The sun was shining, the dog and I were restless in the bookshop, and there was no river of impatient customers beating down our door, so we piled into the car and drove out to Peterson Park. I hadn't been out there since fall. Worth the trip! Who even needs a plowed road into the park when drawn irresistibly by beauty and excitement? Lakeshore or sunshore? There's North Manitou Island out in the distance, and you can even see the curve of the earth at the horizon, a drifting band of Arctic ice at the shoreline. Click! Click! Click! Every prospect pleased.Last night I returned to England's Lake District, continuing with the life of Beatrix Potter. The accomplishments of Mrs. Heelis (as she preferred to be called after marrying William Heelis) were formidable. At home in the country, her writing and painting first had to make room for sheep-raising and tenant farm management, later for her considerable duties to the National Trust, which included not only raising money but also directly managing for the Trust large properties she had bought and transferred over, for their perpetual preservation. So much of what is preserved in the Lake District, so beloved of poets, hikers and naturalists from all over the world, has remained beautiful and wild and open to the public because of the unrelenting hard work of the author of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT.
And yet, in Linda Lear’s biography, BEATRIX POTTER: A LIFE IN NATURE, we find a very simple, unassuming, straightforward, hard-working woman, whose own mother looked down on her for dressing as a “country woman.” Hooray, Beatrix! I say. Beatrix “retained a romantic’s love of both inclement weather and the rugged landscape. She had a quiet acceptance that things will often go wrong, yet she had remarkable patience and optimism. Loving the natural world as she did, Beatrix had long ago accepted that nature was wild, cruel and endlessly beautiful.” I fall short of her example in almost every way, but she has my deepest admiration.
Can one be a romantic if one loses the love of inclement weather? That’s my question for the morning, but the sun is bright above the horizon, and before it was up, puppy Sarah and I had already been out for a long, cold overland ramble in the first light of dawn. Surely that must count for something! Anyway, only a romantic would have a bookstore in Northport, right?
3 comments:
It was a lovely day, and your photo does it justice.
I'm pretty sure that once a romantic always a romantic. Even if you wake up one day and realize that you no longer wish to see even one more snow-pregnant gray cloud - you will probably still feel compelled to have a bookstore in Northport. Might as well resign yourself . . .
I will add Lear's biography of Mrs. Heelis to my "to read" list. I visited the Lake District last fall, and liked it very much. My favorite memory of Hill House is the woven twig garden gate, and the very Potterish cat chasing grasshoppers in the meadow.
Cumbria is a lot like northern Michigan with smaller lakes and bigger hills. It also has more cultivated flowers and fewer orchards, more sheep (WAY more sheep) and fewer cows, more tourists and narrower roads! Lovely.
Puppy Sarah would love it there, as long as she behaved herself. Dogs are welcome on public transportation, in shops (where bowls of water are set out for them at the front door) - pretty much everywhere. However, the sign at the entry to the public footpath through a sheep meadow was explicit: "Any dogs not kept under strict control are at risk of being shot." I took a photo to show to Miss Sadie as a cautionary tale. She was not impressed.
Northport is very dog-friendly (well-behaved dogs are always welcome at Dog Ears BOoks), and that’s one of the reasons I judge other places, but it’s hard to see Sarah on a transatlantic flight. Our old dog, Nikki, traveled with us from the Florida Everglades to Wawa, Ontario, but when we went to Montreal and to Paris (two separate trips), she stayed home.
Another book you might enjoy on the Lake District is THE SILENT TRAVELLER IN LAKELAND, by Chiang Yee. I’ve written about his books in the blog before. I’ve never been to the Lakes but absolutely adored Scotland, another place where the hills are higher than they are in Leelanau County.
My other thought on this general subject is our Leelanau Conservancy and the beautiful Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. My husband lost his private property on Shell Lake, but we both agree that it’s wonderful to be able to roam that whole big, beautiful area and not have it filled with condos.
My comment above should read that it (dog-friendliness) is one of the ways (not reasons) I judge other places. Also, it sounds as if I am running the Conservancy and the Lakeshore together into a single entity, which they are not.
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