Coming Home, Michigan Version

When I first read of our assignment, based on Charline von Heyl's epiphany in Marfa, my first thought was, Bad timing! In a few weeks, I am taking my first trip to Montana. I wanted a glamorous, super-charged outdoorsy setting in which to "see nothing" too. Something like this:

Well, ha! I spent the weekend instead in suburban Detroit, where my cousin was getting married. Not only was it a typically bitter, gray day in Detroit but even my location there, about a half-hour from the idyllic, leafy neighborhoods of my youth, was an aesthetic bummer. A condo development of repetitive blandness that looks like this:

Talk about nothing to see. Even the garden at this home, usually a riot of color and creativity, was a vision of cut-down depression in anticipation of cold, sunless winter:

The last thing I wanted to do was start poking around this uninspired landscape in the Arctic cold. Then, the Charline von Heyl thing started happening. The cold invigorated me. So did the mere fact, as is typical for me, of being outside. I hadn't been in Michigan during autumn in years, and I started to remember, visually and aromatically, my home state's omnipresent natural wonder (among, admittedly, some fairly dreary development). The casual splendor of trees like this, for example:

I found pinecones so freshly fallen that the sap clustered all over my hands, leaving such a distinct pine scent that I felt transported, first to my school's nature center where we tapped trees each fall for syrup, and then to my childhood home where my brothers and I spent all of our time in the wooded ravine out back, no matter the season. The ground on which I ran, hid, fooled around, buried various dead critters in bizarre takes on Jewish funerals, it looked, smelled and crunched under my feet just like this backyard did:

Soon, everything looked amazing. A cluster of brittle twigs like a sea urchin:

A starburst of fallen trees whose single arcing branch transforms the thing into a hideout:

A hole that reminds me of Lee Bontecou, sigh:

Naturally, as I looked deliberately at the rich foliage of spring and summer dead on the ground, in picturesque heaps in advance of next year's bounty, thoughts of the cycle of life took over. This is when things get heavy.

I circle to the front of the condo, inexplicably really, since I no longer want to be indoors. Outside is free and fresh. I am cherishing being outside at home, a luxury that does not exist for me in Manhattan.

I come upon this little totem thing:

I have no idea why it is there, what my host means by it. I have seen it at this home many times, and I always think of it condescendingly as a white person's attempt to do something Japanesey, even though I have no idea whether the Japanese do anything like this in their gardens. This time -- because I am looking so closely at nothing! -- I see a companion to the Jewish cemetery ritual of placing a stone on the tombstone of a loved one. It's a ritual I look upon fondly even though I believe burial sucks.

I think of my brother, whose grave I only visit when I am at another funeral or unveiling at the same cemetery. I hate going there, seeing how he is dead in a box in the ground, a teenager who must be bored to death - ha! - surrounded by old people from our family (although I would wager that my dad's arrival made things better for my brother, though worse for me). I don't cry, I just think of him, grateful that this assignment made me do so in the context of nature, the outdoors and art, while I am alone. Grateful also that my own post-life instructions comprise the anti-Jewish rite of cremation, organ donation and a ceremonial scattering of whatever bits are left in the waters off Tel Aviv Beach. (You have probably thought of these things, too, if you, like me, have lost 40 percent of your immediate family by this point.)

That evening, I go to my cousin's wedding, the whole point of my trip. There is so much to see.

Isn't that leopard tail something else? The party was packed with bandage dresses, aggressive eye makeup and ironed-down hair, an attempt to control Jewfros run amuck. I reprised my role, taken up at my cousin's sister's wedding, of underground paparazzo.

Amid all the distraction, a family friend came to find me. Her sons were friends of my brother's in Hebrew school, which means they got in lots of trouble together (that's what it means for all good Jews). She told me that her sons, all these years later, still speak of my brother. As if on cue, they walked over and told me a story. I cried, grateful that my totally awesome brother hasn't been forgotten.

So where does that leave me? Besides really off-track? I brought home three fragrant pinecones and a pile of red leaves.

I am going to document their decline as a reminder that a project about my brother is long overdue.