Its been two years and it still feels like I should be able to call him.

A collection of memories as time marches me ever closer to a tragic anniversary.

July 13th 2023 was a day that changed my family dramatically. Though the dramatic part happened 11 days earlier.

Those 11 days were like living a funeral dirge, a physical reminder of the march towards mortality.

There were so many storms that rolled through those days where our lives virtually stood still. He would have loved to see those storms, especially from the vantage point of the 8th floor in the hospital. And of course there were the fireworks.

I remember when I was a kid he and I would climb out the windows of the dormer of the house and onto the roof of the porch and climb up to the roof of the dormer with a blanket to sit on and two bottles of Vernors and watch the fireworks on the 4th of July. Not above the trees but almost, high enough to be able to see the local fireworks display and high enough to not be bothered by the mosquitoes. That was an experience exclusive to me, my sister never got to do that.

We used to take his 18 foot long canoe out to the local state park to paddle the Huron River. If he didn’t have a state park pass that year we would pull off the road just past a bridge of a public road that crossed the river and put the canoe in there, like renegades crossing a boarder under the cover of darkness.

We used to take that same canoe out on Torch Lake in the dead of night, the water like glass and the cloudless sky filled with more stars than I’ve ever seen. The milky way reflected off the water giving the impression that we were floating silently through space as we glided stealthily through the water.

This year I’m taking his canoe back up to that lake. It hasn’t tasted those waters in nearly 20 years, and has been resting behind my mother’s garage for the past 3 years. My sister wants to learn how to steer it, I’m shocked that with as much time as we spent in paddle powered craft on the water she never learned. But I guess it makes sense, if she wasn’t in the middle then one of us was in the front while the other was in a kayak. I learned the hard way, by doing. But I will teach her what I know and she will pilot our father’s boat through those clear waters in the calm of the sunrise this summer.

He loved the Upper Peninsula, his favorite place to stay was the Minnetonka Motel (now the Minnetonka Resort) in Copper Harbor, the northern most city in Michigan. We would spend a week there, the 5 of us in a suite cabin exploring local copper mines, visiting small towns that looked like they had been frozen in time, collecting rocks, enjoying the complementary sauna at the adjacent motel, taking day trips to Brockway Mountain and dining at the Harbor House. I was 11 when those trips halted with the death of my paternal grandmother. I haven’t been to that part of the UP in 28 years.

In the last 3 years before COVID happened my parents started vacationing again because I was living at home again with my husband and daughter, which meant they had a built in cat-sitter. They would vacation for 3 weeks in early fall when most of the tourists had returned down state for their kids to return to school. Heading north on Labor Day when everyone else was headed south and would spend their time between Mackinaw City, Eagle Harbor, and Copper Harbor.

Some day we will return to spread the ashes of both parents. But not today. Today we celebrate the positives of life he lived, and cherish the time we have left with our mother.

Cheers to my old man, may you enjoy bottomless long island iced teas and a doobie that never scorches your finger tips in eternity.