October 16, 2009

• So here’s a liddle riddle for you: she ate lunch in Paris, then spent the night in Peru. She found no watercraft in ship-she-wana, tho she wanna one real bad. The tunnel she went through had holes in the top, and the straits led to crooked falls. Where was she? She’ll share a few visual clues.

  She loves quilts, painted on barns…

   

  

  or hanging in restaurants…

   

  or planted in flower beds!

  

   She loves tidy farms…
  

  and beautiful old barns…

  

  …and admires the simpler nature of this lifestyle.

  

  She loves to see children hurrying into one-room schools…

  

  and historic old mills…

  

  and log cabins with pumpkins, and carts filled with flowers.

  

  She loves gardens, both cultivated and wild.

  

  She is drawn, as if by a magnet, to country churches…

  

  and quirky restaurants, like the Legs Inn (those white things are many, many old stove legs, turned upside down, on the roof…and the Polish food was fabulous!)

  

  and quirky mooses.

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  She loves, loves, loves lighthouses, on anywhere shores…

  

  the older, the better.

   

  And when the view is of this bridge…

  

  …it’s just so blue! Fifteen minutes on a jet ferry to visit an island…

  …home of this historic hotel, only to learn that one must pay $10 to walk across the famous front porch…hmmm,  better to enjoy it from a distance.

  That bridge eventually brought her to a wilder, more remote place….

  

  of falls, falls and more falls.  While hiking down to the water’s edge, this sign bore a prayer that she had seen, just a few weeks ago, inscribed on the soaring lobby of the Lied Lodge in Nebraska City…wonderfully stated. It makes her want to hug a tree.

  

  Hikes turn up coincidences, too. She never saw a stranger, so was delighted to learn that the couple with whom she struck up a conversation here (1500 miles away from home) lived just 75 miles from her, back down in the hills; she loves those small-world experiences, wherever she finds them.

  Did you solve her riddle? Paris is in IL and Peru is in IN, just south of the pristine Amish farms near Goshen and Nappannee and Shipshewana. She loves saying those names out loud. Land o’ Goshen, it sure was nice to visit there and encounter the friendliness and openness of the folks who make that place their home.

  The “tunnel” is Michigan’s Tunnel of Trees scenic byway, along the shore of Lake Michigan, around Little Traverse Bay. The churches were there, too, along with a (what superlative can she use here to emphasize the neatness of this?) WONDERFUL rug-making co-op, where 20 women are apprenticed to learn to weave and hook rugs. They buy their wool from local shepherdesses. She decided to come home and learn to be a shepherdess. Alas and alack, no sheep in yon pasture, yet. 

  The Straits of Mackinac took her to the UP across the long bridge, where she found the Tauquamenon Falls to be crooked and lovely and natural. The moose met her there.

  She decided that it is a very good thing to live in the heartland of America, where she can hop in a car and find extraordinary beauty just a day or two away. She realizes it is a privlege to do so.

   

  • 2:46 pm
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