Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Thanksgiving and the Past-Soaked Earth of Home

Home, as the old words say, is where the heart is. But where, then, is the heart?

-  Willie Morris, “Coming On Back”

 

Two unrelated events came together one morning to set my thoughts in motion on the subject of home. First was the serendipitous reading (serendipitous because the book arrived unexpectedly in a box from a friend bringing books to my shop for trade credit) of Willie Morris’s Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home. Morris’s home was Yazoo, Mississippi. In the first essay, “Coming On Back,” he recounts a conversation shared with him by a fellow Ole Miss graduate who realized, in a brief conversation with a Harvard man, that “not all Americans are from somewhere.” Not all Americans, that is, locate their personal identity in their old high school or a cemetery that holds several generations of their ancestors. Willie Morris was definitely from Mississippi, as Albert Murray was just as definitely from Alabama. 

I have a harder time answering the question, “Where are you from?” My father was born in Columbus, Ohio, and stayed long enough to earn a degree in civil engineering at Ohio State University before going off to World War II, while my mother, born in Los Angeles, was given a strangely peripatetic childhood that ranged as far east as Connecticut before her mother and stepfather finally settled down on the semirural edge of Springfield, Ohio. My parents met after the war, there in Ohio, but their first home was in South Dakota, where I was born but lived less than three years, after which I grew up in Illinois, impatient to leave the prairie of my childhood and adolescence for something more exciting -- when very young, the setting sun beyond the farm fields and a cowgirl life; later, breaking into theatre in New York. Ah, the dreams of childhood and youth!

The first place that ever felt as if it could be a permanent home for me was Kalamazoo, Michigan. Although my family had no history in Kalamazoo, I made in that town what felt like a full life. But then, with the intention of being gone only two years -- long enough to earn a master’s degree and return qualified for a better job at Western Michigan University -- I left, and somehow, once launched into graduate school I absorbed from those around me (faculty and fellow graduate students) the expectation that I would go on for a Ph.D., with the result that, while visiting many times since that open-ended leaving, I have never since lived in Kalamazoo. 

 

Kalamazoo, for years, was home. Then it wasn’t. 

 

Years ago, when the Artist and I were still living in Leland, I wrote to a friend that we would probably have the same post office box there for the rest of our lives, but when we moved a few miles north to live in the country and established our business presences in Northport, it only made sense to change our mailing address to Northport, too. “How long have you lived in Northport?” people sometimes ask. I have never lived in Northport. I live in Leelanau Township, surrounded by hills and woods and orchards. I do, however, spend day after day in my bookshop in Northport, and after so many years the shop is my second home.

Original Dog Ears, the little shed on Waukazoo Street

Back on Waukazoo Street in a larger, warmer space

But that brings me back to the original question. Where is the heart at home? 

 

“Behold, thou poor Soul in thy Bath of Thorns, where is thy Home? Art thou at home in this World?”

-  Jacob Boehme, quoted by Ben Ehrenreich in Desert Notebooks

 

My truth is that I was at home with the Artist, wherever we were, and when we were apart I was homesick. 

 

We were at home in Room 11 of the Superior Hotel, a corner room across from the hotel’s two bathrooms (one with a shower whose trickling stream took forever to get hot or even warmish), a room from which we could look down on the main commercial street of Grand Marais and see townspeople coming and going to the bank, to the hardware store, to the post office. 

We were at home in our rented cabin in Cochise County, Arizona, where the front door looked out on the two-lane highway below and the ghost town straggled from one end to the other with very little traffic other than wandering cows and the occasional roadrunner, back door looking north up the Philadelphia Wash to the southern of the two peaks of the Dos Cabezas that gave their name to the little range that always seemed, to me, like the tail of the giant Chiricahua lizard down the road. That cabin was so small that the Artist used to tell people we were “living in each other’s pockets” during our months there.

It was easier even than that. We were at home in whatever car or van we might happen to be driving, whether on a simple “county cruise” or up into Canada or down to the Gulf Coast or up along the Mississippi River or west to Arizona, with whatever dog we had at the time as our mascot, sharing cups of gas station coffee along the miles. And we were at home in each motel room along the way, always looking around at the antiseptic walls with their sterile furniture store artwork and discussing the ways we would rearrange and furnish and decorate and cozy up the room if we had to live there for some undetermined length of time and call it home. Because we could have. Together, we could have.

And so the farmhouse, our dream come true, with all its quirks and imperfections, all its “issues” and many unmet needs, because (though not the home of our ancestors) it held our life together for two decades, continues now to be my home, one I never want to leave. Yet at the same time I am often homesick there because of his absence. Our years together were a long conversation to which the two of brought our loftiest dreams, our most childish silliness, our pettiest of irritations and most joyous exclamations and occasionally (more rarely, I’m happy to say) our deepest fears. The abrupt ending of that conversation has brought in its wake a reverberating stillness to the rooms I now inhabit without him. 

In one of the many books I read about grief there was a sentence that resonated so fully with me that it seemed to say everything in one line, but since I’m not sure where the sentence occurred I’ll have to paraphrase it, and I apologize in advance for delivering it to you without the perfection of the original. I can only personalize it in hopes that that will restore some of the power: The Artist and I shared a private language, and I am now its only living speaker.

 

Anyone in a long relationship understands what this means. You have certain words that encapsulate an entire shared thought exploration, and you only have to utter one of those words aloud to share all over again everything you once said to each other on the subject. Or someone else in your presence voices another word or mentions a name, and your eyes flick to each other’s faces in silent recognition. You read each other’s thoughts. You care about the most mundane details of one another’s childhoods. “Tell me again….” The person you know most deeply is, for all that, always and forever an endless mystery to explore. So when that language and memory partner is gone, no one understands the significance of those words or shares the memory a name evokes or has the slightest interest in what snacks your family shared on Sunday evenings. 

In The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, the author tells of a culture in which the death of an individual is expressed by saying “his library burned.” Like a library, a human being is – while alive and barring the ravages of dementia – a repository of memories. One of my friends, someone who also lost the love of his life (and we agree that “we are the lucky ones” to have had those loves), says he finds meaning now in being “her chief rememberer.” While the Artist is remembered and mourned by many, not only me, my own personal, nonphysical, admittedly ephemeral library, holding memories of our life together and all that he told me of his other lives before we met – that library is, as the pilot told the little prince of his rose, “unique au monde.” 

 

Many of our days in and around the farmhouse were pedestrian and repetitious. Life is like that. There was grass to be mowed, trailers to be lined up onto hitches, tarps to be tied down, all kinds of things to be moved in and out of barns. “I need a hand here,” the Artist would say, and I would drop whatever I might have been doing to lend my hand to his task, and I remember one particular day when I was called to give directions while he backed up a vehicle to a trailer, and it burst upon me that this was my life and that it was just fine! Every square foot of land around my farmhouse, like every mile of county road, is saturated with memories of conversation and shared seeing and working, so if I could have one more day with him, it wouldn’t have to be in Paris or New York or discovering together the Painted Desert. It could be any ordinary day, beginning with “Is there any coffee?” There always was. Why did he ask? But now, I miss that old question.

 

At Thanksgiving dinner, everyone around the table was asked to say something for which they were thankful. So much! So, so much! But I had to say, meaning no slight to those hosting the beautiful dinner or my family and friends miles away, I am thankful for my memories. Grateful for the life I had – and the memories that keep those years alive for me now.

 

Often, when he wanted to hold hands, he would say, “Give me your paw.” And that was everything.

But I see that I completely lost sight of my beginning as I made my way once again down memory lane! The second event that prompted my musings on home was the departure from this life of our old friend William Himebaugh. Willie and Sandy were another couple who made homes together far from their separate beginnings, wherever they happened to be -- home on the coast of Florida or the mountains of Panama or some little island or even just in a boat on the ocean. So Sandra, this post is especially for you, in memory of the love of your life. That’s really what I started out to say, before I got sidetracked by my own loss and my own reasons to be thankful.

Michael and Willie and David -- for many years!