When I go to my favorite beach on Lake Michigan, it usually involves trundling down a sand dune with a blanket, sunblock, a book, possibly a pair of binoculars, and a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino…something frozen and tasty and cooling for heaven’s sake.

Today was quite different.  It’s two week shy of spring in the upper Midwest, even though Mother Nature has been luring us into hopefulness with several days of life in the forties.  It can be a cruel season, full of dashed hopes of capri pants and spaghetti strapped tops and sunshine on your shoulders,

But there have been other cruel things going on in the past few months, which have had the quality of a forced march of illness and family tragedy and funeral details and mourning and the time-consuming process of packing things up and getting myriad posthumous details in order. 

And so today after I left the office in mid-afternoon I drove to the shore anyway for some long-needed soul restoration.  My first stop was at my favorite gourmet chocolate shop for a handful of chocolate-covered raspberries in a little waxed paper bag.  I had first walked in just to order up a half pound of these delicacies to see my friend and I through another dismal day of cleaning for my late aunt’s estate sale a hundred twenty miles away on the coming weekend.  But once inside the shop, self-indulgence couldn’t wait.  Besides, this combination of dark chocolate and fresh fruit had to qualify as a HEALTH FOOD.  I have rationalization down to an art form, if you haven’t noticed.

My second stop was at Starbucks for a toasty soy mocha with whipped cream, something to counterbalance the stiff east wind hurtling off the frigid water. 

And the third stop was at the ranger station at the entrance to the state park, to buy a 2010 annual park pass for my little blue Honda.  The previous sticker is from 2007.  Kind of gives you an idea of what the last couple of years have been like.

Today, at the shore, the sky was grey and cloudy.  The asphalt parking lot still glistened from the early afternoon rain.  Pockets of snow, stubbornly unmelted, nestled in the lee of the dunes, their surfaces scattered with a fine film of golden sand.  The park was nearly deserted—there were no picnickers today.  But a young doe grazed calmly near the edge of the roadway through the park.  She edged away as I powered the window down to get a better view, but there was no urgency in her steps. 

I knew, before driving in, that there was no way that my bare feet were going to touch that cold, wet sand.  Instead, I angled the car across several parking spaces so that the front end lined up with a gap between two dunes.  The waves rolled in on greyish, sandy water, and a half-dozen seagulls strolled the shoreline.  The coffee was warm and delicious as I sipped, savoring the taste and the aroma, and the chocolate-covered raspberries were perfect.  I cracked the windows a few inches to hear the waves.

The unseasonably warm temperatures and melting snow cover had produced a blanket of fog which for the past two days had given most of my driving the quality of being in a Stephen King novel.  I expected no respite here.  But slowly, gradually, the sky above the gap in the dunes began to turn blue, sprinkled with white clouds.  Waves overlapped and crisscrossed as they crashed into the shoreline, like a herd of spirited ponies cavorting, or a bunch of toddlers jumping on a bed.  More blue sky appeared, in vast stretches before me.  The water turned an opalescent periwinkle, and the whitecaps turned creamy and bright.  The sound that came into the small confines of the car was a steady roar, a reminder that no matter what’s on our temporal, human plates, the wind keeps blowing, the waves keep rolling, the world keeps turning.