View from the dining room window. It's why she lives here.
On Friday, my friend Clare and I went Up North to visit another friend of ours, who lives on the shore of a smallish lake in Benzie County. Leah lost her husband suddenly last fall, and though we've kept in touch (Clare better than I), this was the first chance we'd had to visit.
The three of us worked in different offices of the same ad agency years ago. Clare was PR, Leah a writer-turned-account exec and I started out proofreading. After I fanagled my way into a copywriting job, I worked with both of them. Most of my assignments at first were for Leah's projects, and she played a big part in molding me into the writer I am today. She was and still is a stickler for detail, and in the days before widespread email use, we'd spend hours on the phone going over my copy, tightening, clarifying, making every word count. Much of my own insistence on excellence today is the result of mentoring by her and a couple of the other communications pros we worked with.
Back then, the cottage was a summer place, but when the agency was struggling and had to close its satellite offices, she and her
husband Jim sold their house mid-state and moved to the lake. Jim retired, and Leah held a marketing job at the nearby music camp before landing as marketing VP at a northern Michigan hospital.
The village is pretty typical of small towns up and down Lake Michigan's eastern shore: busting out with tourists and vacationers from June to September and fairly desolate in winter. Most employment is dependent on tourism, and many of the locals, if they're not retired or independently wealthy, commute to cities 30 or more miles away for work. Leah is the consummate networker and in addition to her immediate neighbors, she knows practically everyone else in town: the guy who owns the cool market with the fresh bread and great wine; the woman who runs the gift and kitchenware store and who rents out upscale tourist apartments upstairs; the couple who run the local bed and breakfast; the municipal maintenance guy and the car repair guy; plus local artists, musicians, real estate people.
Even though she's got a wonderfully suppportive circle of friends, her family's far away and winter can be long. Leah says there's been many a night when, driving toward home on drifted-over or ice-filled roads she's wondered, "What am I doing here?" Then the car crests a hill outside of town, the lake comes into view, and she remembers.
