I keep saying there is no way we can wait until Halloween to close the moomincabin. But. This is the Great Lake State and weather can be very weird sometimes. The year was 2011 and the month was October and we were up visiting The Commander. We had moved her into assisted living and… And she was adjusting to that situation somewhat… We were soooo fortunate that we didn’t have to sell her house, which was a half-mile up the hill. If she could get a ride there, she could visit and tink around with her stuff. In retrospect, I’m not sure if that made things better or not but that might be something to think about some other day. I remember asking her if she could take a taxi up there. Comm: “Anne [buzzer sound]! Do you know how much a taxi costs?” Me: How much? Comm: Five dollars. Me [thinking]: Okay I could give her $100 worth of five-dollar bills and she could take 20 taxis. And then I could give her more… Or maybe I could make an arrangement to pay the taxi company ahead of time… Sigh… Magical thinking.

The thing is, that particular fall was WARM up in the yooperland. In fact, most days were warmer than The Planet Ann Arbor, which is 350 miles south. We spent a weekend up there in early October and the first pic is my bare foot on the moomincabin deck. We had grilled some kind of beast and ate dinner with The Grinch. On the deck. It was WARM out! And I don’t think there were even any mo-skee-toes. I’m not sure if we closed the moomincabin that weekend or not. My blahg is not coughing up that information but I bet we did. You can keep a seasonal yooperland cabin open for as long as the weather is good. We would keep it open longer if we lived a shorter distance away, like 20 minutes (like my parents did) or even an hour or two. Five hours? Nope.

Gitchee Gumee had very low water that year (not so much now) and the next pic is one I took walking down to the ZAt end of the beach. Barefoot of course. Both photos are heavily apped via Hipstagram filters/lenses, etc. The moominbeach NEVER looks red like that! I like playing with photo apps but nowadays I usually limit that to Instagram.

During the fall of 2011 I called The Commander every afternoon before dinner and she would always tell me how warm/hot it was up there in the yooperland. There was a bit of magical thinking on my part that said Mother Nature was giving her one last beautiful autumn. I pushed that out of my mind. I didn’t actually think she was going to die soon but, alas, she died the next year in February. I have to say that after her death, we had a HOT spring (90s for days on end in March and the Dexter Tornado) and all of the flowering trees bloomed in MARCH. I know that it was just a fluke of Mother Nature but magical thinking says it was my mother’s doing.

I am not barefoot tonight. I am in the Landfill Backyard and it is not all that cold but I am wearing a polartech jacket and Smartwool socks. No leggings though. Or balaclava.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.