A Walk With Finley

July 7, 2025

Greetings from a walk through time,

About ten thousand years ago, nature carved a basin in this part of the world, a work of glaciers and other forces I am not qualified to describe.  The basin filled with water, eventually formed a mitten-shaped peninsula.  People came and were drawn to the water’s edge for various reasons, and there villages formed and became towns. And one of the towns, Ludington, attracted a doctor to live there, and care for the people who were born and occasionally got sick while they grew up. 

Some decades later, an eyelash of time, I met the doctor, my friend Floyd.  He became part of my family, and is still, even though he has moved on to practice in another life.  In the years we shared, we spent countless hours in his house not far from the water’s edge.  Those memories are baked in me and those of my family.  Including some of my family who never met Floyd.

I took a walk with Finley, both of us barefoot, still in our pajamas.  The morning light had just given form to the neighborhood, the roads were empty, the grass was heavy with dew. As we walked along the sidewalk we stepped around teacups of rainwater left from the storm the day before.

Finley said: “There’s some grass.” And then “Some other grass.” And “Here’s a puddle.”  “There’s some ants.”  This poetry, delivered in the cadence of a three-year-old boy, framed the conversation of our journey.

We stopped and talked with a woman out for her early morning walk, and she was delighted with Finley, a universal response.  We watched people jogging along the edge of the beach, out ahead of the summer heat. 

My grandson Finley doesn’t know about our history in this place.  The Christmas chaos, kids sleeping on Floyd’s living room floor, the nearly endless procession of meals and the preparation of meals.  He hadn’t seen the Fourth of July events that were a permanent part of our calendar. The parades, the ice cream, cooking brats and burgers in Floyd and Dorothy’s backyard, feeding everyone who walked through the gate, which might have been everyone in town.  Sitting on blankets watching the fireworks, the best display ever, every year.

Finley didn’t see Floyd painting his house, coming down off the ladder to walk next door to see a patient, then coming back, still paint splattered, and visiting with whoever appeared at the picnic table.  The years since Floyd leapt into the next life seem to have passed in a sigh.

We met a man walking his dog, Hobie, who traded silent good mornings with Finley.  We padded along, damp sand clinging to our bare feet, licensed by the early morning and Finley’s age to walk through the town in our sleep-clothes. 

Finley likes to make me laugh: “There’s a elephant tree!” and then went on to correctly identify trees where we could pick bananas, giraffes and choo choo trains.  He loves to invent words, including my recent favorite, ‘Chickington’, which he dubbed the little town we walked through.

For much of their life, my children knew this place as where Papa and Yaya lived, the grandparents whose sole purpose seemed to be to love them and spoil them.  Even as they grew up, I know they carried away the sand from this place between their toes, which is likely still in the bottoms of shoes tumbled in closets wherever they live. 

Now we are here with my daughter and her little family, just blocks from the house Papa and Yaya held open for us, and I have somehow slipped on the mantle Floyd left for me. 

Finley was a wonderful companion, never letting go of my hand, even as we stopped and talked with people who meet us on our meandering path through the morning.  He says, “Anda, are we going to go to the ice cream?”  “Later,” I say.  “Go to the ice cream later,” he says, now a binding contract.

We turned down Court Street and paused in front of Floyd’s house.  It is nearly the same, and impossibly different.  Only I know this.  We met Larry, who owns the house now, out puttering in the yard.  He was charmed by my grandson, and soon we were talking about the history we share.  He was generous with his morning, telling us how he kept the character of the house, telling us about the doors and hardware that I had touched years before.  He invited us to walk through the back yard and see the flowers he’d planted in the place I stood for hours and cooked hot dogs for everyone who’d been to the Fourth of July parade, and maybe everyone in it too.

Finley let go of my hand and stooped to look at flowers, and then pointed at something and asked what it was. “Watering can,” I said, although it seemed like a word from another time, maybe Floyd’s.  Finley reached the railing of the back porch, then walked up on the steps, as if he always had known the place. 

“Is this Ludington?” he asked, looking back at me.

I felt the hair on my arms rise, and a little shiver fluttered through me.  “Yes,” I said, “This is Ludington.”

This little moment spun out into an eternity, where I felt the presence of time, and all the people it has held.  In that glint of a moment, the hallway stretched out from that damp porch on a summer morning into my family’s history, into Floyd’s life, into the first people along these shores, into the glaciers that patiently worked to make it all possible.  Yes, Finley, this is Ludington.

Hope this finds you traveling,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith