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Michigan Winds
retold by
S. E. Schlosser

Michigan winds are fiercest in the spring. Why, just last year, the wind knocked one of our mountains over into a valley. Folks woke up the next day to find themselves living on a plain.

But we Michigan folk just take these happenings as a matter of course. Take my friend Joe, for example. One March, Joe went out onto his porch to eat dessert. He had barely taken a bite out of his fresh apple pie when a wind blew his house over. Keeping his presence of mind, Joe grabbed hold of the branch of a tree to keep from being blown away. Once he had secured himself on the branch, he nabbed one of the boards floating away from his house, and used it to shield him from the wind so he could finish eating his apple pie.

'Course, I've heard they also get a pretty mean wind when you cross the border into Canada. There's a story I know about a British Columbia chap named Jake whose dog was blown up against his garage wall one day. That wind blew so hard and so strong that the hound dog starved to death before it quit. Jake had to scrape the poor old dog off the wall with a shovel. And what did he find but that the wind had pushed the hound's shadow right into the surface of the wall. So Jake buried the poor dog under the shadow and wrote his epitaph on it: Doggone.

You can read more Michigan folklore and ghost stories in Spooky Michigan by S.E. Schlosser.

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© S.E. Schlosser 1997 - 2008.

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