Welcome to Door County Living, A Magazine That Celebrates the Culture and Lifesyle of the Door Peninsula

Our current issue features:

Living the Life Less Ordinary
The Red Cup Coffee Shop
By Madeline Johnson

From an outsider’s perspective, living on Washington Island is a difficult thing to fully appreciate – especially if you’re one of those city-born people, accustomed to all the luxuries of an urban setting, who thinks that to move there would constitute drastic, even crazy, behavior. I traveled there this past February, however, to meet with Red Cup coffee shop owners Mike and Anne Remke and learned a quick lesson: that the Remkes, a couple who uprooted their family from Chicago ten years ago to try their hand at island life, are not crazy or drastic in the slightest.

True, the island is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. True also, the island can scarcely be thought of as a place to make a quick buck. It not only deprives its citizens of many material conveniences, but it also requires the kind of devotion that would challenge even the most hardened of rural dwellers. My visit put to rest, however, the judgmental suspicion I held. In the Remkes’ case, the opposite claim appears to be true: this couple has their priorities straight. (more)

Nobody Believes in Ghosts. Right?
By Myles Dannhausen, Jr.

It hits us when we're home alone and we shut off the TV, revealing the eerie silence of an empty house. Sometimes you feel it when you drag the garbage to the curb at night, or for the rurally inclined, to the burning barrel in the back yard. The feeling, the sense, that someone else – something else – is there. The hair stands up on your neck, the heart skips a beat, the body involuntarily freezes for just a moment. Then a tough façade kicks in with the denial.

"It's not real," you tell yourself. "There's nothing there. Keep walking, don't look back. Act like you're not scared and it will go away. Just look straight ahead." As if there was an option, as your neck is frozen in place, stuck like a locked steering wheel. If you don't turn and look, you think, it'll go away.

Closer to the door, you feel yourself on the edge of escape. Just make it inside the house, or into your bedroom, whatever strikes you as a safe zone in that moment, and lock the door. You measure your steps as you do only in moments of panic. Four quick steps you figure, and you dart onto the front porch, lunging for the doorknob with the final stride, timing it perfectly. You've barely landed and the knob is turned, the door is open, and you're inside. Safe. Relieved.

Then you try to play it cool walking in, trying to catch your breath without looking like you're catching your breath. Try to look at ease walking into the living room where your roommates, or your parents or your children sit, eyebrows raised at you.

You try to act like you weren't just scared to death, that for a moment you didn't believe with all your soul that there was something else out there. Something you didn't see or hear. Something you just sensed. That for a moment ghosts were not the stuff of campfire stories, but as real as the garbage you just took out.

Because nobody believes in ghosts. Right? If you do, you're a kook. Crazy. Nuts. Right? (more)