Perch Lake Bye Ta-Ta

 

In the summer of 2013, when I packed away the last stuff I was ever going to take from my first-ever house on Resort Pike Rd. outside of Petoskey -- a small place twelve minutes from the College, purchased at a slightly inflated price from two work colleagues and ultimately sold for far less -- I had a moment’s sorrow where I cried in the guest room / music room, shedding tears by myself for a moment that seemed longer than it was, thinking about promises made and promises broken while an uncertain but exciting future lay ahead. 

I'd left plenty of apartments in the past without a second glance, but this was my first goodbye to a house, and it was tougher than I expected. But the transition away from the Perch Lake house that I called home for almost exactly seven years, pictured above in the bottom center? My first house as a married dude with a wife and two little doggos, my first house on a body of sparkling clear water, my most expensive purchase to date? Leaving that house over the course of a few weeks was an absolute bitch.

I’m sure there are a lot of factors driving that emotional heft and profound sense of anger and loss. After all, it was the house into which I put the most money and the most labor, and it was the house where our sweet Scottie called Olive was staggered and felled by bladder cancer. It was a short convenient drive into retail and fast food and golf, and if I'm being honest, it was a place to feel superior to the majority of the local folks. It was less than an hour to each of my parents, and it was just under three hours away from the Detroit area and the Grand Rapids area alike. It held my physical media -- my comics and music and books and such -- in one comfortable place, and it gave me needed physical and mental distance from work.

But both Courtney and I worked full-time in Petoskey, and the waters of Perch Lake kept climbing and climbing, so I ultimately chickened out and bailed out. Now I’m in a house that feels like a hotel with our things uncomfortably placed inside, with a good chunk of my stuff in boxes and piles in multiple levels and multiple rooms, with strange random noises I don’t yet understand, with a job that has pushed me completely online in the face of a pandemic that has eliminated my downstate concerts and sporting events. I've heard that some people are excited about moving into a new place. I just wish I knew what that felt like at this point in time, when I long to see the heron gliding across sun-dappled waves, lightly flicking the shore, just one more time.