JOHN PEPIN

The light is such today that it appears to reflect or illuminate only in obsidian black, pearl white and multitudes of grays.

The surface of the water on the lake is a good example. The reflections show the gray and white, woolen-sock skies and the wisps of cool wind that course over the water’s surface bend the light and shadow like a sheet of aluminum.

The result is a shifting back and forth, with the low rhythm of the rising and falling swells, between shiny metal and opaque blackness.

In the surrounding woodlands, all the tree trunks are either black or white and the foliage varies in pronounced shades of gray. Even though I can feel the light breeze and see the rolling of the clouds overhead, time seems to have stopped.

The typically comforting silence is today like a cutting blade that pierces my skin and then digs in deep without any trouble.

A few days ago, I lost a great friend of mine.

She was a woman I had known my whole life.

Her name was Noreen, and she was 89 years old when she died.

She lived in a big two-story white house with black window shutters, which once had a matching white, wooden fence around the front and side yards.

If that neighborhood where I grew up was like a patchwork, her backyard and ours touched on one corner. Tall maples shadowed a concrete front walkway past a wide, gate that swung on a heavy spring.

There were two or three concrete steps that led up to the wooden front porch, which is where I spent a lot of my time with Noreen and some of her family members.

I used to sit out there with Noreen, her brother John and sister Catherine Ann during the summertime when they would come up from Chicago to visit Noreen.

John was a schoolteacher and Catherine Ann was a nun.

I was a very young boy — probably taking a walk around the block — when I was first invited to sit in the metal-framed deck chairs with them to share a Saturday afternoon.

We had casual conversations, something cool to drink and candy imported from Italy. The pieces of the sweet nougat and nut treat came individually enclosed in a tiny box.

Noreen and her siblings were very kind people. I remember listening to them talk about their work — Noreen was a registered X-ray technician who worked in Chicago and later Marquette for more than 40 years or things they liked to do.

John loved art and he once took me to Heath’s studio in Skandia where the Heath family had a greenhouse and John Heath painted and sold landscapes, though he was also a nationally known wildlife artist who painted trout and duck stamp art.

John Heath was a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. Perhaps, he and Noreen’s brother John had a personal and professional connection through education. I was too young to know.

Her obituary said Noreen was also known as “Nonie” by friends and family, but I didn’t recall that either. I called her Noreen, and she always called me “Johnny,” from my earliest memories of her until the last time I saw her, which was a few months ago.

She collected teacups, liked Sudoku puzzles and needlework. When we sat together in her living room that last time, again on a Saturday afternoon, like those old days long ago, we talked about politics, current events and the Detroit Tigers, more of her favorite things.

She had lost quite a bit of weight since I had seen her last, but she was the same old Noreen, sharp as a tack, always kind and still smiling.

When I came home from out west, I would try to make it a point to stop to see her. She was always encouraging to me. Someone once told me she thought of me as the son she never had.

We had planned to get pasties and watch a Tigers double-header together on television, but we never got to do that.

When I left that last day, she kissed my cheek and we hugged. I left my phone number and asked her to please call me if she ever needed anything.

She wrote the number down on a piece of paper and put it next to her chair, but she never called. I was very sad to hear of her passing away.

I used to mow her lawn. She had a black, Scottie dog named “Buttons” when I was a kid. She had other dogs later, but I didn’t know them as well.

Her backyard had a garden along the back portion. The fence was made of concrete and attractive wrought iron. She grew marigolds and other colorful and pretty flowers.

She had a white pine tree in the backyard at the side of her yard closest to ours. She was proud of her Irish heritage and her Catholic faith. She said that when I was young, she used to hear me singing while I was swinging on our swing set in the backyard.

I recall telling my brother, sisters and other neighborhood kids that she had said, “Johnny, you can do anything in my damned yard that you want to.”

The other kids didn’t believe me because “damned” was a swear word and they didn’t think she would have said that but she did indeed.

She was one of those things I would think about when I was a couple thousand miles away from home. Whenever I pictured coming home, I always anticipated she’d be there, like my dad, the old streets, people and food and drink of our little mining town, along with the other comforts of home.

When I came to her house that last time we met, the porch that I had remembered as so wide and long when I was a young boy, looked so small. The fence around the front yard was gone.

It’s an odd thing for me when someone I care about dies. Thoughts seem to occur to me that I’ve never had before. I guess it’s gaining new perspective, though I have some preconception that it takes time to generate a proper perspective like aging wine.

With Noreen’s death, it occurred to me that the Egyptian-style obelisks that head the old mine shafts in our neighborhood were there when she was born. They were there when I was born nearly 30 years later, and they’ll still be there when we’re both gone from here.

I recalled that she was at my dad’s funeral 15 years ago.

Some of the pallbearers at her funeral were other folks I remembered from our neighborhood. They were there back in those old days when I was waiting for the next train to come by, playing in my sandbox with Matchbox cars or swinging on that old Montgomery-Wards swing set.

In the next few days, the weather is supposed to change, and with it, the colors are predicted to return to the skies and the waters and the woods.

Not today though.

It’s going to remain, black and white and gray as concrete, sudden and finite as death and as gray as the endless infinity that lies beyond.

I feel that if something as bright and colorful as a cardinal were to fly through the scene right now, the whole wide world would shatter like a light bulb and crumble to the ground.

The wind has picked up a bit and has a chill to it that wasn’t there earlier.

I can feel it blowing through me too. It finds all the crevices and holes between the buttons of my coat.

I shiver, turning my head in hopes the experience will roll off me and run away from me across the ground somehow, like electricity.

There are pigeons perched up there in the windows of the old mine shafts now, like there always have been. They’ve got a vantage point I wish I had. They can see over everything, and they are closer to the sky.

Down here on the ground, there’s a sad and profound emptiness.

It’s inside me, it’s outside me, it’s everywhere.

The lights will be out in the big, white two-story house on the corner tonight.

But despite the darkness and the drafts around the floorboards, I am certain a warmth will remain within that house for a long time to come.

Vaya con dios. Te amo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.