Mackinac Island

The weather was perfect. That doesn't happen often in the middle of June up near the border of Canada, even if the summers are theoretically milder. Humidity makes eighty degrees feel like ninety, and you can hardly sweat because the air is already so thick with moisture.

But the weather was not like that. It was a balmy sixty-five degrees, and the sky was a clear construction paper blue. So picturesque you thought nothing of it. You took it for granted.

You rode over from the mainland on a ferry. The lake was calm. Waves bloomed beneath you, spreading white foam petals, but never seemed to rock the boat.

No cars or motor vehicles of any kind are allowed on Mackinac Island, so when you stepped off the ferry, you were greeted with a familiar kind of smell. You live in the Texas Panhandle, a place where livestock outnumber people, and you can't even escape horse feces on vacation. Carriages and buggies carry tourists up the steep rolling hills and through the crowded cobblestone streets, pulled by huge Clydesdales with giant hooves and flicking tails. The moment you settled into a buggy, the horse in front of you relieved itself. Your grandma who was sitting next to you winced in disgust and then had to laugh. You had to laugh too. "Such is life," you said. "Guess everybody has to poop sometimes." Your grandfather found this amusing.

You stopped to eat lunch at a beachside restaurant that looked like an old hotel. The wooden porch was dilapidated. The steps drooped on one side like the house had had a stroke. Your waitress was not very nice, and you can't quite blame her since she worked at a tourist trap.

Since your grandfather walked with a cane and couldn't traverse far up the winding hills, the three of you opted for another horse drawn carriage. This one resembled a tram and was pulled by a team of six horses, which the tour guide told you the names of. The names were not intensely memorable.

You spend most of the afternoon picking through curios in the barn-turned-gift-shop and learning about how the only two motor vehicles on the island, the police car and ambulance, crashed a few months ago for the first time. You take a few pictures of rock formations at the crest of the island and admire the empty expanses of blue converging on the horizon. They would be indistinguishable if not for the sky lightening to a powdery silver as it broke the glassy surface of the lake.

By late afternoon, you and your grandparents are heading back down to Main Street. You found a little balcony café at the bottom of a narrow flight of stairs. At first, you cannot find any servers or even food until a man popped out from the small dark kitchen that emptied onto the balcony. He seated the three of you and asked what you wanted to drink. No menus were brought. The waiter gave you a few options, mostly just pie. You ordered a slice of cherry pie for you and your grandma to share.

You looked out over the balcony. You saw the slope of the hill you were following down, the impossibly green grass rippling in the whistling breeze. Families stretched out on picnic blankets and flew kites. Children chased each other, weaving between spruce trees and lilac bushes. At the base of the hill, buggies and carriages rolled along, and couples traced the sidewalk, hands interlocked or pushing strollers. Some people took pictures of the lake or the harbor or the antique hotels along Main Street.

The waiter brought the pie. It was a huge slab of homemade pie filled with Michigan cherries and topped with a golden all-butter crust and a crown of whipped cream. The cherries were crisp and sour-sweet. The crust was homemade, pockmarked and crumbly and imperfect. The whipped cream was sweet seafoam.

It was a perfect piece of pie. Nothing about it was too much, no piece of the puzzle too underwhelming. Sitting there on that balcony, eating homemade pie, overlooking waves bejeweled with sunlight, feeling that gentle breeze dash away whatever summer heat lingered from yesterday’s scorcher, is something you will always remember.

What you will also always remember was when the waiter brought the bill. Three drinks and a slice of pie amounted to a boastful fifty dollars. You realize now you should never have been as shocked as you were. Your grandfather says when you bring it up, “We paid for the view too.” You think he wants to say something else like there is a price to milk-and-cookie memories, for that warm fuzzy feeling that wards off even the coldest of the world’s chill.

You remember that day with sparkling clarity. Not because all of it was perfect or perfectly memorable but because something happened on that balcony and in that slab of twenty dollar pie. Something formed—a reminder that sometimes you pay the price for good things and they’re worth every pile of horse poop.