“You’re Up Early”

Laundry doesn’t do itself, so when the sky begins to lighten I’m up and making coffee, and soon towels are sloshing around in the washing machine, giving me time to check e-mail before hanging wet laundry outdoors on the line. If it rains? Towels will be softer when they eventually dry. No problemo.

Perhaps I need to apologize to all the friends and acquaintances and customers and strangers who have given or sent me links or books or mss. or DVDs in the last month. The truth is that I have not yet looked at, read, or watched all these undoubtedly fascinating offerings. Running my business and keeping my household fed and cleaned and garden watered and lawn mowed and dog exercised are top priority items. Other trump cards are e-mail with and publicity for and visits with and selling the books of scheduled guest authors. A commute to work on back roads (follow link to see more) is one way I recharge on busy days. That is one luxury I do not forego.

Less frequent are trips outside of Leelanau Township, but I made time Tuesday evening to go into Traverse City with David to meet friends from Walloon Lake who were picking up a new car. They were making the trip to TC, and it’s not nearly as far for us to TC as to Walloon Lake, so we seized the opportunity. On the way into town, I regaled David with tales of “old Saugatuck” from a book a friend had sent me. The old lumber mill town of Singapore, abandoned when the trees gave out and then buried by shifting sands so that not even a ghost town remains, was a new story to me. How about you? Did you ever hear of Singapore, Michigan? Then there was the art colony, which David remembered from his own teaching days in Paw Paw and Kalamazoo. If I’d wanted to get through more work, I could have been reading mss. or watching DVDs in the car on the way to town, but somehow – call me crazy! – it felt good to take the evening off and feel as if I were on vacation like all the rest of the world.