He walks the backroads of the Keweenaw in flannel worn to thread boots caked with copper-country mud that never quite gets shed. His beard holds winter’s first snowflake and August’s black-fly swarm and when He speaks the pines lean in to listen to the storm. His kitchen smells of pasties baking, crust the color of lake iron rutabaga steam and venison grease, a sacrament at dawn. The gravy’s thick enough to walk on; He pours it like a flood says grace is not a whispered thing, but something in the blood. He keeps His calendar by deer camps, measures time in seasons counts solstices in snowmobile tracks and August’s humid reasons. The Upper Peninsula is His front porch, the rest of earth His yard He leaves the screen door always open, strangers never barred. When blizzards bury M-28 He drives the plow Himself radio tuned to static hymns, headlights on the shelf of blowing white that parts for Him like Moses had the sea. The salt trucks follow at a distance, knowing who they see. He fishes out of season just to give the trout a break then throws them back with gentle hands and lets the river take their silver weight to deeper pools where even mercy sleeps. Forgiveness, here, is not a debt; it’s something that He keeps. And when the ore boats ghost Superior beneath a bruised November sky He stands upon the rock at Eagle Harbor, waves goodbye to every load of taconite that ever left His land then turns and walks the shoreline home with calloused, steady hand. God is a Yooper. You’ll know Him by the way He leaves the porch light burning late by how He says “you betcha” when you thank Him for the plate by how He loves the broken things- old trucks, old hearts, old mines and calls them beautiful because they’re His, and always were, and fine. Requested by @Theodore_Kent