3A.M.

that last summer at the diner, and I’d wake and stare at the ceiling, my mind churning in the mud of my bafflement and grief.

4 a.m., and I’d shuffle to the couch, where I’d gaze for a while into the dark. By 5, I’d be slumped into the cushions surfing the internet, thinking I should stop, but not stopping. I’d visit eBay. Trailers.com. Vintagetrailers.com. Vintagefoodtrucks.com. Page after page, I’d click through, considering Airstreams, Arrows and Alohas, Scottys, Shastas and Spartans.

Invisibly, hours would pass. Suddenly it would be time to wake Rick up and get ourselves and the dog into the truck and head to Grand Marais and open the diner. Our diner, our Paramount Road King diner built in New Jersey in 1949, our diner we had restored in 1997 and run together ever since. Our diner, which we had now decided to sell.

Processing that idea was like trying to understand how far away the sun is or picturing what a billion donuts laid end to end would look like. It was like considering hacking off my own arm or ripping a lung from my chest and putting it up on the open market.

Nonetheless, we were doing it. We had run headlong into cancer the summer before, a cancer we had not expected Rick to survive. We had seen, along with the abyss of death, which yawns around all of us all the time but usually wears a cloak of invisibility, that we needed to change our ways. We could not risk leaving me alone at the restaurant where he had cooked every meal that came off the grill during all our years there, the restaurant where he had built the fires and split the kindling and lugged the firewood and plowed the snow, the restaurant where he’d filled the pop cooler with the pallets of soda he’d taken off a semi and stacked case by case, the restaurant where he’d mopped and scrubbed and degreased and painted, the restaurant 20 miles of rough road distant from our home, a road we traversed early and late in all kinds of weather in an aging Ford with loose steering and a habit of grinding down its calipers and bursting its brake lines.

“We have to do this,” I said over and over that last summer, frowning, my brow furrowed.

“Yes,” Rick would answer, his expression grave. “We do.”

“I can’t do this,” I said just as often. “I just don’t know how I can.”

Rick would answer that by gazing into the distance, looking pensive, or frustrated, or heartbroken or determined, depending on the day.

But traveling to work in the truck those last few months, we didn’t talk. It was too loud. The nubby tires would rumble over the gravel, the miles would pass, and I would stare out at the route I’d traveled for so long. Thousands of times, I had stared at these pines, these patches of sky, these ravens, these water holes, these long views of Lake Superior. Thousands of times, the truck had bounced across the dirt, cruised onto the pavement near the edge of town and eased into the back parking lot. Rick would shut off the engine, and we’d climb out, unlock the diner door, plug in the coffee pot and start: heat the grill, warm the oven, write the specials, turn the sign from Closed to Open, and go. Go into our jobs, our vocation, our albatross, our delight.

How miserable I often was there. How resentful, worn out and dragged down by the drudgery, the stress, the weariness, the hours. Oh, the avalanches of hours we worked. Uncountable hours, really. Or hours it was wisest not to count because that way lay madness. And the stress that pulsed through me so much of the time: orders stacking up on the wheel, customers lining up at the door, dishes piling up in the sinks, deadlines tick-tick-ticking away, things to remember and to do speeding through my head, elbowing each other, trampling each other. And the toil of it, day after day. The aching feet and backs and hands, the stumbling, slow-witted exhaustion, the chaos and mess, the greasy pots and pans towering in the sinks, the chugging compressors, the heat. Oh, the heat in the summer in that little steel diner. And in the winter, the bitter, intractable, fierce, uncompromising cold until the fire was blazing. You would think I’d have been glad to see the last of it in my rearview mirror.

But no. A billion times no, a shout from my marrow, no

The diner was often frustrating and much too demanding. But it was also everything. It was the source of profound friendships with our customers and crews. It fostered deep learning and indescribable satisfaction in my work. It expanded my family, increased my patience and urged humility. It was a gigantic work of living art that gave me purpose, meaning and direction.

Running it after we’d decided to sell and agreed with a buyer to sell and had told each other over and over that we must go through with it was like attending my own funeral every day. It was like watching a terrible—or maybe an excellent though unenjoyable—movie about somebody else’s life. It was like having nails pounded into me. Pounded into my eyes, which had gazed out the front windows at Lake Superior every day for decades. Into my hands, which had laid the tile floors and scrubbed them ten thousand times, which had turned on the dish sink faucets and pulled the oven doors open a hundred thousand times, at least. Into my feet, which had walked and trudged and trotted the floors for untold miles. Into my heart.

Oh, my heart.

A SMILE CREPT THROUGH MY WHOLE BEING. I WAS 8 YEARS OLD IN 1974, AND IT ALL RUSHED BACK TO ME: PLAYING IN THE FAMILY CAMPER, BEING FULL OF HOPE AND PURPOSE. BEING SO HAPPY.

The place was my life, you know. I had long known it, but I realized it more every day as the hour to leave grew closer. My cells and the cells of the walls and floors and ceiling and stairs, the tables and chairs, the pots and pans, the equipment—the oven, my oven!—were comingled, indistinguishable. When I breathed, the building breathed. When I wept, it wept; when I laughed, it laughed with me.

Letting it go, admitting we were getting older and more brittle, that we might even die one day, wrenched my soul into surreal angles. The future without the diner was a blur, a blank. I was being cast into deep space, where it was cold and lonely and scary.

But those old trailers I spent my mornings looking at somehow soothed me.

As a kid, I played endlessly in my parents’ camper. Inside were bench seats upholstered in a pale red nubbly upholstery at a Formica table. There were curved, birch-paneled walls and gas lights. There was a narrow bunk where I loved to lie, reading and daydreaming. I’d crank the tiny windows at either end open and closed, pretending I was traveling on a train or a ship. The way I remember it, I was always happy in that little camper. I puttered inside, pretending one thing and another, planning my summer days and my life. Living forward was as easy as turning cartwheels, then. But how would I live forward now?

I stopped short at an eBay listing for an Airstream one bright October morning. The trailer was a 1974 Argosy, and from the photos, it looked in the perfect condition for us: solid but in need of gutting. Big but not enormous. Cute but maybe also practical. Best of all, it was parked less than a hundred miles from us, just past Munising and Au Train. I could hardly wait for Rick to get up. Once he did, I could hardly wait for him to be awake enough to talk to.

For decades my secret escape from the stress of the diner had been to imagine myself living an easier, more peaceful life at home on Muskallonge Lake, writing and selling some small, unspecified thing in some small, unspecified way. Now I had an idea. Maybe we could take one of my favorite parts of the diner, of the work and my identity there, along with us when we went. We could have—or I could have, in case Rick’s cancer roared back or his health never recovered—a cookie camper. I could bake and sell treats out of a trailer set on the corner of our property.

My eBay listing in hand, I discussed it with Rick. “Is it a good idea? Is it doable?”

He walked out to the road with me to inspect the part of our property I envisioned for the enterprise. We squinted into the morning sun and swatted flies away. I turned to him. “How hard would it be to pull off?”

He waved a hand. “Easy. Just have to back the camper onto the corner. No big deal.”

I studied him appraisingly. We had a history of him saying that very difficult projects would be easy. Nonetheless, we rustled our friend Gary out of his cabin and drove west to see the Argosy that afternoon. The cheerful woman who owned it had named it Esther. “That’s perfect,” I cried as we strode across the field beside her house, and she beamed at me.

I climbed inside, minding her warning to take care on the rusty stair and to step over the rotting subfloor, and was transported back to 1974. My gaze skimmed over an 8-track cassette player, a brown gas fridge, green shag carpeting and orange and maize daisies glued to the tub floor. A smile crept through my whole being. I was 8 years old in 1974, and it all rushed back to me: playing in the family camper, being full of hope and purpose. Being so happy.

Within an hour, we were writing Amy a check and promising to return as soon as possible. Back in Grand Marais, the arrangements to sell trudged forward, dragging my broken heart along. But now I had my cookie camper to think about, too. I had a project, a plan, a challenge. I had at least a fragment of a future. It was unknowable like futures always are. But it was something. It was something to cling to.

Renovating Esther has turned out to be more complicated than Rick’s prediction of easy. Rather than wait until she was ready, last June, Rick washed a tiny camper we already owned, a 1965 Arrow Little Chief we call Junior, and hauled it out to the road. I scrubbed down the interior, and it became the “farmstand” for our cottage-industry bakery, The Uglyfish Baking Co. I read somewhere decades ago that “Muskallonge” means “ugly fish” in Ojibwe, and we have been calling things here at the lake “Uglyfish” this and that ever since.

In 15 minutes, I’ll stand at its short stretch of white Formica counter, preparing to set out the day’s display on its table, which would fold into a bed if it wasn’t covered by baked goods. Blueberry muffins. Cinnamon rolls. Espresso brownies. Lemon oatmeal cookies with a tart lemon glaze. I’ll fuss with the labels on the plates and pedestals, put Tshirts and mugs out on display unless it starts to rain and prop the metal welcome sign up over the window. Then I’ll carry my warping chalkboard easel that says OPEN on both sides out to the road and plunk it down beside a basket of petunias, and consider myself ready for another day. A while after that, Rick will appear and start moving railroad ties with a two-wheeled hand cart to outline our parking lot, busy as always. And we will both consider ourselves to be doing the best thing we know to do, living forward.

Ellen Airgood writes from Muskallonge Lake, where she runs The Uglyfish Baking Co. with her husband, Rick. She is the author of Tin Camp Road and South of Superior, both Michigan Notable Books, as well as the middle-grade novels The Education of Ivy Blake and Prairie Evers Kate Headley is an accomplished photographer living in Harbor Springs. Follow her work at @kateheadley and @headleyinharbor.