5 am in Copper County

The problem with Houghton is not the 9 hour road trip with Leif. We leave Kalamazoo with the cat he’s pet-sitting indefinitely and he wants tea and snacks at every rest stop. Something about Leif is that he’s incapable of speaking above 40 decibels, so when he says we should stop at Kitch-iti-kipi and I say “kit shitty kitty?” it’s not contrived. We do stop at the Big Spring, and the water is clear as glass and the color of oxidized copper. It’s full of fish and bubbling sand, and there’s a drunk girl throwing up in it. She yells at her boyfriend and cusses at some locals, all of whom are trying to keep her from falling in. Leif and I are preferably not involved.

It’s not the leaves that haven’t changed yet. They’re mostly green and yellow, and some of them are so red they’re pink. The sunset looks like it’s melting into the trees, and I can wear corduroy pants and sweaters. We all eat Jimmy Johns and go for a walk, and Leif and I find a tiny snake to pet.

It’s not my hyper-fixation on editing, which Auntie recognizes as if she’s looking in a mirror. The only thing I’m neglecting is the after-dinner Mario Kart. It’s not Lily’s obsession with getting in my lap with her wet puppy feet, or the ripping wind at Copper Harbor, or the way they call drizzling “raining.”

The problem with Houghton is that I can’t be everywhere at once. When you have a home in Old Jefferson and a home in Copper County there is always someone to miss. There is always someone waiting for you on the other side of the country. A carousel of bittersweet goodbyes shuttles you from loved one to loved one – and even when you want one more day, the carousel waits for no one. Even when you want a few more hours, so that your Auntie who’s somewhere between a sister and a godmother can take you shopping a third time – and she doesn’t even like shopping – there’s flights and birthdays and promises to keep.

The problem with Houghton is the goodbye.

When the goodbye came, there was no dramatic montage, no running through the airport because I just can’t get on my flight. There was me and Lars, sat in the driveway in the front seat of his car with my bags in the back, looking up at the office window whose light is still on. There was just me saying “I can’t do it. It’s too sad,” and making Lars wake up his parents at 5 am so I could hug them goodbye.

There’s no romance to an ending. It ends in a sigh, at 5 am, with one boot in your backpack and one in your duffel bag. In the end, it’s just some people who love each other trying to hang on to the time they still have to show it.

In the end, Lars and I stay up all night. The lights on the bridge between Houghton and Hancock look different in the fall. It’s the first time I went out in darkness this visit. Everything feels higher contrast and I feel overly awake. I’m wired; I have been since I woke up 20 hours ago. The day before flying always feels asthmatic to me. But in Auntie’s new car, the colored LEDs make everything feel less dark, less final. Lars and I are still awake, pretending that the last day never ends if you don’t let it.

It’s not just the leaves, the lake, my family, the fire pit. It’s not just Maizie and Lily and the way Uncle buys every snack I like. It’s also me — how I’m a distilled version of myself. When you’re not crammed full of micro-anxieties and balancing an ever-changing calendar, there’s room to grow. There’s room for annoyance to expand and dissipate. There’s room for my brain to stretch out and devote time to The Symposium. When I am diminished, I grow.

When the plane lands at MSY, that’s the hardest part. I smack into the border between an end and a beginning. I am not yet returned to my husband, but I am torn from my godfamily.

Who am I in this moment? A cousin? A niece? A wife?

I am myself, and I often find that is not enough. If I am not living for something bigger than that, I don’t think I can live at all. Everything I love is fulfilled in sharing.

Last time I was in Houghton, I was rabid for an ending of another kind – the ending of my book. This month I returned and worked it like dough; I sat around the firepit with aunt and uncle to do my first writing workshop since Spring of 2021. Here are two people who love me and love my book, and no matter what comes next, that moment will be a glorious blessing.

What comes next is more editing. This process is long, and believe me, no one wants this book on the shelf more than I do. I wrote the book, and that was a milestone in my life and in my craft. But there’s still a thousand more things to do, so I keep editing and Nick keeps researching query letters.

Editing scares me because there’s no right answer. I can cut full paragraphs in a caffeine-fueled haze, and the reality is I’ll probably never know the difference. Who knows how long I spent writing those five sentences? Sometimes it takes me 30 minutes to get a paragraph just right. And then, in 30 seconds, I decided it doesn’t feel right. And it’s gone. Not forever, but for the at all foreseeable future. Not even my editor will ever know how those words knit together.

I don’t mind, in the end. We’re all here to work hard and bleed money, so kill it if it won’t sell — I’ll still have the words I thought were perfect on my hard drive, but when the book is bound, it’s not speaking for me anymore. I am removed from the equation, and I won’t presume to step between book and reader to say which words are the most important.

Or maybe that’s a romanticization of my mercenary tendencies. What some would call a sell-out, I would call pragmatic.

No one wants this book done more that I do, believe me. Everything I love is fulfilled in sharing, and so this book will be.

And you can’t rush a good thing.