A Winter Journal, Notes from the Upper Peninsula is a nature journal, a place to practice my craft, but more-so a place to cope with winter of which I am not fond. My hopes are to better my writing, photography and get through the season with less symptoms of seasonal affective disorder.
I moved to the Upper Peninsula in the winter of 1993-94 and promptly started the new semester at Northern Michigan University. I spent each March/April for three years breaking down in tears in Professor Livingston’s office until he proclaimed, “I know what’s wrong with you!”
Born in January 1963 to a mother who loved to ice skate on a local (outside) rink in Huntington Woods (Oakland County, Michigan) I was destined to have a birthday ice-skating party every year until adolescence raised its ugly head and I became unmanageable. I hated ice skating. I hated numb toes and fingers.
30 years later, after moving to the Upper Peninsula, I discovered the mysteries of winter, the beauty, the craziness of white and cold. I experienced my first sub-zero days -30 and -40 below. Schools cancelled on account of sheer cold on crystal clear blue days. I thought in my madness that winter, here, away from the city grime, dazzling. Pure.
My neighbor, Wild Bill Tapola said if you can’t “make wood for winter” as a Finlander, you die. Making wood means chopping and lying in a store of wood for heating your home. This is the land of my people. I am 1/4 Finnish, 1/4 Swede and 1/2 German. Given up for adoption at birth I knew nothing of my heritage until moving here.
This land is my destiny, and I knew that after winter poems pored from me during my studies at N.M.U. My dreams are of this land. This winter I will deepen my commitment to snow and ice and the waters brown with tannin and iron.
