The area you refer to as the Northern Peninsula should be called the Upper Peninsula (UP). This avoids confusion with the area of the Lower Peninsula, aka the "mitten," from which I hail, often referred to as "up north" as in, "I have a cottage up north." Unlike the well defined UP bounded by Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron and a spit of land in Wisconsin, up north is a large, vaguely defined geographic area north of Detroit, Grand Rapids & other cities where "downstaters" come to vacation. UP is where "yoopers" are from; it rolls off the tongue so much better than "np- ers" does. Cheers!
"If you think very deeply about your past you are back against Dostoyevsky’s wall in reverse, the wall as thick as your life has been long. Your duty to dash your head against this wall is neither here nor there because that is what you end up doing anyway. There is no more disarming absurdity than asking, “What if I had …” because it invariably deals with key events that affected every single day, however slightly, in the life that followed. Each day, let alone hours and minutes, owns its fatality and this is no more grim or not grim than any other natural biological fact. We don’t need clocks to tell us that. The old Zen man who said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes” knew his own phenology and the sun’s descensions draw us surely on with our increasingly melancholy birthdays. I can’t mentally withdraw that day I made an abysmally stupid decision because how it affected the rest of my life is clear to me, and the life I have lived since carries the weight of that inevitably forgivable stupidity. That’s life, we wisely say."
The area you refer to as the Northern Peninsula should be called the Upper Peninsula (UP). This avoids confusion with the area of the Lower Peninsula, aka the "mitten," from which I hail, often referred to as "up north" as in, "I have a cottage up north." Unlike the well defined UP bounded by Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron and a spit of land in Wisconsin, up north is a large, vaguely defined geographic area north of Detroit, Grand Rapids & other cities where "downstaters" come to vacation. UP is where "yoopers" are from; it rolls off the tongue so much better than "np- ers" does. Cheers!
This excerpt from Harrison’s “Off to the Side.”
"If you think very deeply about your past you are back against Dostoyevsky’s wall in reverse, the wall as thick as your life has been long. Your duty to dash your head against this wall is neither here nor there because that is what you end up doing anyway. There is no more disarming absurdity than asking, “What if I had …” because it invariably deals with key events that affected every single day, however slightly, in the life that followed. Each day, let alone hours and minutes, owns its fatality and this is no more grim or not grim than any other natural biological fact. We don’t need clocks to tell us that. The old Zen man who said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes” knew his own phenology and the sun’s descensions draw us surely on with our increasingly melancholy birthdays. I can’t mentally withdraw that day I made an abysmally stupid decision because how it affected the rest of my life is clear to me, and the life I have lived since carries the weight of that inevitably forgivable stupidity. That’s life, we wisely say."