HARBOR LIGHT NEWSPAPER EDITOR’S NOTE: The Harbor Light Newspaper is dedicated to anchoring our readers to northern Michigan’s sense of place. We believe a community is defined by its stories, which is why we are elated to present another in our series of guest essays about life in this region. Writer Maureen Abood, a life-long seasonal resident who recently decided to call Harbor Springs home, is the author and photographer behind the blog Rose Water and Orange Blossoms. Her modern musings on Lebanese cuisine are often tied to the fields and tables of this area, and in her essay, we find that common connection of food, family, community. Follow her blog online at www.maureenabood.com.
--Kate Bassett
In Harbor Springs, With a Grateful Heart
By MAUREEN ABOOD
SPECIAL TO HARBOR LIGHT NEWSPAPER
It comes as no surprise to me that my earliest memory of Harbor Springs has to do with ice cream. Two scoops served not one on top of the other but side by side in a cone from The Lemon Tree, which is now Turkey’s. Turns out that a great many of my Harbor Springs memories are associated with food in one way or another. When we landed in our home on Main Street, we discovered a wonderful irony: that our next door neighbor was, like us, Lebanese. Latifi Huffman made us a big Lebanese dinner to celebrate our newfound, and unlikely, Lebanese connection in Harbor Springs. It was a feast that no doubt took her days of painstaking preparation, her way of affirming our shared culture and, in the tradition of many a Lebanese woman, her way of expressing her love. There has to be all kinds of good karma coming off of the table I write on right now; it is the same table that was once in Latifi’s kitchen. Often joining us on the front porch in the evening before going out for dinner, Latifi was a force to be reckoned with at 4 feet tall. She rivaled our pink gladiolas with her own glad, bright pink dresses and matching lipstick, telling stories of herself as a girl (“I was beautiful honey, and I didn’t know it!”) and laughing easily, especially when she talked with my parents.
That was true of most anyone who has come up on our porch over the years, where there is always lemonade and conversation. My father, Camille Abood, came up north from a young age to fish with his father and his friends. He always wanted a place here, and to share his passion for the water and the north country with his wife, Maryalice, and his family. Main Street was the perfect place for him because it allowed him to keep tabs on the town and its activities while still enjoying Little Traverse Bay nearby.
On more than one occasion we arrived from downstate to find a beautiful apple pie, warm and fragrant, on our kitchen counter made by our neighbor on the other side, Aris Smith. The Smiths and their children have meant a great deal to the Aboods. Their roots in this town match those of the massive maple trees in their yard, deep and sturdy. Their men march in the town parades as veterans; they meet life’s challenges, of which they have experienced many, like those maples as well: with great strength and fortitude. Mr. Smith used to watch us coming and going from his own porch, always telling us to drive safely back down to Chicago or wherever one might be headed, and to come back soon. I remember when they lost a son, a young man, years ago and my parents referenced the Smith family in instructing ours, as one we should emulate for their resilience in the face of adversity. We have found ample opportunities to make use of this instruction.
From the front porch I have eaten the best grilled hot dogs on the planet (which is saying a lot after living in Chicago for years), while watching every parade, Memorial Day and the 4th of July, for most of my life. The only 4th of July that did not find an Abood on Main Street was the year my father died, just days before the fourth. But the idea of coming up for the holiday was a strong impetus for my father in the weeks of his short terminal illness. His eyes lit up from their fog of pain when we spoke to him of Up North, how my brother would fly him there, and he could sit on his porch again. If I had to guess I would say that as my father’s soul took flight, his mind had him in Harbor Springs, out in the bay in his boat eating lunch and watching the sail races, or sitting on the porch with my mother.
That summer the house was closed up until my mom and I ventured up a few months after his death. What a harsh reality it was to enter the house and face the fact that he would not be here again. We cried as we drove down the hill into town and as we opened up the house and went out on the porch, enveloped in the numbness that only the death of a beloved can inflict. Harbor Springs broke our hearts that summer, but in the years since it has also helped us to heal. Because this is where we come to gather, to remember who we have been and where we are headed but most of all to simply live in the moment at hand, always with the sense of my father’s presence, and always striving for that same joyous yet meditative calm he found here.
We find it on the porch and in the bay, and we find it at the table. One experiences a marked increase in appetite on entering Harbor Springs. This is because of Up North terroir— which is a “sense of place,” and the effect of environmental elements on the food and drink coming out of that place. Terroir is about how the land from which anything is grown imparts a unique quality that is specific to that region. Harbor Springs terroir begins with the water: springs that bubble out of the beaches in Petoskey or the water fountains in Harbor Springs are like fountains of youth, a Holy Grail. I have not tasted purer, sweeter water anywhere. This purity extends to the light here, yellow light that casts itself across the summer days, and the violet veil that it becomes at dusk and dawn. It’s an orchestration, along with soil, bay breezes, and other exquisite secrets of the seasons that only a higher power, God, could conduct. The outcome in food is an explosion of flavor, color, and texture, grand and fleeting like the fireworks finale over the bay on the 4th of July. They boom and strike awe in us; they echo down the lake. Then they are gone until next year.
When I recently finished culinary school in a place that is known for its terroir—northern California—I wondered where I could possibly go next that would stand up to the thrill I had just experienced living in San Francisco, cooking and learning about food and wine, walking every day to school along the San Francisco Bay, eating produce of the highest quality year-round. I knew that I would not be seeking a position on the line in a restaurant, but rather would want to find a place where I could settle in, cook and write for a time. Ideally this creative life would take place near a body of water.
So landing in Harbor Springs for the summer was a no-brainer, a natural spot to spend time again with family, cook with my mother and reignite my writing, in the form of a food blog. And here I’ve been inspired, like the Lebanese in the Mediterranean are, by the sumptuous bounty to such an extent that my blog posts of stories and photos every week are beginning to feel like an aria, an extended love song, about this place. Last week the quote on my blog for one of my “Postcards from Up North” read that “there shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” That reminds me of how my mother, sister and I always toast with our cocktails from any location and in any season: we clink our glasses and say, “happy summer!” That little cheers recalls for us that we carry summer in Harbor Springs with us all of the time.
But the season itself of summer in Harbor Springs does end, always sooner than we’d like. Staying on for the winter this year—that has taken a little more of my consideration. We came for short visits at Christmas when I was a child, driving up on Christmas day and eating Campbell’s bean with bacon soup and my mother’s Christmas cookies and baklawa. My father read to his five children, and we played games into the wee hours. I always made a bee-line downtown to Howse’s to satiate the craving I’d had for those chocolates since summer’s end, and to walk home in the snow licking one of their holiday lollipops. Here we escaped for a short time to a wintery world that felt like it belonged in the story books we were reading from.
How, though, would the long cold winter in a tough economy play for me now? My dad won’t be here to read stories and my mother will wisely be in the Florida sun. I remembered though how my living room in Chicago evokes Harbor Springs in its total glory, with James Peery paintings of the bay and Holy Childhood Church in summer on one wall, and a huge Virgil Haynes silvery winter scene in town on another.
My decision to stay for the winter has come to me slowly, but was finally clear when I realized that terroir doesn’t just impact foodstuffs. Terroir produces…us. We are products not just of our familial upbringings, but products of place. The same environmental elements that make the peaches at Bill’s Farm Market so perfect or the tomatoes at Pond Hill Farm so divine are having their effect on you and me too. Just as our lives are filled with both joy and sorrow, the abundance of summer would not be without the fallow, stark beauty of winter. I have learned enough by now in life to seek the unknown, even the difficult, because in time I recognize that it was out of the challenge that I grew the most. So here I will be this winter, in Harbor Springs with a grateful heart.
This is part of the September 7, 2011 online edition of Harbor Light Newspaper.
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