Changing Moods of Northern Michigan

One rainy morning on Waukazoo Street

 

The season is dragging its feet, but the rocket took off.

Spring break? I didn’t take one. A lingering cough and less-than-optimal driving weather put the kibosh on travel plans. There were a few highlights in the week, however, including birthday dinner at a friend’s house, where we watched the launch of Artemis II together. 

Moon launch! Following the crew of Artemis II these past few days has been good medicine for me, a cheery antidote to the insanity of you-know-who and you-know-what.

As a devoted earthling who has never had the slightest desire to travel in outer space, I’ve never been a big fan of the space program, but Wednesday evening’s launch warmed my heart. Here’s what I loved most about it: Everyone involved was calm, competent, skilled, intelligent, knowledgeable, dedicated, modest, and grateful to be part of a team effort years in the making. What a breath of fresh air in today’s world! And one of the four astronauts, 47-year-old Christina Koch, is from Michigan! 

Thanks to the Artemis II mission, we have already learned to call the side of the moon facing away from earth the “far" side, rather than the “dark” side. Makes me think of Gary Larson’s cartoons. Here are some Larson takes on space travel.

Much, much closer to home than 250,000 miles, spring plants whose flowering was set back by two feet of March snow are preparing once again for their postponed season opening. Winter aconites, snowdrops, and hellebore seem as eager to blossom as I am to see the blossoms. Even buds of small branches torn from big trees—little detached limbs!—want to participate.

Reminders of my friend Chris, who gave me the first ones

Need to plant more of these in the fall

Still crumpled from their sleep under the snow

Life force!

Participating in democracy is heartwarming.

The March 28 “No Kings” gatherings across the country were once again peaceful and full of joy. Recovering from one of my life’s worst colds, I didn’t think I could handle a big Traverse City crowd but made a sign and went to join demonstrators in Suttons Bay. The thought I had that morning was that I was not only demonstrating for those whose views I share but for all Americans, not only for my own future and that of my children and grandchildren but for the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of all Americans to the seventh generation—at least! 

It was good to see demonstrators carrying American flags. We were out there on a chilly morning because we love our country!

I wanted a larger, clearer sign on March 28 than the one I’d held earlier in Northport when I joined “the stalwarts” (as I call them) for a couple Thursdays on the corner south of my bookstore. My solution was to take a large trifold pasteboard I’d put together for the Artist’s memorial gathering in Leland and tape it closed, using what had been the back of the trifold for the front of my sign. No one else knew, but I liked knowing that the Artist and my family and friends were with me inside that sign.

My reading is random, as usual.

“On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also, I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

- Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)

Barker’s historical novel, Regeneration, takes place during World War I and opens with poet Siegfried Sassoon's letter protesting the war’s continuance. Taken to be suffering from shell shock, he is sent to a hospital for treatment rather than being court-martialed, and in the hospital he, the historical character, and we, the readers, meet other soldiers sent home from the front and gradually learn their stories. One of the others is young Wilfred Owen, another English poet, killed when he returned to action, age 25, a week before the war's end. (Sassoon lived through the war and died at the age of 80.) The character whose thoughts we follow most intimately is the doctor in charge of Sassoon’s case. 

But it was that letter on the first page of the novel that grabbed my attention like a fire engine siren, with the phrases “callous complacence,” “agonies which they do not share,” and “have not sufficient imagination to realize.” Isn’t that the case with the present war begun by our own country? Except that the sufferers today are, for the most part, not our country's military but civilians (including children) of the country our president wants to bomb “back to the Stone Age.”

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Shifting gears here--On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes, edited by Michael Welch, is a  collection of nonfiction and poetry by 33 different writers living in the U.S. and Canada on one or another of the Great Lakes. The publishing house, Belt Publishing, is new to me, and none of the writers in the book had names I recognized. An interview on Interlochen Public Radio with one of the writers (Sara Maurer, “What Are Yoopers Without Winter?”) brought the volume to my attention and led me to order it, and I am so grateful to IPR for the connection! I’ve been skipping around in the volume, opening at random and reading wherever the book opens, and everything I’ve read has been excellent. Not just good but excellent, and I am eager to get this book into my bookstore customers’ hands.

Slowly, the season to come is taking shape.

Dog Ears Books will celebrate Indie Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 25, with a poetry reading by Fleda Brown at noon. This will be Fleda's fourth appearance in Northport, so it's safe to say there is mutual affection. Mark your calendar now!

May will be a quiet month, without any special events, as I have several special events in my personal life that month. 

On Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m., our bookstore guest will be Robert Downes, doing a slide show presentation on the arrival of Europeans in North America and what that meant for indigenous cultures, along with a signing of his new book, Sun Dog: A Novel of Native America. 

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Northport World News

  

UPDATE 9/3/25

Sorry, but the hours announced below for this week might not work out at all. Car trouble to deal with. I'll get to town when I can....

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What does Labor Day mean for you? This year, for me, it means that school will start soon and the mentoring program at Northport will start up again, so I should be reunited with the student I mentored last spring. I look forward to that. Otherwise, it’s time for me to think about fall hours, maybe taking Mondays as well as Sundays as days off. As for the Monday holiday itself, I’ll probably be open, at least for a few hours. Maybe Tuesday will be my holiday. 

Traverse City author Robert Downes has won a book-of-the-year award from the Historical Society of Michigan for his nonfiction book, Raw Deal: The Indians of the Midwest and the Theft of Native Lands. Long ago (but recent enough that I remember it: 1991) Bob Downes and George Foster started the Northern Express, a local weekly covering the local Grand Traverse region scene. When they sold the paper, his partner went back to accounting, and Bob turned to travel and writing. Latest of his books, Raw Deal begins with indigenous prehistory and follows Native Americans east of the Mississippi up to the present day. I’ll have to restock soon, because I had only one copy left when Bob stopped in on Friday. Graciously, however, he signed that copy.

Another nonfiction book that’s been getting raves from my customers is The Turtle and the Mitten: An Epic History of Michigan, by Aaron Helman. Aaron’s book is more general Michigan history and addresses various periods, one topic at a time, beginning with Detroit and then going back to Pontiac and Tecumseh, forward to the Toledo Strip (read the book to find out what this is, if you didn’t grow up in Michigan), and so forth. An accessible and entertaining introduction to our state’s history, The Turtle and the Mitten is finding a wide audience.

That’s Up North literary news. Farther afield, Geraldine Brooks has won the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American fiction, and I could not be more pleased. I think there’s only one of her books that I haven’t read.

At home, I had another visitor and a chance to catch up on family news. The next evening, Wednesday, it rained, so mowing grass was out of the question, and I set aside my halfway sort of backup plan to spend the evening on bookkeeping. A rainy evening invited relaxation. Providing Sunny Juliet with a fresh, juicy bone, then, I settled down on the porch with a novel instead, feeling beyond cozy…. 

My “Shelf Awareness” newsletter had recently shown a chalkboard outside a bookstore somewhere with one arrow pointing in—to BOOKS—and the other pointing out—to CRUEL WORLD. Fiction, however, does not have to be (and isn’t even primarily) “escape” literature. The book by Nevil Shute that I dove into the other evening, Pied Piper, set in the early days of World War II, certainly was not. The novel's protagonist, an "elderly" English widower (he is 70!!!) whose pilot son has been killed, recounts what began as a getaway fishing vacation in the Jura region of not-yet-occupied France. As the war comes closer and closer, he was persuaded to take charge of a young brother and sister whose parents, determined to remain at the father’s League of Nations job in Switzerland, want their children home in England, safe from the war, and he agrees to see the young ones home. For one reason and another as he crosses France with the original two children, his entourage of dependents grows (hence the novel's title), and the dangers and risks of travel mount precipitously when the Germans invade France, their planes bombing the roads and their soldiers occupying towns and villages. The old man (as the author calls him) with the growing band of children in tow is an Englishman—the enemy! Will he be able to save the children? Military occupation, abductions and disappearances, accusations of disloyalty, civilians as enemies—it all felt much closer to home than I would have thought possible a year ago.

The journals I’ve been keeping for about nine years bear Roman numerals and titles. My current volume is XIV, and its title is “So Far.” I use those two little words often these days. I wrote to a friend that “so far” my health and strength are holding out, “so far” I’m managing this and keeping up with that. In my eighth decade, though, I know the day will come when “so far” turns into “no longer.” It’s inevitable. I have friends who no longer hike or no longer drive--well, the list goes on, but I'll stop there.

 

I only hope and pray that "so far" becoming "no longer" will not be the case for our country and that we do not reach a stage when women are “no longer” allowed to vote, when Americans can “no longer” travel across state and national borders, when speech dissenting from government propaganda and a dominant party line is “no longer” free, etc., but curbs on freedom are already underway, with others under serious discussion by influential members of the Republican Party and supporters of the president.

(What makes the setting aside of Constitutional protections and provisions even more maddening is that the people going along with it have the nerve to call themselves “conservative”!)

How many of you have ever read any books by Studs Terkel? He interviewed Americans on his Chicago radio program from 1952 to 1997, and many of the stories he elicited from interviewees found their way into books. The first I ever read was Working, and immediately I became a Terkel fan. One of the latest books in his long list (not quite his last) was Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, first published in 2003. 

 

For Studs Terkel, hope never died, and the same was true for most of the people he interviewed, though various of them defined hope differently and found it in different ways and places. More than one person in the book found hope in the struggle itself. At least one found it in taking action. Not in seeing light but in lighting the way themselves or even going forward in the dark.

 

I intended to make a gift of Hope Dies Last to a friend, but he assures me he will return it after reading, so I have now decided that it will be a book I’ll loan out to anyone who expresses an interest. Let me know if you are interested. I’ll start a list. 

 

Keep the faith, 

my friends. 

Keep hope alive.

You can do it! Extend yourself!