"The feeling we had come home"

     Northern Michigan is Hemingway country. Paris and Spain and Cuba came later. Here is the motherlode for early Hemingway, the Nick Adams stories. Though this woodsy, cherry-strewn realm does pop up elsewhere. In "Green Hills of Africa," Hemingway writes,  “The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall.”
     Saturday's wedding of my older son and his fiance took place at Charlevoix, the lovely lakeside town which, for Nick Adams, represents domestic bliss with Marjorie in "The Three-Day Blow." Though his friend Bill assures him that a married man is "done for." 

     Not true. Fiction be damned, Hemingway personally liked marriage well enough — he did it three times. He wed his first wife, Hadley Richardson, at Horton Bay, and honeymooned 20 miles east of Charlevoix at Walloon Lake. Their signed marriage certificate is displayed at Harsha House, part of the Charlevoix Historical Society Museum. 

     The museum also holds a letter written by Hemingway saying how, in 1920, his mother kicked him out of their house, and he was only able to survive the summer by parlaying $6 into ten times that amount at a Charlevoix gambling den. The winnings, he wrote, “prevented [him] from having to go to work at the cement plant where Bay Harbor is now." 

     We admired the local cement plant, still on the shoreline. And Bay Harbor is where my son's wedding took place, close to his new wife's family.

     While I plan to take some time to process the whole event — you are, as I like to say, allowed to think about stuff —  there was one reading my son had incorporated into Saturday's ceremony, from "A Farewell to Arms," that I thought I'd share now, especially after a fellow guest whose son is getting married in September made a beeline to me afterward and announced that she is going to regift the quote: 

At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

     Beautiful, right? Perfect. I've recently read "A Farewell to Arms" and at the reception asked my son when he'd come across that passage. Not while actually reading the book, he admitted, but by surfing selections of romantic quotes online. Not quite the same as stumbling upon it in situ, I suppose, not sighing in recognition of truth and marking the place to return to later. But good enough nevertheless.  Anyway, it's a moving and effective wedding quote, and if you'd like to borrow it, it's yours.