The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

On Sunday morning I finished one nonfiction book I’d been reading and had knocked off the remainder of another in the afternoon after housework, so at bedtime I was thrown back on a volume from Robert Hale’s Regional Series, books written in the mid-20^th century on various parts of England, featuring history, landscape, architecture, and so on. This second one, Exmoor, I’m not finding as charming as Olive Cook’s Breckland (each book in the series has a different author), but I am not reading it carefully for legal-historical detail, simply as escape from the present to another place and time. The “historic” parts that please me most are the most purely local. Here is an example: 

 

"From here we will cross Hoar Oak Hill to Hoar Oak Tree. This celebrated tree was, from 1300 when the Forest was curtailed until 1815 when Simonsbath was colonized, one of the only two trees in the entire Forest. In 1658 it fell from “very age and rottenness,” and four years later a young tree was planted there to take its place, and this newcomer was in turn blown down in 1916."

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

Bits like that I slow down to read and re-read, picturing the scene in my mind. I wonder if the replacement tree was replaced in turn when it fell in 1916. The author doesn’t say. 

 

I didn’t read very far in that book on Sunday evening before falling asleep, however, because before picking it up I read my entire 190-page journal from December 12, 2019, to March 16, 2020, reliving a long trip west (seven days on the road, longer than usual because in New Mexico I was felled by what I considered at the time a migraine attack but have since learned was more probably vertigo), ghost town hikes and social events, a first exploration of Turkey Creek Road, our “Coyote Christmas” (I would link this if I could, but the platform is not cooperating), Sarah’s last full winter with us, the onset of the pandemic, and so much more. A friend and I had been trying to remember when she and her then-partner visited us, first in Willcox and later in Dos Cabezas, and both of those visits I found recorded in this 2019-20 journal, the first of a series that has now reached Vol. XIII and page 2240 (as of this morning), memories important only to me. 

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

The Artist and I made a couple of trips to Tucson that winter and visited bookstores in the “Old Pueblo,” as locals still like to call their city. David loved Speedway Boulevard! I was happy to get back to our quiet ghost town. We both loved the old library in Bisbee. 

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

My son’s father died in the spring, and I spoke with my son by phone almost every day. The Artist and I found again, having become yearlings, the new foals on the edge of Willcox that had captured my heart the winter before. On Monday mornings I volunteered at the Friendly Bookstore and on Wednesdays at Willcox Elementary School. We made new friends in Willcox. I hiked with neighbors on our home ground and a piece of public land down the road. 

 

"Sandhill cranes not far off, heard before seen & sometimes not seen at all, they fly so high. Brief thrill of daily passenger train [speeding through town nonstop], and in the quiet that follows its disappearance, again the distant, purling music of the cranes, now visible overhead, sunlit in their turning."  

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

"A high forest of ocotillo as we climbed & at the peak gave way partway down along a fault line to beargrass at the sedimentary/igneous shift. Northeast slope, shaded, held surprising pockets of tiny ferns & flourishing mosses, & the trail in places was muddy. Moisture no doubt came from snowmelt; springs that high unlikely."

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

We saw the new “Little Women" film in Willcox, and a Stage-to-Cinema showing of “The Nutcracker,” the 1984 production of the Royal London Ballet created by Peter Wright. 

 

"And while a large group, we were told, had formed the afternoon audience, we were the audience at 7 o’clock. A private showing! As if we were the king and queen!

 

"David loved it every bit as much as I did. “Superb! Magnificent!” It was a perfect holiday gift. And before & after the show, there were the magical lights in Railroad Park, their glorious colors reflected in puddles from the day’s storms….

 

"Two years ago we went to Paris at the Willcox Historic Theatre when the show was “Figaro” from the Opera de la Bastille. Now, London. It would be thrilling to attend the opera in Paris, the ballet in London, but having these experiences in a little Arizona cow town & coming outside to the dark of high desert winter has a magic all its own, almost as unlikely as the fantastical “Nutcracker” story itself."

 

      - 1/29/19

Railroad Park, Willcox, AZ, lighted for holidays in 2019

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

"I had two sketchbooks with me yesterday, having taken the second as a mental reminder to get started. [Apparently the second was still empty, the first almost full.] It isn’t that anyone else cares … or that I would “do” anything with [the] drawings, even having made them. It’s that I feel good when drawing. Leave thoughts & self behind. Exist purely in the moment. See fully. And afterwards I can revisit those places & times: by looking at old drawings, I am plunged back into the ‘now’ of ‘then.’"

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

From ‘then’ I return to ‘now,’ as winter weather has returned once more to spring Leelanau, snow deep and heavy and still coming down as Sunny and I ventured out into the morning. Maybe I will not get to Northport today, after all, and that’s all right. There are potatoes and onions and lentils a-plenty in the house—“lentils for the apocalypse,” I found myself thinking, a thought perhaps arising from recollections of the drive the Artist and I made back to Michigan in June 2020, one night staying in a three-story motel in which we seemed to be the only guests, an eerie place I named “the motel of the Apocalypse.”

As always, the present is saturated with the past. We are time beings.

"No dog park today, huh?"

Note: As I say, the platform has turned uncooperative, and one of the several things it will not let me do is format quotations as indented paragraphs. I don't know if this is a temporary or a permanent problem. All I can do is use quotation marks and a different color font.

Hate and Happiness, Books, Dogs, Gardens

As Popeye always said, "I yam what I yam."

Does somebody out there hate me? Really?

 

Even good friends sometimes forget that I moderate comments on my blog, and they can be frustrated when what they wrote does not appear immediately. I remind them that their comment will show as soon as I hit that little ‘publish’ command. 

 

What does not get my thumbs up is spam in comment disguise, such as, “Gee, this content is really interesting,” with a link to whatever business the spammer (probably a bot rather than a person most of the time) is trying to promote, which can be anything from crypto-“currency” to Caribbean vacations to—well, you get the point. 

 

The other day, though, something really weird showed up. It came from “Anonymous,” who is a frequent commenter, but this time the comment consisted of a single repeated word, in full caps—“DIE DIE DIE,” etc., repeated over two dozen times per line for twenty lines. Such is the strangeness of our world today that I wasn’t even shocked or upset. Way too many scarier things to worry about these days. I am, however, mildly curious. 

 

Did a real person leave this message? If so, was it someone who knows me? A stranger? A regular reader of Books in Northport? Someone who has been in my shop? Or was it not a person at all?

 

Long story shortened here: I marked it as spam and deleted it, and unless I get a confession from a verified human being, I'm going to believe that it was spam—from a IA bot!

"Don't chew on it, Mom." "I won't, Sunny."

 

Happier stuff

But Wednesday was a happy day for me at Dog Ears Books. Although the weather had turned cold again, my heart was warmed by the arrival of the first half of my latest new book order, which included a stack of Lynne Rae Perkins’s latest title. Hooray!!! The publisher (Greenwillow) says At Home in a Faraway Place is for ages 8 to 12, or children in grades 4 through 6, but my personal opinion, as a reader and a bookseller, is that this book, as is true of all books from LRP, is for all ages. I would certainly not want to miss the story myself, though I passed my 12^th birthday—let's just say, a while ago. 

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” I chortle in my joy.

The box delivered on Wednesday by Ted the UPS man also contained a happy assortment for little ones just being introduced to the wonderful world of books, and the sun even broke through as I was arranging them for a group photo. 

And with MICHIGAN THEMES!!!

Other than that—

 

Sunny takes a little break now and then. 

So does the dog mom.

My life has been the usual round of bookshop, reading, and dog play, with unaccustomed bits of housework (floor scrubbing) and seasonal yard tasks (raking and moving plants to make way for a hardscape renovation, i.e., new boardwalk entrance path to house.

No, I am not doing this work myself!

We had a few days that felt like spring, a short power outage (see previous post), and now the forecast holds the probability of snow again for the first day of spring. But it is, I repeat, a spring snow, not the return of winter, as we transition from snow and ice to mud, mudlicious mud!

 

 

And now, spring break

 

Northport School will be on spring break next week, March 24 to 28; however, after 48 hours spent considering a cross-country trip, I decided there is too much that needs doing at home and in my shop, so Dog Ears Books will be open next week. I may adjust my hours, say, from noon to 4 p.m., but I will be here Wednesday through Saturday, as usual.

P.S. I LOVE Lynne Rae's new book!!!

And HAPPY SPRING, everyone!!!

Elsewhere, Elsewhen

Green moss in winter

These things are no more, and the feeling I am telling here … may have perished, too. It felt like the tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore, a debris.

 

-      Niall Williams, This is Happiness

 

I had no celebratory plans for St. Patrick’s Day, either for the day itself or for the preceding weekend. Saturday would see me in my bookshop, and maybe Sunny and I would get up to the dog park on Sunday, if the weather didn’t turn wretched, but forebodings were somewhat against us. Ay, that’s March!

 

Without thinking, anyway, of St. Paddy on—was it Thursday or Friday? No matter—I picked up a paperback novel with blurbs on the back cover looking good enough that I thought I’d give it a try. I needed a new bedtime book, having stretched Olive Cook’s Breckland out about as long as possible, setting it aside repeatedly, both to read other books (both fiction and nonfiction) and also to make it last, then returning to it time and time again when sleep eluded me in the wee small hours, until finally, against my will, I reluctantly reached the last page. 

 

So now I would read Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness. At least, I would begin the novel and see if it held me. And now, to say that it did hold me did is to make a massive understatement.

 

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality. 

 

The narrator, an old man—well, exactly my own age!—is recounting a time much earlier in his life when, as a lad of seventeen years, he left the seminary in Dublin with lost faith and went to live for a while with his grandparents in a remote Irish village during the time that electricity, long promised to the village, came at last. The manner of its coming is not incidental to the story but woven into its essence. Here is the man who has come to the village of Faha to supervise the installation of poles and lines:

 

Everybody carries a world. But some people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released. 

 

And here are the strains of music woven into the story:

 

The quiet of country life can sit on your heart like a stone. To lift it, to escape the boundaries of myself awhile, I took down the fiddle.

 

One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that.

 

So now, thoroughly charmed and engaged, I read myself to sleep on Friday evening and again when I woke in the dark hours of Saturday morning, but only when dashing off an e-mail to my sisters on Saturday afternoon from the shop and mentioning the book did I realize what a timely choice I had made. Irish! How appropriate!

Woolly bear woke up on Friday!

The temperature rose to 70 degrees in Northport on Saturday, and the sun shone bright, but the wind blew like the devil, gusting up to 50 mph. (So much for my having swept the sidewalk with the push broom two days before!) Sunshine brought people out of their houses, and the wind in Traverse City—worse than we had in Northport, I was told—sent some of them clear up to Northport, so it was a fairly lively bookshop day, and only late in the afternoon, while a couple from Ann Arbor were happily browsing, did the power go out on Waukazoo Street. First the lights flickered, then went out briefly and came back on again, that happening two or three times, until finally they stayed off for good. Luckily, my happy customers were undeterred. We had a meeting of hearts and minds as their choices were books by Wendell Berry and Robert Reich. Closing up then, I only hoped the power would still be on at my house when I got home.

 

It was not. No lights. No furnace. No pump.

 

But I was prepared for a power outage with two deep stockpots filled with water and a brand-new, long-handled lighter so I wouldn’t need to risk fingers by lighting the stove with a match. Right away I lit my two fat candles and sorted through the collection of oil lamps for one with a good wick, cleaned the glass chimney, and filled the reservoir with oil. Success! The power company thought electricity would be back on by 3 a.m., I was at first dubious, but a look at the overnight forecast showed the winds gradually dying down, so maybe….

 

But we would be fine, Sunny and I, and now my reading choice struck me as even more appropriate. I had only reached Chapter 18, not even the halfway point of the novel, and while Noel’s grandparents had a crank telephone, the only one in the village, no one yet had the promised electricity. That was the fiction. Meanwhile, here in my “real” world I was all set with candles and oil lamps and a cell phone with 80% of its charge. Wind blowing demonically around my old farmhouse, dog lying across my feet, I felt a strong sense of kinship to the people of my own grandfather’s native land, back in times that were difficult and challenging in many ways but much simpler and probably more satisfying in others.

I haven’t said a word about the slowly unwinding plot of Williams’s novel and won’t get into that now. For me, it is the world of the story that matters. Early in my reading of it, I snapped a photo of the cover to send to my stepdaughter and texted her this brief message: “I am elsewhere. It is beautiful and restful.” So then, continuing my reading, I was struck by the passage quoted above about the Irish reels defeating time and space. Elsewhere! Yes!

 

Another of my Saturday customers was a young woman who said that if she could have a superpower, it would be to travel back in time for a day, not to intervene in history but simply to be there in that time. She agreed with me when I remarked that such is the magic of books. 

 

Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morning in the United States in the year 2025: Snow sifts in shifting veils from the barn roof. I am elsewhere, elsewhen.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all, Irish or otherwise.

Sunday morning...

...snow in Leelanau.

In My Little Corner of the World

  

She was a glamorous librarian, whose image lends panache to an often undervalued profession, an astute collector who shaped an internationally renowned library of rare written and artistic treasures from around the world. 

-      Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007)

 

This is the second book about the life of Belle Greene that I have read since the beginning of the year. The first was a novel, The Personal Librarian (2021), by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray, a fictionalized account of the famous librarian’s life and career. Both books spent considerable time dwelling on Greene’s racial heritage, her lengthy, on-again-off-again affair with Bernard Berenson, and her many other flirtations and possible affairs. I turned to the biography after the novel in hopes of learning more about the bookish aspects of Belle’s life.

 

She worked in the Princeton library and pursued “informal studies of rare books and illuminated manuscripts,” as well as taking a few classes there and elsewhere along the way, and then Greene, who acquired no degree and had no academic standing, was hired as J. Pierpont’s “personal librarian” at the age of 26 and remained with the library through the death of its founder and on throughout the life and death of the founder’s son, retiring only shortly before her own death that same year (1950). What I wanted to know was more about how she acquired and built on her knowledge of rare books and manuscripts, and while much of that remains a matter of mystery and speculation, I found hints in Ardizzone’s biography, most tellingly perhaps this one: In April of 1949, when the Morgan Library mounted an exhibit in her honor, Lawrence Wroth (historian, author, and John Carter Brown librarian at Brown University) gave a speech in which he “likened her ability to recognize quality to the gift of perfect pitch in a musician, and noted that her ‘inherent taste’ had been molded ‘through years of association with great men, great books, and great productions of artist and craftsman’” [quoted in Ardizzone, 2007].

 

Certainly Greene took advantage of every opportunity to learn from those with whom she came in contact—scholars, collectors, and dealers—but I believe, from what I have read, that her “inherent taste” and natural “ability to recognize quality” formed the basis on which all subsequent learning was built. Knowledge can be passed from one person to another, insatiable curiosity can reap much from books and experience, but what the Artist and I called “the eye” seems to be much more a matter of natural gift. Some people never develop “the eye” (or, in music, “the ear”), despite years of study.

 

Benedict and Murray’s novel was my first encounter with Belle da Costa Greene, but once on my radar she started to turn up again and again. Shortly after the novel, I read Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, and there again was Belle da Costa Greene, receiving letters from Curtis asking for her intercession with his patron, J.P. Morgan, so that now I can hardly look at one of Curtis’s magnificent portraits without thinking of Greene and Morgan and how Curtis was so determined to publish his 20-volume great work that he agreed to take no salary for himself but only use Morgan’s money for expenses. Belle Greene did not always reply to his letters; Curtis must have seemed very much the uncivilized frontiersman in sophisticated New York.

 

How fascinating it is to assemble even a few pieces of the enormous jigsaw puzzle of the turn of the 19^th century to the 20^th, and to learn something of how great names of the past weathered earlier wars and economic crises in our country! Greene was far from destitute, thanks to her position at the Morgan Library, but the stock market crash of 1929 pretty wiped out what she had been saving for her retirement. As it turned out, however, retirement played almost no part whatsoever in her life. 

 

Then, reading the acknowledgements at the end of Ardizzone’s book, I came upon this surprise: 

 

…Conrad Rader wisely refused all offers to become my full-time unpaid personal assistant, but he kept the cats out of the office and the dishes washed, dragged me out to Warren Dunes at least once a week, and provided a calm center in my life. For that and so much more, I dedicate this book to him. 

 

Warren Dunes? Sure enough, I see now on the jacket, the author (who teaches at Notre Dame) lives in Niles, Michigan. She is a Michigan author!

As for the rest of my recent reading, I binged through seven books of a detective series (it was not the complete series), books about The Sanibel Sunset Detective, by Ron Base, given to me by a friend, and then I boxed them up to send to my baby sister, who is recovering from a broken leg. She will pass them on to our other sister, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are back in Northport sometime this summer. The stories are action-packed but also include more than a few laughs. True escape reading!

And now it’s back to Robert Reich’s Aftershock; Yvonne Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers; etc. The serious stuff.

 

Dog and Yard Notes

Difficult to get much in the way of decent photographs at the dog park, even with a phone, but Sunny and I managed to get there to see friends both Sunday and Monday of the last two weeks. Rapidly disappearing snow in our yard makes tennis ball play and Frisbee a lot easier at home; however, socializing is as important as exercise—for both of us.

In general, my yard is in great need of attention—raking, mostly, at this stage of the season—and yet it’s encouraging already to see bright green hellebore leaves, now that the snow covering them is gone. I absolutely love hellebore and thank my friend Susan every time I look at the ones she gave me. Stay posted for the lovely blooms. On the other hand, if you were looking for one of my inimitable political rants, see here and/or here. No need to wait for that stuff!

 

Where Do We Stand?

 

(That sign needs refreshing and straightening up, doesn't it?)

Oh, where to begin? 

 

With the weather? Warmup and sunshine, then soaking rain, and now, coming up, back to snow. The sunny days were a pleasure, but it is March in Michigan, after all.

Omena Bay, Monday, March 3, 2025

With books? Recently I set aside, unfinished, yet another, this one a biography of a famous author, because after 180 pages read I could not stand to spend another minute in that man’s life. A biography of photographer Edward S. Curtis, by contrast, held me to the end, by which time I concluded that his life was as tragic as that of his subjects, except that he did manage to get his work done, and the tribes he photographed appreciated his work, and he had not succumbed to despair at the end but had in mind yet another project, though that late-life idea was destined not to be realized. Amazing perseverance! An interesting side note in Curtis’s was his correspondence with Belle da Costa Greene, the subject of a book of historical fiction I read very recently (The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray) and whose biography (An Illuminated Life, by Heidi Ardizzone), I now have in my to-read stack. Curtis and Greene were connected through J. P. Morgan, who employed Greene as his personal librarian and who finally underwrote Curtis’s expenses for his 20-volume work, although Curtis himself received no pay for all the years he put in.

 

With the dog? I can hardly “begin” with her now, my paragraph above on books having gone on as long as it did, but I know my readers enjoy having dog notes squeezed in among the books, so, first, here she is in black and white, looking more like our old Sarah than she generally appears to me. One morning I told her, “You are all my dogs,” meaning that she has inherited my love for them and that I see them all now in her. Isn’t that the way it is with dogs, when you come right down to it?

Sunny looking like Sarah --

We got to the dog park two days in a row, too, first with hard-packed ice underfoot and then with melting snow and the reappearance of mud. The dogs, of course, don’t care. They could not care less! (And isn’t it strange how easily Americans in general—I have to watch myself!—have slipped into saying, “I could care less,” when they mean exactly the opposite?) At home, we had not only morning Frisbee time but even the return of tennis ball play one sunny afternoon!

 

Meeting friends!

So there you have weather, books, and dogs, and now I’m going to dip into politics, so if you can’t stand the heat, you can exit the kitchen now. Fair warning!

Late winter thaw

The nation-wide economic boycott of online and big box giants set for Friday, February 28, was largely overshadowed by the shameful spectacle that took place at the White House. There was a pretty strong view, anyway, that a one-day boycott would have no effect whatsoever, either economically or politically, and yet, in solidarity with the idea, I finally made a plan to support it in my own way, because it felt good to be doing something at last. And then I realized, from all the feedback I received to my announcement, that other people felt the same way, that there is a great hunger for ways to take action, other than making repeated calls to our so-called Congressional “representatives” who could not care less than they do about our opinions or what we would like to see happening in Congress. (What we would like to see: evidence of backbone!)

 

So that felt good, but what next? The answer came when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with her to a public protest in Traverse City on March 4. We would be protesting not only the administration’s shameful treatment of the president of Ukraine but every other destructive and hateful thing he has done in the last – is it possible that it’s only been six weeks???!!!

 

The thing is, I have never before taken part in a public demonstration. Mind you, I was paying attention in the Sixties and arguing against the war in Vietnam, and I certainly supported civil rights in principle, but I never marched once. And I was young back then. Now? Well, I can do it for my great-grandchildren!

 

My friend and I were nervous before we went. We didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the only thing that would have made the experience more positive than it was would have been a larger crowd, but there had been at least two other protest gatherings earlier in the day, and some of the people standing with us on Bayshore Drive at the intersection with Union Street in Traverse City had been to all three demonstrations, and while the rain held off (thank heaven!) it was a gloomy, grey day, not to mention cold for a couple of aging “protest virgins” who had forgotten their gloves.

 

But what a wonderful experience it was! 

Wearing my knitted cap from 2016--do you remember?

The vast majority of motorists who passed our intersection honked car horns in solidarity, waved, gave us thumbs up, and even cheered. (In the half-hour we stood there with our signs, only half a dozen people at most were negative.) It felt good to be standing in public for our principles, and to be affirmed by people passing by was icing on the cake. At one point, I was near tears, I felt such love for my country and for my fellow brave Americans out there in the cold wind! It was a happy, joyful feeling!

 

Will public demonstrations make any difference at all? 

 

We know protests will not change the positions or alter the plans of the divider-in-chief in the Oval Office, but he is not our target audience. We want to motivate Democrats in office to unify and raise their voices, to motivate Republicans with eyes open to join in bilateral resistance, and to show any Americans still on the fence—or wavering in their support of the administration as they see the gutting of programs necessary to their livelihood or even to their lives—that they are welcome and that we can prevail if we join together. 

 

I did not (how could anyone think I would?) watch or even listen to Tuesday evening’s hour and a half rant. And on Wednesday morning, why would I “read the full transcript” or “watch highlights”? I know all too well the “state of the union”: It is in a perilous state, brought low by the divider-in-chief whose bloviating fantasies illuminate nothing, ever. What would that 90 minutes provide? Boasting and blaming, threats and lies and name-calling. Why would I subject myself to that yet again, even after the fact? 

 

First thing Wednesday morning, though, I did watch Senator Elissa Slotkin’s entire rebuttal (link in list below), and I was so proud that she is a Michigan senator! I am looking toward not the haters but the helpers, not the dividers but to those who would reunite us, those with a positive vision of an American future that is sometimes these days all too hard to see. 

 

As for those who disagree with me, I am through playing Whack-a-Mole. Put the pieces together—or don’t. Here are some places to start, if you care to see what I see. I have chosen a variety of sources and have made each choice for clarity and basis in fact.

 

Fact-checking the State of the Union address.

Senator Elissa Slotkin rebuts president.

War in Ukraine.

 

Full meeting with Zelensky in the White House.

 

Lech Walesa weighs in.

U.S.-Russia-Ukraine recent history

 

Current administration’s ties with Russia.

Russia and U.S. cybersecurity.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

 

What does Musk’s own chatbot say?

DOGE savings?

 

Cost of president’s trip to the Superbowl.

What tariffs could cost Americans (from Fox).

Ontario’s response to tariffs against Canada.

What constitutes an “illegal protest” in the U.S.?

 

Voter fraud, facts and myths.

Beautiful Michigan!

Beautiful Northport!