Once There Came Two Englishmen

First, The Lo-o-o-ong Birthday!

 

Before beginning with the Englishmen, I want to note that the birthday I was so reluctant to welcome stretched out to about two weeks, from the first early package in the mail to the last birthday dinner, at which my hostess provided me with my very first experience of the famous Sanders Bumpy Cake from Detroit! I had heard of it but had never seen, let alone tasted, one before. What a treat!

The beautiful cyclamen above, my favorite hothouse plant of early spring, had better be my last birthday gift this year, but could anything be lovelier?

 

And Now, Two Englishmen in Pre-Civil War America

 

Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration, in the United States and Canada, Made During a Residence There in 1832, by the Rev. Isaac Fidler (NY: J. & J. Harper, 1833)

 

Three Years in North America, Vol. II (from the second London edition), by James Stuart, Esq. (NY: J. & Harper, 1833)

 

Arriving in New York in December of 1831, after seven weeks at sea, Rev. Isaac Fidler reports that he found lodging for himself, his wife, two children, and a servant lodgings in a boarding house for $21 a week, water and three meals a day included. They subsequently moved into an unfurnished apartment, dismayed at the cost (more than a furnished flat at home, the author tells us), as an entire house, which would have been their preference, was far beyond their means, even after the servant left them for better wages with an American family.

Like so many others, Rev. Fidler’s reasons came to America with the hope of improving his situation in life. 

 

Educated for the church, but destitute of interest or patronage, I remained a mere teacher at home, with little to encourage my ambition….

 

He had hopes of finding employment in an Episcopal church in the United States. When disappointed here, as he had been in England, Fidler tried his luck in Canada, but Mrs. Fidler did not care for that country, and so back to England the family went, having spent altogether less than a year in North America.

 

James Stuart, on the other hand, as indicated in his book’s title, was here for three years, his travels were much more extensive, and, as a man of apparently independent means, he was at leisure to look more carefully into the regions through which he traveled. (Stuart, actually a Scot, was married but childless; if his wife accompanied him to America, she makes no appearance in his book.) Despite a background in law, Stuart had been embroiled in more than one controversy in England that led to duels. He seems, however, to have passed his visit to our shores peaceably. 

Both Fidler and Stuart note American shrewdness and fixation with finances. Both also read Mrs. Trollope’s popular book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, before undertaking their stateside visits. Fidler, who also read Stuart’s book before publishing his own, was convinced of the absolute truth of Mrs. Trollope’s negative stories and hoped Americans would take her lessons to heart and improve themselves. Americans, for their part, denied the Trollope stories, and some American booksellers refused to carry her book—which only persuaded Fidler that the stories must be true, “as they always denounce as false whatever truth offends them.” (Thus claims of either “Guilty” and “Not Guilty” indicate guilt, as Fidler sees it here. Interesting.)

 

Stuart’s opinion, happily, was otherwise. He spent much longer in North America, traveled to every part of the country, and spoke with Americans from all walks of life, while Fidler concentrated on those who had been born in England and had emigrated as adults. Stuart also visited every denomination of church and attended at least one camp meeting (it was apparently a single camp meeting that Mrs. Trollope had painted in lurid terms), and he saw no such excesses of lewd behavior as she had reported. 

 

(Frances Milton Trollope was the mother of the English novelist, Anthony Trollope. When the latter traveled to the States himself—the northern states, at least, during the Civil War—he was grateful to be received hospitably, given his mother’s harsh published views.)

 

Stuart reported favorably on American cuisine (e.g., judging American canvasback duck as tasty as Scotch grouse) and gave fascinating details of the period’s modes of travel.

 

…The river was hard frozen, and we expected to cross on the ice; but the passage of the mails on the ice is, it seems, prohibited by the rules of the post-office of this country; and persons are employed to keep an open course for the small rowing boats, in which the mails are transported. We embarked and were pushed forward by three men, who propelled the boat by long poles shod with iron….

 

Fidler’s American travels seem to have been restricted to New York (city and state), New Jersey, and Boston, Massachusetts. He noted that Americans were “prejudiced” against British aristocracy, and he considered most American writing to “exhibit a curious medley of prejudice, ignorance, and bombast.” All of North America, in fact, struck him as crude and unrefined.

 

Fidler, not having traveled in the South, did not give an opinion on slavery but did note:

 

In New-York no white person will sit down to eat at the same table with a coloured person, nor associate in same company. … I talked with several coloured people [in Canada], and always found them, in conversation, rational and sensible.

 

He spoke apparently at length with one “coloured” woman while briefly attached to a church in Canada.

 

I encouraged her to join our Sunday school, which she did a few times; but had not acquired ability to read, before she left the neighborhood. Her husband had been a slave in the States, and had made a premature [sic] liberation of himself by crossing the boundary line. Yet he could not gain a living by his skill and labor. He was a helpless and dependent creature. I perceived the necessity of conveying useful instruction to people inured to slavery, before emancipation and the rights of freedom are bestowed. Liberty to the captive is assuredly no blessing, where this had not been previously provided. 

 

(Liberty no blessing? That, of course, was the English clergyman’s view, not an opinion given by the formerly enslaved man, whose “premature liberation” of himself would seem to indicate that he preferred freedom, despite its difficulties.) 

 

Fidler spent much more of his North American time in Canada than in the U.S. As a Church of England clergyman, he found Canada’s Anglican religious observances congenial and would have been happy to settle there permanently, had his wife been so inclined. As for religion in America, he considered Methodist to be “bigots” and expected that in time the Episcopal church would become the national church of the United States, but he had not attended the meeting of Congress that Stuart did, or he might not have made such a prediction. [See my discussion in this post, under the section “Reading the Past,” for that background.]

 

Stuart traveled extensively in the antebellum South, as well as west to St. Louis, and thus had more to say about America’s “peculiar institution” (slavery) than Fidler. In Charleston, for example, he noted his landlady 

 

… give a young man, a servant, such a blow behind the ear as made him reel, and I afterward found that it was her daily and hourly practice to beat her servants, male and female, either with her fist, or with a thong made of cowhide.

 

He quotes another writer telling a story a serving girl in the same landlady’s establishment, punished by “twenty-six lashes inflicted … with a cow-hide” while another “young negro slave who waited in the house” had to stand by and count the lashes. Nor was this the end of the girl’s punishment, as the Frenchman she had defended herself against complained to the police, had her arrested, and she was then whipped again “in his presence.”

 

“I regret that I did not take a note of this miscreant’s name, in order that I might give his disgraceful conduct its merited publicity.”

 

Note that the unnamed “miscreant,” quite rightly, is the Frenchman, not the punished serving girl.

 

Both men frequently note prices, Stuart going far beyond Fidler in that regard, paying attention to commodity markets and the resources of different regions, as well as personal finances. At one point he makes the acquaintance of a fellow Scot in Illinois, who had first settled in New York but then been tempted further west by newspaper stories describing prairie land in Illinois.

 

He therefore came directly here from New-York, and procured 500 acres of the very best land in the state, as he thinks, of rich soil from three to four feet deep. It produces from thirty to forty-five bushels of wheat, and excellent corn and oats in rotation. It would do it injury to give it manure. The land is so easily ploughed, that a two-horse plough ploughs two and a half acres per day. There is never any want of a market. Everything is bought by the merchants for New-Orleans, or for Galena, where a vast number of workmen are congregated, who are employed in the lead mines on the north-western parts of the state. There is also a considerable demand for cattle for new settlers. Cattle are allowed to run out on the prairie during the whole winter….

 

Returning to the parson: Except for his lack of satisfaction and gratitude, Fidler’s style of writing reminds me of Mr. Collins (a fictional reverend) in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as he exhibits the same overly conscious sense of social hierarchy as did the clergyman in the novel and similarly preens himself on his own judgment. Noting in his book’s preface that he has done all he could to avoid repeating anything Mrs. Trollope “had already said in a very popular and attractive style” and anything in Mr. Stuart’s book (the style and content of which he passed over in silence), Fidler writes of his own authorship in the third person: 

 

He flatters himself, therefore … that those who have read the above works may yet peruse his with some advantage.

 

Oh, yes, the advantageous perusal! 

 

Ah, but now, my own confession! It is impossible for me to read Fidler objectively, since the 19^th-century reader who once possessed the copy now mine added extensive marginalia, in soft pencil, from beginning to end of the narrative. At one point early on, that reader noted “True” in the margin, but more often, as he got deeper into the book, he was writing the word “Lie” “You lie!” or even, once, “Big Lie.” 

Here the long-ago reader remarked to the author, "You old Sponge."

I found the entertainment value increasing with longer marginal notions. Here are a few samples:

 

      “Old sour Crout”

      “Fiddler Diddaler”

      “Charitable Parson Fiddler”

      “Fiddle it off, Parson”

      “You lie, Parson”

      “Quarrelling Parson Fiddler”

      “Fidgetty Old Mrs. Fiddler” [She was never satisfied, according to her husband.]

      “Oh you old humbug”

 

The anonymous reader with his pencil even takes leave of the author on the last page of the book with “the hopes of the Reader that you will never return here” and makes reference to the writer’s “amiable spouse” and the writer’s own “amiable, candid disposition” with obvious sarcasm. I must say, it was fun sharing my reading with Anonymous from almost 200 years ago! Fidler alone would have been far too solemn!

Back to the Present?

 

One reason I have shared these two books today, other than having made extensive notes on them months ago, is to avoid discussion of current events. My head is not in the sand, never fear (though as often as possible I put my mind “somewhere else” at bedtime), but on Sundays now I am staying resolutely offline and away from the news, taking the day to restore my spirit. And although planting anything outdoors this early would be premature—no wild leeks poking up in the woods yet, no peepers peeping in the ponds—it feels good to rake the yard and to spend time at the dog park with Sunny and her friends. Small beginnings of the young season, too, are to be found, for those with searching eyes. Whatever transpires in the summer to come, right now I am grateful to be granted another spring.

In My Life, One Book Often Leads to Another

Neighborhood reflections

One day last week here in the shop, I started reading Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, quite a well-known book but unfamiliar to me except for its dust jacket. Wilson leads off his study with Jules Michelet, the French historian and natural history writer, and I was immediately entranced by details of Michelet’s life, but it was the way Wilson wrote about Michelet’s History of France that made me want to retire immediately and spend the year reading French history as written by Michelet! Though I wonder if even a year would be sufficient, since it is a 19-volume work.... Although, truthfully, I am not interested in the earlier volumes and would be content to begin with the Renaissance. As it happens, in any case, I won’t be starting that reading in the near future, as I cannot afford the editions I want and refuse to be satisfied with cheap modern paperback reprints. Content is most important, but I care about the physical object, as well.

 

Did you know that Jules Michelet is the person responsible for the term ‘Renaissance’? He lived from 1798 to 1874 and looked back on the end of the Middle Ages and subsequent flowering of culture and science as a true rebirth of Europe. People lived through the Renaissance without having a name for it. What will our age be called? Never mind—let's not take that road today!

Winter aconites have had many naps and reawakenings this year.

Taking a deep breath and consigning Michelet to my old-old age reading (along with those volumes of the vitalist philosopher Louis Lavelle that I bought in Paris decades ago) and skipping ahead in Wilson, I saw a chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic,” and that led me to put down Wilson and pick up Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which so far I am finding much more reader-friendly than a volume by Adorno alone, one I am wading through in odd moments, page by weary page. It is a paperback reprint, as is the Dialectic, but both are quality paperbacks from a reputable publisher.

 

Edmund Wilson must share credit with a novel sent to me by a friend, however, a fictionalized life of Walter Benjamin, for sending me to Adorno. My friend did not care at all for Benjamin, at least in the novel, Benjamin’s Crossing, and I can see where the man would have been a difficult companion, but I do not find him altogether unsympathetic, especially after reading his short memoir vignettes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900. (Those are truly magical!) So the novel my friend rejected led me to several other books and lives.

 

You may recall, if you pay attention to my bookish meanderings, that a novel based on the life of Belle la Costa Greene led me to read her biography, also. Now, in part because of what I learned of her work for J.P. Morgan, I am reading a biography of Duveen (he is usually called only by his surname), the famous art dealer of that particular turn of the century, now over 100 years ago, and altogether I feel very steeped in the late 19^th and early half of the 20^th centuries. 

Current bedtime book

I appreciate the old-time, high-quality cloth binding under the jacket.

Does that happen to you? Does something in a book put you on the trail to other books? 

 

I vowed to stick to books today, after the over-the-top, nonliterary rant of my last post—not that I am apologizing for it, but this is, after all, Books in Northport. But dogs are an okay detour, though, aren’t they?

 

Sunny Juliet and I got to the dog park twice this week, on both Sunday and Tuesday, and she had a chance to play with her friends Daisy and Louie both times, and also with Jackson on Sunday. Sunny knows the word “friends” and perks her ears alertly when I ask her if she wants to see her friends. In that, she is like me. It was good to be with friends Monday evening to remember dear Larry Coppard, and a chance encounter on Tuesday at Samaritan’s Closet with friends I don’t often see had me smiling for the rest of my afternoon off. 

Outdoors at home

At home, I’m getting at the big job of raking my yard after the mess left behind by fall and winter, one bit at a time (with many pauses to launch tennis balls in the air for Sunny), and I’m happy to announce that all the snow is gone from our yard! For the time being, that is. It’s still April, after all.

In my favorite booth

And it’s also still cold, so I wore my puffy winter jacket when I went to meet another dear friend who had invited me to dinner at the Happy Hour. I timed my arrival a few minutes early, so I could sip my "brewski" (as the Artist used to say) while reading the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, but my friend wasn’t far behind me. Quiet when we arrived, the joint was jumpin’ by the time we left. 

Friendship warms the heart on the coldest of Up North evenings, and happiness is the signature, as well as the eponymous, mood of my neighborhood roadhouse. (Ha! I've been looking for a chance to use that word 'eponymous'!) 

Everyone is happy here.

My friend, a fellow reader --

It’s NOT All About Me

Ruby red osiers (red-twig dogwood)

It’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.

So began Robert Reich’s April 7, 2025, Substack post. It’s true he doesn’t mention what was happening in Gaza ten weeks ago—that wasn’t good news—but it’s hard to argue with what he does say about our world ten weeks ago. 

And now? Barbarians running amok throughout the federal government at all levels, slashing and burning, wreaking retribution wherever possible on particular states, universities, law firms, judges, and anyone else who has dared to stand for the rule of law against the lawless, monolithic attack, and now punitive tariffs on everyone from China to penguins. What can one little bookseller in a small, quiet village possibly hope to say to draw attention away from the national scene and toward her own small interests? 

Does she look dubious?

But I don’t want to divert your attention from the national scene! I want you to pay attention to it. If I include photographs of my dog now and then or images of beauty found in my country neighborhood to give you a reason to smile, that’s not because dogs and scenery are more important than imminent threats to our democracy (as well as our livelihoods) but simply because we need to remember, in the midst of chaos and horror and destruction, that our world, the basic reality being so egregiously attacked, has an essential goodness. 

As for why I include snippets of big news here that you can easily find elsewhere in far greater detail, it’s because I hope that at least one or two people who depend on (dis)information silos to guide their thinking—I cannot stop hoping—will find something I say, some random link I include, if not their stock portfolios tanking, a serious challenge to their ”God’s got this” complacency, because I know that many of them have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as do I, and surely they don’t want our country destroyed before those younger generations have a chance to enjoy a good American life. 

How many people do you know who are downsizing households and reducing material belongings so “the kids won’t have to deal with a mess” when they’re gone? Well, how about a country without respect for the Constitution, without freedom of expression, a country loathed by the rest of the world for not keeping its word? What parents want to see their kids having to deal with a mess like that? 

The Secretary of the Treasury (another billionaire—surprise!) does not think (my sentence should really end there, shouldn't it?) that ordinary Americans facing retirement “look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening” in the stock market. He thinks they don't pay attention to the market, which is somewhat like (although not quite as bad as) the Secretary of Commerce saying that only fraudsters complain about not getting their social security checks on time. What planet do these idiots live on?

Mr. Bessent, sir, Americans preparing to retire are paying more attention to financial indicators than you realize. And Mr. Lutnick, sir, your mother-in-law may not worry if her social security check doesn’t arrive on time, but many Americans rely on those checks to pay their rent. How out of touch with your fellow Americans can you possibly be? 

I’m thinking that right about now, with Social Security threatened and world trade in crisis, Americans who didn’t worry about international students or undocumented aliens being kidnapped without grounds for arrest and without any semblance of a trial—those Americans might be getting a little nervous now that their pocketbooks are threatened. People who were perfectly comfortable with nonstop lies, fear-mongering, and violations of the United States Constitution might not be quite so comfortable with value erased overnight from their own stock portfolios and retirement funds.

Many of us have long wondered what it would take, and maybe this is what it takes. Cart our immigrant neighbors off to prison in El Salvador; cut off funding and trash years of research into serious health issues; make the United States a pariah among nations—but my stock portfolio? My money? You’re messing with my money?! 

Yeah, well, if that’s what it takes, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their pocketbooks. If that’s what it takes for people to start paying attention to the Constitution, now is the time to wake up!

As for what inspired the absurd tariff plan that has the stock market in freefall, the true story would not be believed if it were written in a novel. The actual fiction writer may be offstage for a while (we can only hope), but for now the damage has been done. We’re told it will be GREAT “in the long run.” In the long run, of course, all of us will be dead, and our poor grandchildren will be left to put together whatever pieces of freedom might be left.

This is what happens, friends, when experience, knowledge, and solid background are considered as disqualifications for the highest positions in government. Take a look at the Cabinet and the advisors to the president. Just take a look. The rest of the world is looking on with horror!

Meanwhile, in my little corner of the big world, more snow arrived on Monday and a dear friend died. Time is inexorable. Larry Coppard, we will miss you in Northport, and your absence will be felt far from our village, as well, because a good man is hard to find and heartbreaking to lose. But every life well lived is an inspiration to others, and so the good life Larry lived will continue to light our hearts and our way forward.

The Artist called his dear friend Larry "Lorenzo"!

These are the things that matter: dear friends and family, principled human beings, the reassuring cycles of Nature, art and literature and music and memory and all the ways our souls live on past the body’s return to earth. 

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. In other words, tyrants come and go, but love remains.

A David Grath sky --

Postscript 4/10. Nope. I’m not done. Do you know what the president’s golf outings cost taxpayers? Do you know that the new 100% unqualified assistant director of the FBI, a big “strongman” podcaster, apparently needs a 24-hour, 20-man security team, no matter where he is or what he is doing? (Those guys don’t work for free.) Do you know that the Secretary of the Interior, at the same time that park rangers are being fired across the United States, has paid aides baking cookies for him on demand, because he has to have them warm? 

Oh, right! It’s all about cutting costs, trimming waste, making government more efficient. You believe that?  This, friends, is how autocrats rule: Living like pashas, they take from the people and give to themselves.

Rushing Headlong!

Look out, world!

Whenever we get to the dog park or we’re playing the game at home where she chases tennis balls launched through the air by her momma or any old time she happens to spy a rabbit in or near our yard at home, Sunny Juliet goes into high gear in a heartbeat. Not the soulful bedtime cuddler, she is a speeding rocket! 

Shadows on fresh spring snow

 

I wish I could say northern Michigan is rushing headlong into spring with the same speed Sunny shows when chasing a rabbit, but – nah. We had a teasing short course of spring weather, followed by yet another snowstorm. Then the weather warmed up again, and we were visited with torrential rain before once again cold returned, bringing both snow and ice. The result of, first, the heavy, wet snow, and then the rain freezing to ice, both times with pounding winds, was a lot of tree damage—in the orchards, the woods, and along northern roads. 

Northport Creek nearly at street level

Another result for many (mostly in the northeast corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula) was loss of electrical power. Calling the ice beautiful, then, seems insensitive at best, perhaps even cruel, and yet what else to say when the sun shines on pellucid, glass-encased branches, making tiny rainbows in the bright, clear air, and every breeze brings the sound of tinkling crystal as shards fall to the ground? 

Frozen vineyard under blue sky

Workers clearing away fallen branches

Hear the sounds of crystal?

Nature can't help her awe-ful beauty.

But yes, I know, friends, that I have been fortunate while others have faced devastation, and my heart goes out to those who have had losses. Life isn't fair. That's why we have to be fair with and kind to each other.

Piles of presents!

Sunny was not forgotten, either.

As for me, personally, although I was not at all in an anticipatory mood in the days leading up to it, I had another birthday the other day. Rushing headlong through my eighth decade, I am now another year closer to the dreaded eight-oh! But I was so fearfully spoiled by cards and texts and presents from family and friends—and the day itself dawned with what seemed miraculous: a sunrise!—and then I tricked a friend into letting me treat her to a late lunch, not telling her it was my birthday until afterward (she says she’ll never trust me again)—that, all in all, unexpectedly, it was a very satisfying day. 

Tuesday sunrise - what a great gift!

Fisher's Happy Hour cream puff (K. Snedeker photo)

Sunny and I had been to the dog park earlier, and later I bribed her with a beef bone so I could spend the evening calmly and quietly, reading and visiting on the phone, all snuggled in a sleeping bag with my feet up. My old friend James, had he seen me, would have said in a voice pretending to be shocked, “Pamela! You sybarite!” It was my own personal, self-indulgent holiday.

But Sunny was not completely ignored. That never happens.

Other than advancing age, another reason I wasn’t much in the mood for a birthday is the way my beloved country seems to be rushing headlong away from freedom, democracy, and universal suffrage and off a cliff to land into the opposite of such values. (I will refrain from giving a name here to the opposites that are daily before our eyes, because you already know what words are so painfully appropriate.) After a day spent resolutely offline, though, in bright sunshine, at the dog park, opening presents, and visiting with friends, in person and by talk and text, I thought I would chance looking at headlines on my phone. Maybe only headlines. What a wonderful surprise greeted me: Cory Booker standing up in the Senate for the U.S. Constitution and the American people! I was so heartened! What a terrific birthday present! The next morning I could hardly wait to check in again with him. As you know, he stood and spoke for over 25 hours, a new Senate record. I am so grateful to him and proud of his presence in Congress. We need more standup men and women there!

Back at work in Northport on Wednesday (with some of the nastiest weather so far this year: snow turning to sneet, then rain coming down, turning to slush on the sidewalks that will no doubt freeze to ice overnight—ugh!), I had not expected anyone in my shop, but browsers and buyers appeared as if by magic, and they were lovely visitors, too, all of them. I was glad there were dog treats in my jacket pocket for the little Boston terrier who needed to come in and to warm up. 

Now before the weekend arrives, I need to put together an April display for National Poetry Month. Always something to do in a bookshop. It's my good life.

Friday, May 23, noon -- details to follow soon.

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.