Living the Life at Lake Medora

The Enduring View.

Its not been much of a blogging summer.  Not sure why.  There have been lots of nice events and all the usual summer pleasure.  But they didn't seem to offer the kind of story I like to tell on a blog.

We did have a kind of short summer.  We didn't arrive til mid-June, partly because we lost our deck last winter from record amounts of snow and ice, and we can't get into the house without going onto the deck.  And we're leaving early for a wedding in Louisville of a much loved young woman we've known all her life.

Still there were pleasures.  We still have our beautiful view and a beautiful new deck from which to view it (a deck luckily paid for mostly by insurance).

 We had much loved friends who visited us from SC and who relaxed, each in her or his own way, on said deck.

We read Moby Dick together and celebrated Melville's 200th birthday at the Fitz with a superb bottle of Ridge Zinfandel.

We enjoyed nice meals at home.  Our favorites are grilled salmon (Yay Tony!) and Co-Op handmade pizzas.
 

We ate hotdogs at the Copper Harbor Arts Fair.  (Note the importance of eating this summer.)

I swam (not across the lake--too cold for that--but a ways).

And we enjoyed the best martinis in the Keweenaw at the Harbor Haus.

We admired sunsets and the beginning of color.

These are the "episodes" of my summer.  If anyone can help me "configure" them into a cohesive whole I will thank them for helping me tell the story of my summer.

Tomorrow we leave for home, and we have a great adventure ahead.  That will be my first post in Louisville.

#LakeMedora
#PureMichigan

Miami

Tony in Miami 💓 

I was going to title this blogpost "A List Is Not a Story."  I have been absent from Blog World for a while.  Mainly because I couldn't formulate an interesting post in my mind--a story, that is.

Since I got back from Budapest, I have done a lot of things.  Some have been wonderful, others mundane.  But all of them added up in a kind of one-thing-after-another way.  Not a good way to organize a blog post; not a really good way to organize one's life.  Nevertheless, stuff happens.  I am not going to rehearse here the mundane stuff (nothing horrible but the mainly the necessary indignities being older--or really of just "being." ) I will make note for the record of the nice things we did: a trip to friends in SC, a visit from Tony's sister Mary, a gorgeous wedding in SC, and a trip to Miami.  Mainly I want to say for myself that I need to return to a narrative of retirement.  I need both rhythm and focus.  Happily I am leaving for the lake in two days, so things should settle in nicely and interesting blogposts will once again occupy my mind.

However, this blogpost has to be about something, so I am going to feature here one of the best experiences of the last few months (and the one where I have the best pictures), our trip to Miami.

We went to Miami for a long weekend to attend my nephew Aaron's senior recital.  My sister Sandy rented a house, and she and her husband David and all of her sons were there, as were my brother Ben and his wife Nina, and David's brother Bobby and his wife Marilyn.  So Aaron had all his aunts and uncles there.  As Sandy said, with bar mitzvahs over for a while and weddings not really in sight, there are few opportunities for families to gather like this.  It was wonderful for lots of reasons.

We went to the beach:

We went to the Everglades where saw critters, water, and trees.  (Ben and Sandy and I lived in Miami in the 1950s, and though I think I was the only one of us who remembered this, we used to visit the Everglades with our parents.)   

Debra and Tony almost done in by the heat.

My sister Sandy 

My brother Ben and his wife Nina

We walked around Little Havana. 

But the absolute highlight was the recital.  My nephew Aaron Mutchler, Jazz Trumpet Extraordinaire!

Aaron, third from the left.