Donna

 In this YouTube video, Donna Michels walks us around her gardens .

 

I first saw Donna when she entered a building in the middle of a Chicago winter. Her coat was unzipped, flapping in the breeze. She wasn't wearing a hat or gloves. This sight is etched in my memory. I grew up in Chicago and knew the ferocity of its winter weather. Yet Donna came in from the cold as if the cold was not there. Who was this person?  As time went by I learned more about her. She was from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Ishpeming specifically, where they had real winter weather; real biting winds, real drifts of snow, ice that lasts till June. Compared to that, winter in Chicago is not winter. Pictured here, Donna Michels standing on an Upper Peninsula cliff overlooking the Lake Superior shoreline -- appropriately attired.

A few weeks before the last Christmas of the twentieth century, my brother Mike and I stepped out into a cold and gray winter day for holiday shopping in Chicago. Mike informed me at the out-set that he was on a “mission” to find a Christmas something for Donna.    “Something really unique,” he said in calm, almost reverent voice.  “Something Donna!” For the entire day we visited several used vinyl record and CD establishments, Mike, as always meticulously combing through tightly packed bins throughout the cramped stores.  What was extremely notable and different this day was observing Mike veer from rock n’ roll LP’S to check out the classical music inventory.  At a few used music stores, he would ask my thoughts on classical CD’s he found, most piano, violin or quartet.   Thereafter, he would seek information on his selected CD’s from store employees and listen intently to a selection or two on each.  I do not think Mike cared much about wh...

“One of the mythic hero’s most important tasks is to travel to a strange new land and come back  enlightened or bewildered.” * Honestly, with a lede like that, who isn’t going to continue reading. Today, my lunch was a  sandwich and The New York Review of Books. If Donna were still alive, she might be reading the story to me. She had been reading the New  York Review for many decades, many more decades than the three we shared. She would read  it cover to cover; she gave it her complete attention. High praise. Concerned that a lapse in Donna’s subscription might nudge the universe off axis, I renewed it  in her name. I quietly sit and read. The New York Review has my complete attention. *  Quote from an article by Yuri Slezkine in the October 22, 2020 issue.