Second Thoughts

Leelanau Twp., 4/15/25

Is spring having second thoughts about getting underway?

 

You would have thought so if you were in Leelanau on tax day, Tuesday, April 15. We got out of bed in the morning to fresh snow on the ground and a biting wind! But besides being tax day, it was also “Alyssa’s Day of Kindness,” a day to put a smile on the faces of friends and/or strangers by treating them to ice cream or coffee (two of Alyssa’s favorite things) or flowers or anything else—or simply doing a kind deed for another person—in memory of a 21-year-old who died by suicide. Alyssa’s family came up with this wonderful memorial idea, which was kicked off three years ago. Those of us who participate take photos to share, and it is a lovely way to remember this beautiful girl I’m sorry I never met—though I can’t help wishing we didn’t need this memorial and that Alyssa were still here to enjoy another spring in her young life….

 

Beautiful Alyssa!

Note: Please see the number in the flier above. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 for help!

 

Biting My Tongue

 

Some people think we should always blurt out whatever comes into our minds, right there on the spot, and they call anything else “self-censorship,” meaning something bad. I disagree. Why say something I’ll be sorry I said, when there’s usually no reason not to pause and reconsider? By taking time, I may revise my expression, tempering or strengthening it, as the situation seems to require. Sometimes I’ll decide to say nothing. Not speaking right then doesn’t mean I won’t say something later.

 

And yes, once in a while I do blurt out my first reaction! Am I always sorry? Not always! You would love to have an example of that, too, I know, but those unscripted moments are not for a public showcase! Mine is not a blurting blog.

 

Life happens moment by moment, though, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum but always at a specific time, in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and it’s a harsh rule that admits of no exceptions.

 

 

Changing My Mind

 

Related to the idea of exceptional blurting is another notion of second thoughts. One recent day I had stopped by my bookshop to drop off a few books and pick up others to take home on loan. I sat down at my desk for a minute, and a woman walked in the door I hadn’t locked. “I’m not really open,” I told her. She looked disappointed but then admitted she was only looking for a restroom. I suggested the gas station next door, but then, as she was getting back in the passenger seat of a car out front, I had second thoughts and went out to invite her back in. Why not? She was very appreciative and thanked me repeatedly.

 

When I locked up shop a few minutes later and went over to the gas station myself to pick up a few items, I met a woman I’d known in Kalamazoo decades ago. She had gone out to her car and found her sister missing and been alarmed. “She has dementia!” I told her I’d let her sister use the restroom in my place and that she was now safely back in the passenger seat of the car. Everything had worked out fine.

 

Even if I hadn’t met the driving sister, though, I had already felt better about my second thought and decision. The woman’s dementia was not obvious to me, but that she had some sort of illness was, and each and every single one of us knows how much it can mean to find a restroom when we need it! As characters in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, said more than once in that book, it was only a little onion. Such a little onion I gave!

Throwing Out the Script

 

The foregoing is introduction to my telling you that this post on having second thoughts is not the post I planned to publish on my blog today. The discarded post began with the statement “I can’t do it” and went on to detail my heartbreak over the ongoing events in our nation over the past—how many days and weeks has it been?? It isn’t that I would have wanted to “take back” anything from that post, had I put it up. No, but I had two reasons for starting over: first, I have no hope of changing a single mind (you can't make people care if they don't); and besides that, I know that at least a couple of my regular readers come here for something other than politics and current events. News they can get elsewhere. News is hard to avoid! What they want from me is strength and courage and dog and landscape photos, a smile, news from my little corner of the world, and (some of them) gentle meanderings about books. 

 

And why not?

 

 

Back to My Little Corner

 

Well, today was a sunny day in my one and only precious life. Song sparrows sing again in the mornings now, and redwing blackbirds make their creaking calls from the top of the barn, sounding like the old swings of my childhood school playground, swings with heavy wooden seats hung by heavy steel chains. (At least, I presume that metal was steel. Joliet, Illinois, was a steel-making town, after all, our township high school team known as the Steelmen—though also, confusingly, as the Iron Avalanche, unbeaten until they were beaten.) Robins cry out in self-admiration, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" 

Barefoot child with grandfather c.1951

Canada geese fly overhead these days in honking Vs, and every once in a while I hear the clatter of a sandhill crane’s voice and stop whatever I’m doing outdoors to search the sky, hoping for a sight, while mallards and herring gulls find refuge in temporary ponds that have formed in fields of corn stubble. It's good to see them, too.

All of which is to say that life goes on. (Or as I have come to say in recent years, “Life goes on ... until it doesn’t.” None of us is going to live forever.) The earth rotates and orbits the sun, day alternates with night, and the cycle of seasons repeats and repeats. Our blue-and-green planet, brimming with life, has not always been in existence and will probably not exist forever, but here we are, right now, and here it is, and there is comfort in knowing and seeing that we haven’t yet killed our home.

Toe of my boot illustrates how tiny these daffodils are.

Now that the yard is free from snow (again!), Sunny and I have resumed her work on the weave poles, which she finds the most challenging of all the agility equipment. She loves jumping the hurdles so much that it’s hard for her to understanding that weaving does not require that she jump. Do we all need a challenge? “Weave!” will be Sunny Juliet’s challenge this spring and summer.  

Sunny with challenges!

Also, let’s not forget that April is National Poetry Month! Poetry! There’s a reason to celebrate! 

 

My poet of the year 2025 is Fleda Brown, and Fleda will be here on the Friday before Memorial Day, May 23, to read from her new chapbook of prose poems, Doctor to the World. There will be chairs in a circle in the Artist’s gallery next to the bookstore (I’ll have it cleaned up before the event, I promise), and we will convene at noon, so I’m inviting attendees to bring sack lunches for an informal and intimate gathering. 

Poet Fleda Brown on a previous visit to Northport

 

Finally, in closing –

 

Life! It’s what we’ve got, so take it easy, my friends, or take it hard, but take it, and don’t take it lying down! Also, don’t forget, if you can manage it, to brighten the corner where you are.

 

¡Nunca te rindas!

 

Also,

 

HOORAY FOR HARVARD!!!