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!

Back at Last

 

…Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was filled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snowflake and cedar frond, every fox and goldfinch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. 

 

-      Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

 

It’s coming again, our Great Lakes winter. Or is it? Last winter we had a little snow in January and none to speak of (at least, none to plow) other than that. Then spring 2024 was early and wet, and after that summer descended into drought, a long, dry spell that, while it lasted into early autumn, did nothing to dull the fall colors, which were seemed to go on and on and on until November winds came to strip branches and topple trees, until now, here we are looking for snow. There was a bit on the ground Thursday morning, our first, but it didn’t last long, and our long-range forecast is for a “wet” winter, 40-50% chance of wetter-than-average weather, as in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, and hail. Does that mean the yo-yo continues to bounce back and forth, never a settled season? 

 

Whatever the weather, winter's increased darkness always brings an increase in indoor reading time. More on that in a minute, but for now I hope you noticed that Jerry Dennis's sentences are as savory and mouth-watering as the moments they describe.

One January day in 2024 -- real winter!

Where have I been?

 

Since September 13, 2007, my initial post on Books in Northport, this is the longest I’ve gone between postings, the most recent one before this dated October 29, 2024. The main reason for the long hiatus was the death of my laptop screen. I tried one day to work from my phone, posting directly to the Blogger platform, rather than working through a Word draft first, then uploading it, the result not quite an unmitigated disaster but when done at last I realized -- too late! -- that I’d uploaded to my photo blog rather than either this (primarily, or at least initially) book blog or even my dedicated bookstore blog. (Here is where that post ended up, for those of you who never happened on it.) With the laptop, I could have rectified the error easily. Of course, with the laptop I wouldn’t have been posting from my phone in the first place. 

 

Then one day last week a friend called and said, “I need your blog!” She clarified by adding, “I mean, I need you to write something new!” So now that I have a clean new screen and keyboard at my disposal (and all my old programs and files right where I want them, too), I’m jumping back in. Perhaps not a peak performance, but at least something to indicate that there still are books in Northport!

And bookmarks!

 

Still reading – and rereading

 

Away from my email for three weeks (that part, I have to admit, felt like kind of a vacation), I made a few feeble stabs at handwritten notes for a future blog post and kept my “Books Read” list up-to-date with handwritten additions but didn’t bother with long descriptions of or reflections on the books added to the list. I also wrote a few letters to distant friends, made notes about new books to order for the shop, and set aside Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi to reread Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, one of my favorites among his novels, which inspired me to pull RL’s Dream off the shelf next, a Mosley novel I read so long ago it was as if I were reading it for the first time. With the main character a musician originally from the South, and with Mosley’s brilliant sentences, I sensed many echoes of Albert Murray. There was also a historical novel squeezed in there, a 24-hour spell with The War Began in Paris, in which a former Mennonite woman from the American Midwest, working as a small-time journalist, becomes entangled with another American woman journalist with Fascist sympathies, glamor and excitement dulling her sense of danger. 

 

Oh, the world, the world! Even in fiction, there is no escaping it! Not that escape should be a relentless quest. Understanding, empathy, living other lives in other skins – that’s the magic offered us in fiction, don’t you think? I’m curious what my readers have to say on this topic, especially as not long ago I stumbled on a website where a writer proclaimed something like “Life is too short to read depressing books,” and her readers all agreed in their comments that they wanted nothing but escape from novels and therefore avoided any book that received a major prize and/or had been recommended by Oprah! Novels without conflict, characters without challenges? To me, this is a peculiar narrowing of the entire idea of reading, although I certainly understand the need at times for “happy endings.” But what do you think?

 

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A little “playing tourist” –

My son and his wife came up for three nights, making for cheery alterations to my usual schedule. After their Monday of hiking Whaleback and tasting at Tandem Ciders while I took Sunny to the dog park and did a bit of housework, the three of us reconvened for dinner. Having company is inspiration to the cook in her tiny Paris kitchen: On Sunday evening there was a curried soup made from Hubbard squash and coconut milk; Monday’s vegetable dish of cauliflower and mushrooms with parsley exceeded my expectations, and the leftovers were even delicious cold. As for the rice pudding, while it was hardly a failure, next time I’ll let the rice steam much longer so that it disappears a bit more into the custard.

Tuesday the three of us went out together, visiting Samaritan’s Closet in Lake Leelanau and the Polish Art Center in Cedar before dinner at Dick’s Pour House in the evening. Shopping! Dinner out! Not things I usually do on my own, and it was even more fun to know that Ian and Kim were enjoying their little Up North vacation. Kathleen at the PAC in Cedar is delightful, too, as is her shop. 

Deer season and outdoor dog activity

 

Sunny and I are challenged in our outdoor time during firearm deer season, although she has no idea why mornings are different. When it isn’t raining, we still have tennis ball play in the yard or even in the two-track, but there is no off-leash running along the edge of the woods these days. All the more reason, then, to take Sunny to the dog park when I can. But the extra round trip to Northport is only worthwhile on days my bookshop is closed (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), as the morning’s first regulars don’t arrive early enough to provide Sunny with playmates if we get there at nine o’clock. By ten, though, we can usually count on another Aussie, a couple of Pyrenees, a Bernadoodle and a smooth-coated collie. A few times there was a little fierce barking (some from my Naughty Girl, some from others), but a tennis ball hurled through the air quickly distracts everyone from conflict. And it is so good to see dogs running off-leash!

  

New Books: Arriving Soon!

 

My new book order, usually sent in on Mondays, finally (after not happening at all for a couple of weeks) got done on Thursday this week, a bigger order than usual, making up for weeks missed. There will be an assortment of new board books for the pre-reading crowd of babies; a fun book of dog poems for “kids” of all ages; Robin Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, as well as a version of Braiding Sweetgrass for young adults; a couple editions of Wind in the Willows for those who need to re-immerse in it or discover it for the first time; and, as usual, a few surprises. The order should come in early next week, so I may be in the shop on days you’d expect me not to be there, because opening boxes of new books is a delight not to be postponed but indulged as soon as possible.

The run on jigsaw puzzles has already begun, though, so don't wait too long to make your selections for those long winter evenings ahead.

  

And the season rushes on!

 

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving already -- the best, I always think, of American holidays, being all about gratitude rather than hoopla. Hoopla fun will come two days later, though, never fear, with Saturday evening’s lighting of the Christmas tree in Northport and a visit from Santa – and then the race is on! Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25 this year and continues to January 2, with Kwanzaa from December 26 to January 1, so the end of one year and entry into the next will be rich with holidays. 

 

We need our holidays. We need to shift focus from competition to celebration, from conflict to love. We need festive lights during the shortest days and longest, darkest nights of the year. We also need to take time to remember those in less fortunate circumstances (far too many!) and do what we can with our end-of-year contributions. Writing those checks, like writing a holiday letter or addressing cards to friends, is a good December ritual.

A couple of longer bookstore days

 

My 11 a.m. -3 p.m. hours will be subject to some stretching for the days following Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how late I’ll be open on Friday, November 29, but I’d love to see local shoppers in my bookstore on that day, and if there are enough of them, I’ll be happy to stay open as late as 5 p.m. 

Indie Bookstore Day!

The next day, Saturday, will definitely be a later business day, as Northport's tree lighting doesn’t take place until 6 p.m., and I don't want to miss that!

Lights are strung, ornaments are on. All systems are GO for a week from Saturday!