As May Approaches

Do you see her?

Seasonal sights

A recurring obsession in my life, spring ephemeral wildflowers, comes into focus now for its all-too-brief season, briefer than spring itself, which began earlier with winter aconites and Siberian squills (blue flower above) in the yard and will extend beyond the days of shy woodland beauties as the first impressionist flush of returning life in the branches of trees all too quickly swells unfurling into shade-providing leaves. Right now, however, the time of ephemeral blooms is just getting underway, although my photographs here, from two and three days ago, are not an accurate report of today in the woods. 

My old news here is of Dutchman's breeches, blooming above, and of trillium and toothwort preparing to bloom. Will trillium and toothwort flowers open today before I get these words thrown out into the world?

Daily I watch buds in the orchard, as well as on my own little apple trees and solitary plum. When will the cherry trees blossom? people ask. We are all hungry for spring’s abundant, harmless beauty.

Spring rain was abundant this year, far too abundant in many places (lots of flood damage), and even in Leelanau swelling creeks and ponds and creating temporary bodies of water in low places. Some, like the ponds in my yard, lasted only 24 hours, while others deserve their lovely name, vernal pools, and these days, morning and afternoon, I visit both the ephemeral and the year-round ponds to watch ducks and geese and cranes and gulls. One morning I was rewarded by seeing three lesser yellowlegs, a single bird at a vernal pool and a pair on a larger, more populous body of water. The pair was gone the next day, the bachelor a day later, all of them on their way north to Canada’s boreal forest land. Hawks, too, are migrating north, but wild turkeys remain, turkeys and mallards courting and breeding here among us.

Just passing through....

A busy bookshop day

We had a lovely gathering of people for poet Fleda Brown’s reading last Saturday as we celebrated National Poetry Month and Indie Bookstore Day. I forebore photographing my guest, as it was her first public event since back surgery, and she was still strapped into a white plastic, torso-hugging brace. “A bionic poet!” I exclaimed. She may not have appreciated that name but was pleased, as was I, by her audience, and we were all very pleased with her. On the most serious of subjects, this poet manages to cast a sideways glance, providing a wry look at our human absurdity, while never losing sight of life’s priceless details. Her poems and essays are gifts to the world.

For all Saturday’s unwelcome cold (spring is a season of many short, teasing setbacks), even after the poetry crowd dispersed my day in the shop continued busy right up until 4:30. Where did all these book-lovers come from? Serious browsers, good sales, great conversations—it was like a day in July, all the more heartwarming coming as a surprise in chilly April!

Fleda Brown's 2025 visit to Dog Ears Books

Trend or anomaly?

My phone often makes a sound as for an incoming text when no text is coming in, as if the phone is tugging at my sleeve or nudging my arm to say, Pay attention to me! You’re not paying attention to me! Apparently a new "thing" for young people on college campuses these days is the phone-free gathering, where attendees sit with hands free and look into each other’s faces and talk directly to one another, making the conscious decision not to let their phones dictate their every waking minute. Isn’t that a hopeful sign?

(When an old friend and I were going to get together for the first time in many years, I suggested that we leave our phones in another room. We didn't miss them at all.)

Another development in the growing rebellion against digital technology (more astonishing to me than a return to vinyl records) is the rediscovery of VHS. Movies in boxes! Don’t have a VCR? You can rent that, too! I am told that even CD and DVD technology amazes more and more young people, accustomed as they are to streaming music and movies. What do they make of VHS tapes?

(In novels written a hundred or more years ago, we read of parties where young people gathered around a piano, singing songs, thrilled with the arrival of new, up-to-date sheet music. Country life without a piano might still feature a fiddle, guitar, harmonica, or other instruments. Stamping feet. Clapping hands.) 

I wonder (the eternal springing of hope!) if perhaps my busy spring Saturday of bookselling is related to these other stories, another turning away from tiny screens. Maybe we will have an Indie Bookstore Year!

What is on your mind these days?

This morning I watched grey clouds outside my window as they moved slowly from south to north. A south wind. Occasional glimpses of blue sky. Then a more uniform grey, devoid of contrast, reminding me of ground so recently monochromatic white. My first coffee of the day, whether at 5 a.m. or 6:30, is my time to come awake to the world gradually, to look back on the days before and plan the days ahead, to read or write, to—I admit it!—look at my phone to scan headlines as well as to see the weather forecast. “Violence is never the answer,” people around the world say solemnly today, a predictable chorus, as they condemn the latest lone shooter. Who would disagree? Yet if war is not violence, then nothing is. That is one of my morning thoughts.

First faint flush of green!

Trees. I think about trees daily and look forward every morning to being outdoors again among them, although I confess to taking up arms against autumn olive and popples advancing into land I want to preserve as meadow, just as I contemplate possible ways to discourage spotted knapweed in my meadow without the use of poison. Controlling nature is not possible, nor is it my wish. I am grateful for the proliferation of squalls and forget-me-not in my yard and yellow-headed coneflowers in the meadow. Finding another hawthorn in the meadow delights me. I don’t want to be engulfed by autumn olive and knapweed, however, and they would take over the world if they could. Such greedy bullies! 

My constant companion

Sunny Juliet has no such concerns. Whatever grows or doesn’t around us, the outdoor world delights her, and she has a genius for turning up deer bones! It is as if she and the coyotes have made an agreement—they will make the kills, and she will scavenge the bones—while in her domestic life in the yard at home, life this spring involves an astounding number of tennis balls, more and more of them turning up where they had been lost in winter’s snow. 

Sunny taking a bone break from tennis ball play

It is good to have a dog in one’s life. A constraint on freedom, to be sure, but then, there are many constraints on freedom, which can never be absolute. In our family and civic lives, we are frequently held back by consideration for others; in our outdoor lives—every move we make!—nature sets boundaries on what we can do. I step carefully in the woods, watching where I put my feet and testing a slender tree before relying trusting it fully as a handhold. Sunny bounds ahead confidently, much more stable on four legs than I am on only two, but we are together in our enjoyment. We are here now. We are blessed to be here now.