Moonrise, moonset, swiftly go the years.

Moonrise on Monday evening

 

I see the moon, and the moon sees me.

 

You’ve been plenty of sunrises and sunsets on both this blog and the one dedicated to photographs, and I’m sorry to say that once again I failed to get outdoors to photograph the Northern Lights on Monday night, which apparently were spectacular. I did, however, go out one earlier time in hopes of seeing them (vain hopes) and was rewarded by a beautiful waxing moon, orange-red in the smoke from distant fires as it moved toward setting in the western sky. 

Red moon going down in the west one dark morning last week

 

Sunny and I see each other, and my friends and I find time to see each other, too.

 

My sybaritic enjoyment of locals’ summer (September) continued with another Sunday and Monday off work. I did work almost two hours Sunday morning digging up autumn olive – real work! – but then took the rest of the day off to lounge around with a book and later to meet a friend in Suttons Bay for a movie and a bite to eat. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, so it was good to catch up.

 

Monday morning Sunny and I had another agility session (so sorry I can’t photograph while we’re working), and as I told my sister, I am learning a lot. Is Sunny learning a lot, too? Truthfully, I think my learning curve is much steeper than hers, as all she has to do is follow my commands and gestures, while I’m the one who has to get everything right, which gets more complicated every week. It’s more than having my dog comfortable on the equipment — jumping hurdles, going through tunnels, etc. She has no problem with any of that. But I have to guide her from one station to the next, and the course changes from one time to the next (as it does in competition), so it matters a lot which side of a piece of equipment I’m on, how and when I get there, how and when I signal to her which one comes next, and how well I do getting into position myself so I’m not in her way or misleading her unintentionally, and every week Coach Mike adds a new twist to what I do, so this sport is exercising my mind as much as Sunny’s, if not more. 

"Mom, are you as smart as I am?"

When I made an appointment to have the garage in Leland replace a burned-out headlight, I texted a friend to see if she might be free for lunch or a walk. She voted for lunch, and we spent two leisurely hours at the Cove, leisurely time made possible by the fact that everyone else wanted to sit outside by the dam, while we chose to be indoors where we didn’t have to shout over the roar of falling water to make ourselves heard. 

 

Glad to see the pay phone still in Leland, carrying its freight of memories -- 

 

Before sleep and between first and second sleep, I read. 

I read and fall asleep, then wake again sometime in what my mother called “the wee hours,” turn the light back on, and read for a while more before “second sleep,” waking for good between 5 and 6 o’clock. My current bedtime reading is a novel set (at least Book I is set) in pre-Revolutionary America, the main character a boy ready, in his own eyes, to become a man but not keen on being sent away from home to a big city in the East to study Latin and “cyphering” with a man of the cloth. After yearning for home and parents, however, he finds on his first holiday that the folks of the pine woods are painfully dull and unsophisticated compared to the “quality” he has met in the city. I stopped at the end of Book I on Tuesday morning, leaving young Johnny to his ambivalence. 

 

So far, my strong impression from this novel is of a country – our own – born divided. As Johnny travels from inland pine forest to coastal city for his education, we see various faces of 1770s America: pious Methodists suspicious of “papists”; gamesters, drinkers, and teetotalers; hoi polloi and those who take themselves to be gentry; rich and poor whites; black slaves imported from Africa; Cherokee families pushed beyond the mountains by white trappers; loyalists to the crown, trigger-happy rebels, and thoughtful folks on both sides. The Revolution had not come by the end of Book I (Johnny’s father was convinced there would be no war), and yet many divisions among Americans already existed on the bases of family background, country of origin, religion, skin color, education level, and political allegiance. E pluribus unum seems an impossible dream. Some of us still hold onto that dream.

 

The quiet morning before dawn --

 

Summer stretches out for visitors, too.

 

Northport, Michigan

People are still discovering Northport for the very first time as we drift on a summery breeze into the second half of September. “What’s it like here in the winter?” is the perennial question, to which my tried-and-true answer is, “That depends on the year.” Whatever we get for winter this time around, though, apple season is here now. 

The new look of Leelanau apple orchards --

Apples and goldenrod, anemones and the eagerly seed-making marigolds and staghorn sumac, every growing thing making the most of these days that grow shorter week by week. We need rain, but it’s hard to argue with summer – even in September, when it comes. 

 

What Happened Before Labor Day?

For one thing, the bookstore cat acquired a name. I’ve had the cat for twenty years, a gift from one of my younger sisters, but no one had ever asked its name before. Now a little girl asked, and I had to admit I had never named the cat. I asked her if she would like to name it and what she thought would be a good name. Right away she said, “Kangaroo!” So now Kitty Kangaroo is second-in command store mascot – second, of course, to Sarah the dog, or, as one friend calls her (remembering when we first brought the puppy home and tried out different names), Sarah-Forever.

On Friday afternoon, September 4, the banner announcing Leelanau UnCaged went up across Waukazoo Street.

But the big last hurrah for the bookstore summer season was the September 3 evening event with Susan Gilbreath Lane and one of her three brothers, Steve Gilbreath of Northport. It is their great-grandfather’s journals, telling of his military experiences from 1861 (beginning in the Civil War) to 1898 that were recently published by the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago, as part of Pritzker’s “Citizen Soldier” series, as Dignity of Duty: Journals of Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, 1861-1898. The family did not even know of the existence of these journals until Susan found them, by chance, as she was doing genealogical research among her grandfather’s papers donated to the Detroit Public Library. One audience member summed up what Susan called her “dumb luck” in a memorable nutshell expression: “You hit the genealogical jackpot!”

And that’s not all. Not only did the family now have a record of thirty-seven years of their ancestor’s life, but Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, to the good fortune of all involved, was an educated and very lively writer, so that his eyewitness accounts of many famous battles and of life on the American frontier have a vivid immediacy for any reader. Here is a striking passage from early in the book, to give a flavor of Gilbreath’s writing style:

Night came upon the scene with a pale moon. Its silvery light seemed paler in light of the burning Congress. She burned slowly, and for hours the flames seemed to be playing with the huge vessel whose hull stood forth so massive and black. 

Now a tongue of flame would spring from her portholes and spin up the long ropes to the furled sails. A spar would fall or a sail unfurled by the fire would fall over the side on fire. Again a great tongue of flame would spring aloft as the deck burned through, or a burning mast would fall. And during all this mournful conflagration, as all the guns were shotted, the fire would ignite the charge and some gun would fire sending a ball up or down the river. So slowly and almost regularly did these explosions occur that they seemed like signals of distress or that the noble vessel was firing her own death knell.

Susan told the story of finding the journals and how they came to be published by Pritzker, and then she and Steve took turns reading short passages. There were questions from the audience before we adjourned to give Susan, who edited her great-grandfather’s journals, a chance to sign books for purchasers.

Steve and Lauran Gilbreath have been Northport residents for 22 years. The morning following the bookstore event, Susan Lane and her husband closed on a house of their own in Leelanau Township. What a wonderful way to wrap up an event-filled bookstore summer! Dog Ears Books truly is Leelanau Township’s local bookstore!

What a summer! Thank you to all our loyal bookstore customers for making our events successful!

Life in My Book-Lined World

The Adams Family

Any reading life is marked from time to time by unexpected coincidence. I have been reading The Adams Family, by James Truslow Adams (no relation to the others, he says), published in 1930. The book deals with four generations: John Adams, b. 1740, one of America’s Founding Fathers and second President of the United States; his son, John Quincy Adams, b. 1768, our sixth president; JQ's son, Charles Francis Adams, b. 1886, U.S. Minister to England under Lincoln; and finally Henry Adams, who, unlike the three generations before him, never really seemed to “find himself” but who did write The Education of Henry Adams, not at all the book one might expect from its dry title and deserving of its place on Modern Library’s Top 100 books list. 

The descriptions of the first two generations of Adamses (I’m almost more than halfway through the JTA book), both as they describe themselves and as the author and others describe them, are frank and occasionally startling. John was generally seen as jealous and vain, mistrustful to the point of near-paranoia. John Quincy, a skilled diplomat (a quality that did not come down to him from his father), was nevertheless cold, overbearing and harsh. But as much as the personalities of John and John Quincy, I have been fascinated by the picture of American politics during the Revolutionary Period and the first decades of the new country.

Well, now (this is the coincidence) I pick up the current New York Review of Books (June 5, 2014) and find reviewed three new books on the Adams family, one on John Quincy and two focused on his wife, the first a biography, the second her own writings. The last of the three I will definitely have to read!

Not the Book I Expected

Impatiently as I awaited Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit, I admit that I anticipated a funnier book. The first, the title essay, is as funny entertaining now as when I read it online (and David laughed aloud when I read it to him), but the second chapter essay is all about violence against women, worldwide, from rape to murder. Very serious, very well done – not what I’d expected at all, but I couldn’t put the book down without reading it cover to cover. The essay (the chapters are essays, written at different times and collected in this book for the first time) on Virginia Woolf was particularly insightful, lovely and haunting. And “Grandmother Spider”! Well, you know I would be taken by the image of hanging laundry on the line:

To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your own fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

So now I am recommending Men Explain Things to Me and looking forward to reading other books by Rebecca Solnit.

Notes and Reminders

As for Ice Caves of Leelanau, I should note here that every copy I have on hand is spoken for (I won’t have more until July) and I’m not taking any more names for reservations (for fear of having more reservations than books and because I really need to have a few books available for people who walk in the door asking for them), but I have many other wonderful, beautiful, fascinating books worth attention and deserving homes! An entire bookstore full of them!

Also, please don’t forget that Dog Ears will be celebrating its 21^st birthday three weeks early (so as not to conflict with the 4^th of July), on Friday, June 13, with readings by eleven poets from the beautiful new Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry book from New Issues Poetry & Prose in Kalamazoo. Michigan art and poetry in gorgeous anthology published in Michigan – this one is a lifetime keeper, for sure.

Confession (or Resolution, or Warning)

I am carrying out a plan this season to be more selfish. As a child, I was tagged the "selfish one" of the three (I was also the oldest), but in my adult struggle to overcome that quality, I sometimes feel I've gone too far. My business -- and you know I love my bookshop! -- doesn't give me much time off in the summer, and summer (the Up North reward for surviving winter) is also the time when social engagements and yard chores also kick into high gear. So I'm taking a stand: no more summer meetings for me. I have to draw a line somewhere, and that's where I'm drawing it. No more meetings! It's more important for me to set aside time to draw something besides lines....