I’m sunk into the backseat of my mom’s Honda CRV as it glides between cuts of national forest, shielding my eyes from the overcast sunlight creeping in through the windshield. I peer through the tinted window into the dense forest. Darkness seems to gather and hang between the trees. I’m hungover, cuddling my mom’s black-and-white border collie, Bruno, as he sleeps. Last night was fun though. Too many margarita Cutwaters in our shared hotel room, not enough sleep. Instead, while my mom slept soundly, my younger brother and I binged episodes of the spooky apocalypse show he put me on to: newcomers stuck in a time-warp town, haunted by monsters that devour you if you’re outside after dark. 

I’m hungry. “Can we stop to eat somewhere after this?” I plead.

My brother says yes from the driver’s seat as my mom uses her phone’s GPS to navigate for him. 

“Um…you’re gonna want to turn left soon,” she declares.

“Oh, we’re close?” I lift my head off the backseat headrest and look to the left, towards where I think the water is. The dense tree line doesn’t give way.

“Right here,” my mom shouts, “Turn right here!”

My brother jerks the car into the very short left hand turn lane that appears in the middle of the two-lane county road, taking us down another winding path through congregant trees. After a couple minutes, we pull into the state park parking lot. No other cars are here. 

“I need to pee,” my mom and brother both announce as they ready themselves for the dirty, worn down porta-potties we parked in front of. 

The summer’s humidity caught me by surprise. While my family relieves themselves, I get out of the backseat, stretch my arms and hips, and get my belongings from the trunk before partially disrobing, with Bruno and the forest as my audience. Hoodie to an old t-shirt, sweatpants to bike shorts, I slip my socked feet in and out of my black-and-white Adidas one at a time, so as not to touch the ground. By the time I’m finished, my family has returned. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” my mom said. 

I make sure to gather everything we need from the backseat: Bruno’s bag of treats, a glass bottle of ashes, and a bit of writing in my small notebook about my grandma that I’d like to read aloud, though I’m nervous to share it with my mom. Check. I place everything in my fanny pack and sling it across my chest. 

I’ve never seen this bottle before. It’s orange with a beveled texture and it’s sealed with a rubber-lined glass cap of the same color. I ask my mom where she found it.

“It was in your grandma’s apartment when I was cleaning it out.” She doesn’t offer much more than that, escorting Bruno from the backseat by his leash. 

We make our way through the forest on a short trail that leads to Lake Michigan’s waters. On our way, we pass by rapturous raspberry bushes, slender quaking aspen, and sturdy basswood. I’m only able to identify these by using the Seek app capturing photos with my phone and hoping for a cell signal to name the species.

Beyond this brush lies the lively waters of the massive lake we came to see. We’re on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, though technically, we’re still in the southernmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. If we traveled the perimeter of the lake, through Wisconsin, Illinois,  and Indiana, we would eventually end up back in Michigan, in the small town in which my mom and grandma were born, just north of the lake’s famous sand dunes. My mom was raised nine miles away from Lake Michigan’s shore, with her two brothers, by their father and stepmother. At 14 years old, she left her home in Michigan on a Greyhound bus to live with her mom, my grandma, in Minnesota. Her brothers soon followed. 

My mom leads the way now, telling my brother and I that walking barefoot on Lake Michigan’s shore is “the way to do it”. I decline, as we make our way through a sandy stretch littered with lake debris, driftwood, and bird droppings. As we walk, though, the debris clears and the sand begins to reflect the sun’s light and warmth. The clouds have broken.

“We used to come here every summer,” she recounts. 

I look ahead and see that the shore we’re on opens up into a public beach where swimmers and sunstalkers have staked their claim. I feel my mom’s excitement shift into anxiety as we pass another beachwalker heading in the opposite direction. My mom knows that disposing of ashes in a public body of water is…not advised. Once the beachwalker is out of earshot, my mom says, “Let’s do it here.”

“Um, okay,” I reply.

I move swiftly, grabbing the glass bottle from my fanny pack. We approach the restless water together, greeted by gliding winds. I step beyond a piece of long driftwood, deeper into the shore so that the sand grabs hold of the clear rubber soles of my Adidas, but not so deep that the musty water washes over them.

And then, instead of reading the words I had wanted to share about my grandma––words that I believed honored a truth about her, that she was complicated, generous, mutable, and withdrawn, words that speculated what it would’ve been like had she agreed to co-write her queer-ass biography with me–I choke. 

I say something like, “I’m glad that we all got to love grandma in our own ways,” before opening the glass bottle, kneeling down to meet the water, and attempting to let my grandma’s ashes spill into it. With a quickness quicker than me, though, the ashes catch with the wind and blow back onto my black Adidas.

Me, my brother, and my mom crack up laughing. My mom wipes tears from her eyes. 

“Well,” she says, “at least she’ll be with you wherever you go.”