the time people get vertigo from motion, like in a plane or boat, right? But sometimes it’s triggered by stopping a motion your body’s gotten used to.” 

Donna said, “A lot of people experience vertigo as a spinning sensation. Landsickness doesn’t feel like spinning, though. It’s more like you’re rocking, swaying, bobbing…it’s really hard to keep your balance.”

This was stressing me out just imagining it. “That sounds awful,” I said. 

Donna agreed, “It was. It went away after a couple of days for me, but some people get stuck like that for longer.” 

After another half hour of swapping stories, Jim and I were saying our goodbyes and heading home in time for sunset. Samson and I would be back at the cafe by six the next morning to open, and Jim would leave even earlier for his part-time job at the ski and golf resort on the edge of town.

While Jim drove down the winding, willow-lined driveway to the street, I thought once more how much I wished you could’ve been there. I’m never not missing you.