writing in Hastings

Hastings, MI – We spent a week in mid January at our son and daughter-in-law’s place south of Hastings, MI. We got in after a snow storm on Sunday with a car and a truck. The roads were bad; no one did the maintenance over the weekend. But, a good neighbor plowed the driveway to the house.

On Monday, backing out of the driveway, I got stuck in an iced-up snow bank. After a while, I rocked the car back and forth out of the snowy ordeal that started right in front of the house.

The city of Hastings wasn’t much better. On our way to the North Eastern Elementary, a van was stuck in a snow bank at a city intersection. The school walking guide Doug told me that he fell on an ice puddle because the sidewalks weren’t cleared. He cleared part of the sidewalk himself.

It wasn’t that the storm was unexpected, after all, we live in deep Midwest in Michigan.

Guys with their snowmobiles have been eagerly waiting for this since December; we had a green Christmas. The same waiting game goes for the ice fishermen back home on Murray Lake.

Finally, the homemade ice skating rink outside froze, but now it’s covered with a foot of snow, but the kids went sledding.

Baby Boom of 2020s

When dropping Dominik off at the daycare at CERC and Hastings High School, we found out that babies born in 2020 were already in the daycare. The kids have been rotating rooms between red and blue to facilitate the influx. Walking to the red room, I saw babies crawling in the baby room.

I noticed a mom this morning still in her pajamas dropping off older kids with the youngest ones waiting in the van. Among seven strollers, there was a stroller for twins parked by the daycare. The car seat carriers were lined up on a shelf by the wall. The red room was already full of kids at play.

Wow, what a crop.

After a short drive on the winding road between Hastings and Kalamazoo, I walked inside the house that reverberated love, peace and warmth with the smell of coffee.

When I glanced outside the window, I saw a big pile of wood covered with snow and the outdoors furnace. An entire crew heads out into the woods to cut tree trunks.

Welcome to Michigan.

I even heard and saw birds chirping in the tree from Josephine’s window. On a day like this, I love being a writer. I get to channel stories that otherwise people would have no access to. No newspaper or TV will ever report on these seemingly ordinary things, except that there is nothing mundane about them. Each moment will never repeat itself.

I worked on the final revisions of the Greenwich Meridian Memoir. I added a chapter about husband Ludek’s escape from former Czechoslovakia via Yugoslavia in 1988. Stay tuned for excerpts.

Earlier in the morning on our way to the high school, we saw an old man bundled up walking in the roadway with a stick in the pinkish morning twilight among the roaring buses.

Why didn’t he wait till daylight? Will he be there tomorrow? Will we see the rising sun or will it be cloudy?

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