Theory and Practice of Life

Crabbing upcurrent some evenings [walking in the river], feeling the force of the water on my legs and a night breeze in my face, I often think of myself as passing the house offshore. Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking through, a theory of rivers, of trees, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening in the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying up with a staff, the practice of wood.

 

-      Barry Lopez, “The Whaleboat,” in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

 

Carried away as I had been and still was by the writing, I felt a shock of recognition (a happy shock) when I came upon these lines in the Barry Lopez essay. This must be, I thought, the seed that Jim Harrison found and nurtured into a tree, his poem “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” and then into the forest of his collection carrying the same name. Jim himself was a walker of rivers—the Sucker River that flowed by his U.P. cabin, the Santa Cruz (or was it a tributary?) outside the place he and Linda lived in Patagonia, Arizona, and others I don’t know at all in Montana. Somehow I feel closer to Barry Lopez through this bridge Jim built between us, and of course the Artist is there, too, with us, as one of the Artist's images along with a stanza from Jim's river poem appeared on the poster and wine label from the 1991 vendange Leelanau Cellars called Vis-à-Vis. 

(The Artist and I walked the Crystal River many times....)

 

***

 

But now, breaking news, sent by a friend in Tucson: There is a new threat to the Santa Cruz River, in the form of a 30-ft.- tall stretch of new border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, 25 miles of it, through the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley, where cameras placed along that section of the border have recorded an average of five pedestrian crossings a month, including Border Patrol agents, hunters, and hikers. Estimates are that there is one illegal border crossing in the area every 20 months.

 

Read those numbers again. Now once more. 

 

An article in the Arizona Daily Star by Emily Bregel reports that conservationists forecast “devastating” effects for migrating animals, along with a disruption of the hydrology of the Santa Cruz River. “‘Wall construction will bulldoze into a steep cliffside at the [Coronado National] memorial, which already acts as a natural barrier,’ said Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager for the Sky Island Alliance. ‘The cliff where they're going to place new wall will be twice as tall as the wall itself,’ he said. ‘It really highlights how disconnected from logic this wall is.’”

 

Some pork barrel projects are simply a waste of money. This one qualifies on that count: “The $309 million contract for the border-wall project went to Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota-based company with a record of thousands of environmental violations and legal problems including a 2019 lawsuit, filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging poor workmanship on a 3.5-mile border-wall segment in Texas, which was privately funded by Trump supporters.”

 

But other kinds of pork barrel—and this one qualifies also on the second count—seem calculated not only to make money for a private construction company but also to set the stage for environmental tragedy and, no doubt intentionally, to spit in the faces of those who care.

 

In sum, the current U.S. administration has given a $309 million contract to a company with a record number of violations and lawsuits against it to build an environmentally destructive, unnecessary wall, accomplishing nothing of value. Hello, DOGE? Anyone home?

 

Oh, rivers, rivers! How the human race continues to desecrate you!

 

***

 

Back to my little corner of the world --  

 

(Not its permanent location)

The Artist and I moved from Leland out to our Leelanau Township farmhouse 24 years ago, and only now, inspired by having grandson Jack and his crew camping here recently, have I finally taken the plunge and gotten a fire ring for the yard. Sunny and I did not have our agility session this morning, due to rain and wet grass, so a trip to the hardware store fit in nicely, and I was also able to score some jar lids for the next round of rhubarb chutney, having made the first batch on Sunday.

 

My bedside reading stacks had gotten out of control, so it was good to finish three books in the last couple of days—Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, a mesmerizing post-Katrina true story; The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner, a reality check for all would-be published authors; and, finally, the book of Barry Lopez essays quoted at the beginning of this post. I had gotten about 1/3 of the way through a biography of Judge Learned Hand before other books tempted me away from it. Will I ever read all of To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, by Edmund Wilson? Fascinating as it is, I find myself skipping around in the chapters…. And then there is Wilma Dykeman’s The French Broad from the “Rivers of America” series. I’ve only just begun that one and should really not have started it, with the others still waiting to be finished, but—no reading rules in my life! Taking classes, required reading, even teaching are all behind me now, and I can browse the endless buffet to my heart’s desire.

 

It's almost the 4^th of July! And the day after the 4^th (the 5^th, right?) is the annual Friends of Leelanau Township Library book sale in Northport, beginning at 9 a.m. Last year I was so busy and had so much on my mind that I completely forgot the sale, and the organizers were exclaiming to each other over my absence, as I am one of their best customers every year (if not the best). In the coming week the FOLTL summer author series kicks off with Karen Mulvahill and her historical novel, The Lost Woman, on Tuesday evening. I’ve taken a picture of the poster, since I didn’t see the list on the FOLTL website:

Planning an August bookstore guest

And sometime in August I’ll have as my bookstore guest author Tim Mulherin. (Note to self: We really need to set a date for that!) Tim’s book, The Magnetic North, addresses the idea that, as I put it, “Everyone wants to be here!” If you grew up in Leelanau County, do you regard newcomers as an invading force or grist for your make-a-living mill? If you’ve been coming up for summers all your life, are you dismayed or heartened by changes you see? Maybe you have just “discovered” Leelanau (I know it feels like that to a lot of people, some of whom have never been in Michigan before) and dream about living here someday. We are not the only area in the country experiencing growing pains, either, so Tim’s exploration of the issues will be of interest to just about everyone.

 

Before leaving the subject of books, I’ll mention that I’ve started carrying a few bilingual board books for little ones. So far I have English-French and English-Spanish but will look into other languages if anyone is interested. 

Now, breaking news, local—and good!

 

Saw this sign when I walked by today! Hooray!

More ice cream! Now there is Buster’s on Nagonaba, Barb’s Bakery on Mill Street for frozen custard, and Deep’s at the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba for your Moomer’s fix!

I wrote a four-page letter to a friend this morning, and almost all of it was about trees and wildflowers, appearances and disappearances of same in my little world. Will the purple coneflowers that failed to show up last year get back to me this summer? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m enjoying every blooming thing in its time. 

 

Lately, the letters I write are less and less like chatty “newsletters” and more and more like rambling meditations, occasionally on a single theme. Do you ever read collections of some famous person’s letters? If you do, what interests you most in them? Their daily activities, family and social interactions, their reflections on contemporary events, or something else entirely? What do you most appreciate and enjoy in a letter you receive in the mail?

It occurred to me this morning that I may never write a book for publication—my doing so isn’t unthinkable, but neither is it highly probable after so many decades—and so my writing is of a very ephemeral nature, mostly letters and blog posts. Ephemeral and unremunerative, not to put too fine a point on it. But that takes a lot of pressure off. Metaphorically, I am scrawling messages and corking them up in bottles flung out onto the waves, in hopes someone will be entertained or someone's heart warmed, if only briefly. Sending a letter says, I hope, “I’ve been thinking of you. You were on my mind. Wish we could sit together in the shade and visit in person. If we could, here is some of what I would have to say.” Of course, if my friend were here, there would be no telling where our conversation would go. Even a reply to a letter isn’t always a response but the correspondent’s own rambling thoughts shared in turn. And that’s just fine! 

 

Last thought for the day: One of my recent customers thanked me for having the Ukranian flag in the window, telling me he was born and raised in Ukraine and showing me his tattoo (you can read about the symbol here), which he allowed me to photograph. Here is a statement today from Johann Walter David Rudolf "Jo" Wadephul , member of the German parliament and current Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, pledging European support to Ukraine. Why? Because all men are brothers. And because theory of freedom is nothing without practice. Will we Americans hold onto our freedom? That remains to be seen.

Allow Me to Recommend a Book For Your Consideration

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don’t judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other…. 

- Valerie Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

As a bookseller myself, I am perhaps oddly cautious about recommending books. I absolutely never tell anyone they should or, worse — God forbid! must read something, but my reticence goes further than that. Even when directly asked for to make a recommendation, I counter gently with a general question of my own, such as, “What kind of books do you like to read?” Because there’s no point in recommending a tome on history or economics to someone looking for light fiction or vice versa. And I cannot think of a single book, no matter how extraordinarily wonderful, that would do as a recommendation for anyone and everyone. Often I’ll go so far as to say that I enjoyed or even loved a particular book and to suggest that the person looking for something to read might also enjoy or even love it because..., giving a few of my reasons, which might or not be reasons for that other person, but I never insist. There is no better way, I believe, to put someone off a book by trying to trap or shame them into reading it. Years ago, a man visiting my bookstore who learned I had not, at that time, yet read Kristin Lavransdatter told me, in these very words, actually (I kid you not!) shaking his finger as he scolded, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Rather than rushing to mend this fault in my character, I avoided reading the book for years, seeing that horrible man’s scolding face whenever the title came up in conversation or a copy of the novel came, briefly, into my hands. 

No, no, there are books I wish more people would read, but I refuse to present reading them as a duty.

I will, however, if asked — and occasionally without being asked, as I do in today’s post — recommend a book for someone’s consideration on the basis of my own fascination with it. So if your interests and reading tastes and preferences are similar to mine, you might be moved to try it, and if it’s not up your alley at all, for whatever reason, you’ve saved time by finding that out, too. Although I’m not sure, now that I think about that…. Maybe if it sounds like something you wouldn’t care for, I’ve somehow misrepresented it? I certainly hope that won’t be the case today!

…We order four hamburgers and four pink lemonades and spread our map out on the table while we wait for the food. We follow yellow and red highway lines with the tips of our index fingers, like a troupe of gypsies reading an enormous open palm. We look into our past and future: a departure, a change, long life, short life, hard circumstances, here you will head south, here you will encounter doubt and uncertainty, a crossroads ahead.

Brief digression: Years ago I sat at a table in a bar with a group of other graduate students in philosophy, and one of the group, a student from another country (the young man from Spain or Otto from Finland?) asked innocently, of a song playing on the jukebox just then, what "City of New Orleans" was about. Well, ask eight philosophers what anything in this world is about and prepare yourself for a perfect storm of disputation! 

I think of that evening and the philosophical discussion that ensued because Lost Children Archive could be characterized in so many ways. In the most basic and simple sense, it is the story of a road trip, as a couple married for four years, his young son, and her even younger daughter set out on a cross-country road trip from New York to the American Southwest. They travel first in a southerly direction, then in South Carolina begin their westward trek. Their progress is unhurried, as they take time to sight-see along the way. In the car they listen to audiobooks and music but always remain attuned to towns and landscapes they are passing through, parts of the country they have never seen before. Road trip. That’s the simplest, shortest way to describe the book.

Of course, there’s much, much more to it.

Right at the beginning we learn that the man and woman share an unusual career. She is a sound “documentarian” (her word), he a “documentarist” (his word). Both record and assemble documentary soundscapes. They first met on a project in New York, where their assignment was to go about the city and record as many of the world’s spoken languages as they could find. The different names they give to what they do, however, indicate differences in both background experience and what kind of projects they want to take on in the future, differences that put their future as a couple in doubt. Will they remain together or part to go in different directions? That is one of the relationship questions posed by the novel.

At Chiricahua National Monument

Their travel destination is one the man has chosen for a new project he has conceived on “echoes” of the Apaches who lived in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona, and the woman has realized that she can expand new work she began with immigrant children in New York to an exploration of the situation of undocumented children along the border with Mexico. In that way, their separate projects can be pursued in parallel, at least for a while, once the family reaches the Southwest. As they makes its way toward what they mistakenly believe to be Fort Still, Oklahoma — learning of their error only when they arrive, which seems strange, because wouldn’t they have seen it written as Fort Sill on their maps? Yet we often see what we expect to see rather than what is before our eyes — the woman begins to see a way in which the separate projects may actually overlap, at least for her. As the man tells the children about the Indian Removal Act,

I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word “removal” is still used today as a euphemism for “deportation.” I read somewhere, though I don’t remember where, that removal is to deportation what sex is to rape. When an “illegal” immigrant is deported nowadays, he or she is, in written history, “removed.” I take my recorder from the glove compartment and start recording my husband, without him or anyone noticing. His stories are not directly linked to the piece I’m working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present. 

art on border wall at Douglas, AZ

And so, the novel is also about American history and American current events, Apache history, history of the Western frontier (and the myth of the frontier and the vanished frontier), about U.S.-Mexican history, the current situation on the border, immigration, and more. With makers of sound documentaries at its center, documents and documentation and archives form another general theme of the book, specific needed documents also being what the immigrant children, at risk of being “removed,” too often lack. And it is about what makes families and what holds them together. There are also two very specific "lost children," two girls, undocumented, that the woman has been asked by their mother to look for in New Mexico or Arizona. 

The main characters are referred to simply as “the man,” “the woman,” “the boy,” and “the girl” throughout the novel. We are never given their names. The woman tells the story -- thus we have more physical descriptions of the other three, more of the woman’s thoughts as they travel -- but we see and hear them all as they interact. The boy, ten years old, is learning to use a camera, undertaking his own documentation of their trip. The five-year-old girl, full of life, brings a fresh perspective to many moments. [Later note: Halfway through the book, the boy takes over for a while as narrator, and later still voices mingle, in ways and for reasons I leave you to discover for yourself.]

All this “about” talk, though, tells you nothing of the spellbinding narrator’s voice. Indeed, it tells you nothing of the spell cast by the the story of the trip itself, deepening with every mile as we learn more of what has brought these people to where they are and what propels them forward into their uncertain future, as we share their experiences along the road. 

For a reader without deep concerns about immigration or border security or lost children (though I ask myself, who could that reader possibly be?), Luiselli’s novel can/could be read for the innovative and yet somehow timeless beauty of the writing. That would be reading at the level of enjoyment. Deeper still, one can read the story (as I’m sure most will) for both its contemporary and historical context. 

Finally, then, a personal note, one that comes very early on in the novel:

Finally, one night, my husband spread the big map out on our bed and called the children and me into our room. He swiped the tip of his index finger from New York all the way down to Arizona, and then tapped twice on a point, a tiny dot in the southeastern corner of the state. He said:

Here. 

Here, what? the boy asked.

Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, he said.

And? the boy asked.

And that is the heart of Apacheria, he answered.

There it is, you see, for me. It all comes together for me, as it seems to be coming together (I am as yet not halfway through the novel) for the woman telling the story: the Chiricahuas (Echo Canyon), the Dos Cabezas, the Dragoons (Cochise Stronghold); Cochise and Geronimo and Lozen and U.S. policy with Native Americans from the beginning of our country's history; the U.S. border with Mexico; immigration and immigrants without documents and the lost immigrant children; where we’ve been as a nation, where we are now, and where we’re going; the sights and sounds and roads and small towns and big cities across this land. It’s all here. It’s all in this book.

north of border

south of border

You might want to think about reading Lost Children Archive. If you love it only half as much as I do, it will be well worth your time.

July 1 postscript: The only part of the book that really bothered me was reading about Cochise being buried at Fort Sill. He wasn't. His grave is not there and never was. Cochise died in Arizona and was buried somewhere in the Stronghold, by Apaches, in an unmarked grave. When the fictional family in the book is on the road, on their way west, they think they are going to Fort Still — they have the name wrong — and that took me aback, but it’s their mistake, and when they see the sign they realize their error, so I kept thinking they would correct the part about where Cochise was buried, too, but apparently the author is the one who misinformed her characters on that score. Did she visit Fort Sill? I’d say not. There is so much Apache history in the book, how did she miss the fact that Cochise died before Geronimo and the others were “relocated” by train to Florida? In biographical/historical terms, it’s a serious error. In literary terms, in terms of the length of a book’s life span, maybe it doesn’t matter quite as much. Who am I to say? Historians, as well as living descendants of Cochise today, cannot have the viewpoint of possible heirs of world literature centuries in the future — if civilization lasts that long.

The thing is, I haven't even begun to describe for you the lyrical beauty and the interweaving of life, literature, and documentation that make this book worth your consideration. Please give it a try!

Kitchens, Morning Coffee, and a Bit More

Stepping back into my Paris kitchen in our old northern Michigan farmhouse after several months far away was no big adjustment, any more than had been walking back into the one-room ghost town cabin in mid-December. Neither place is fancy or glamorous, which is probably why both feel like home. And that is how they are alike, but in other ways they are very different. 

My little kitchen in Michigan is a small galley, what one of my family members calls a “one-butt kitchen,”  which is why I began calling it a Paris kitchen in the first place. (Space is at a premium in Paris.) A second person can squeeze in, but it is difficult then for either person to move and work freely. — Well, moving and working are difficult, moving and working freely impossible. 

In the ghost town kitchen, there are steps to take across open space between stove and counter, sink and refrigerator. In my (Michigan) Paris kitchen, standing at one counter, I turn turn 180 degrees to face the sink, turn back and take a single step to the stove, and stretch an arm out to open the refrigerator. Only high shelves are a challenge. Everything else is within reach. 

In the ghost town cabin, as in Michigan, I was often up before dark or, when spring arrived, at least by first light. Both places, my morning begins with making coffee. 

This morning, for some reason, I thought of long-ago mornings in Paris, France, waking to the cooing and fluttering of pigeons, clink of spoons against china, and sounds of French conversation and singing through the open windows. That was in May, and I am now in May here, in northern Michigan. Is that what reminded me of the rue de Vaugirard and dear Hélène, the landlady who became a cherished friend? She, I remember now, made only instant coffee. (Does that seem strange?) Red wine she bought in bulk and kept a bottle filled for me on my shelf in her refrigerator. Her kitchen was somewhat larger than mine here in the farmhouse, but it was not large enough for a table, and our eating and drinking was all done in the apartment’s largest room, a combination parlor/dining room, the walls crowded with crowded bookshelves and an eclectic assortment of art work, courtyard window sill lined with herbs in pots. 

The largest kitchen I have ever had was in my graduate student apartment in Champaign, Illinois. It was an old sleeping porch on the third floor of an enormous Victorian house at the opposite end of a large city park from the downtown shopping district. Once a month, on the day I got my graduate assistant paycheck, I would get off the bus downtown and treat myself to fresh flowers from a little jewel of a florist shop (much like similar shops in Paris, France), next picking up a baguette from an Italian restaurant and bakery on my walk home, cutting through the park. My sleeping porch kitchen was enormous and filled with light. Also, and despite its generous size, because it was on the third floor and there were mature trees right outside the window, it felt like living in a treehouse.

I was alone then, without even a dog until — but that is another story. My point is that, living alone in Champaign, a single pot of French press coffee was enough to get my day started. Later in the morning, out in the world, near campus, I could stop in at a coffee house (say, the Daily Grind) or, toward the end of the long pay period when funds were running low, the basement cafeteria of the Newman Center. All that was a lifetime ago. Two dogs ago.

The ghost town coffee maker, one we bought new in early 2018, made the first pot of the morning quickly. During its operation I had time for a routine of yoga stretches but never enough time to become impatient.

Here in Michigan, in my little Paris kitchen, our equally modern but aging coffee maker takes its sweet time, even after a day-long ritual cleaning. Sometimes, not wanting to wait for the glass to fill, I pull it out ahead of time and pour a premature cup — always too strong, but the addition of hot milk makes it café au lait, thus more palatable. This morning another idea occurs to me, however, and I hunt through cupboards until I find a pair of seldom-used espresso cups and saucers.  

Yesterday I came to the last page of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, beginning at bedtime a Swedish novel recommended by a friend, Bear Town, by Fredrik Backman. I am generally careful what I choose to read before sleep, and so I saved for morning another book brought by another friend, a book of nonfiction by poet Carolyn Forché entitled What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, a story of modern-day El Salvador. That story begins with one I have heard before: the seizure of indigenous people’s lands for the cultivation of cash crops, profits reaped by the cultural thieves. In this case, the first such crops were indigo and sugar cane, as the campesinos were pushed up into the mountains. Then came the realization that the mountain slopes were perfect for coffee plantations. 

I get up and go to the freezer to look at the bag of coffee beans. The contents are claimed to be “eco-friendly,” but I see no mention of here of “fair trade,” and I remember that when my sister gave me the bag (we were visiting sister and brother-in-law on our way back to Michigan), she commented that it wasn’t what she usually buys. I remember too a piece in the latest New York Review of Books discussing slavery in the United States and quoting William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote that slavery was “not a southern, but a national institution, involving the North as well as the South,” and I recall one of my guest authors in the 2018 Thursday Evening Author series at my bookstore, Rachel May, the woman who wrote American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery, who came on her own to the same conclusion as she researched a piece of material culture. 

My original review of Rachel May’s book is here. One of the questions I note that May asked was how we, the United States, came to be where we are today, in terms of race relations. I think of that this morning because Carolyn Forché’s book seeks to answer, among other questions, how we Americans came to be where we are today in relation to Latin America, especially Central America. We cannot understand why so many refugees are streaming north to our borders without realizing what they are fleeing — and if we understand the role of our own government in creating the intolerable situations in their native countries, we cannot help feeling as responsible for their lives as we feel for the lives of our fellow United States citizens. 

When a Salvadoran man with two young daughters showed up at her door and said he had come because she was a poet, Forché had no idea that a few days later he would invite her to spend her poetry fellowship time and money by coming to spend time in his country. He said that war was coming to El Salvador and it was her chance to see something like Vietnam from the very beginning. Besides, he asked, what else did she have in mind? “Write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life?” 

What are we going to do for the rest of our days on earth? What are we going to challenge ourselves to learn, and how might what we learn change our lives? It takes courage to learn and even more courage to change. I am not unmindful of the strong coffee that accompanies my reading this morning. I’m thinking of this year’s garden, also, and wondering how it would go if I dropped seeds of corn, beans, and squash into little hills surrounded by straw mulch from last year’s gale garden — a natural thought, given my morning’s reading. 

New Beginnings?

Hoppin' john, collard greens, cheesy biscuits

January 1-2, 2019

Dos Cabezas

When you think about it, the idea of a ‘beginning’ to anything is strange. I wrote those words out long-hand on a pad of yellow-lined paper on the morning of January 1st, but they were really (as I also wrote) a continuation of what had begun on my laptop screen two weeks previously as “Desert Diary,” and that was only picking up again a record of descriptions and thoughts written last winter and three years before in blog posts and letters to family and friends.

Cabin from wash on snowy New Year's Day

Was 2015, then, the beginning of all this writing and of my love for mountains and high desert? If so, why did my heart leap up when the owner of our cabin first told us about it, uttering the words “high desert,” “open range,” “ghost town,” words that thrilled me even then? 

Sarah & fence

I’d never longed to see Arizona — it wasn’t a dream for me, like the dream of seeing Paris — but the truth is that I had always, as a young, horse-crazy girl, dreamed of going West, dreamed of the West from the front porch (west-facing) of our family home on the Illinois prairie as I gazed over and past the cornfields across the road and imagined myself on horseback, riding beyond those prosaic fields, into the sunset. Out under — at last! — black skies pricked by innumerable stars, far from any city or suburb. As it always had and perhaps still does to Europeans, “the West” represented freedom to the child I was, fenced about by social rules and expectations. “No running in the house!” Could they not see that I was not running but galloping? That I was not a child but a wild horse? As I galloped, indoors or out, or dreamed on the front porch, gazing across cultivated fields, I imagined boundless wilderness, open and challenging. There were pictures in my head from television cowboy shows, but there were no sheriffs or bandits or range wars in my fantasy. I had no wish to conquer anything or anyone, only to be there, to “breathe free,” and test myself, not against adults or other children or social mores or any arbitrary will or rule, but against natural reality, harsh though it might be.

[Sidebar: Some, I know, will immediately want to compare my girlhood dreams to those of a boy, so I’ll pause here to say that I am not interested at all in that comparison. Men, usually the ones to raise the comparison questions, can only speculate about how their youthful experiences compare to what they can only imagine were those of someone now a woman. They cannot truly compare, as the only experiences they had were their own. And the only experiences I had were mine, so I cannot compare, either, but comparison is not what I’m about. I am only describing my dreams, and I can say definitely that I did not dream of surviving a Western wilderness as a girl, only of meeting the challenges of nature. Perhaps a boy’s dreams center more on becoming a man. Perhaps their dreams are more gendered. I don’t know. I suspect there are as many differences among boys’ dreams as there are among the dreams of girls, but I find questions of gender when they intrude on my experiences with the natural world, whether actual or imaginary, annoying and unwelcome, because part of what I sought to escape in my childhood imagination was just such restricting social norms.]

Back to the more interesting (to me) question of beginnings, though. Did the feelings I now have for my winter Arizona surroundings begin with a child’s dreams as that child gazed across an Illinois cornfield, imagination ablaze with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and company? Or was the beginning further in the past, when my parents attended their first rodeo out in South Dakota while I was still in my mother’s womb? South Dakota, my birthplace and scene of my conception — would such a place not mark a child with an invisible brand, not to be erased by subsequent moves and homes? Or do I go beyond reason with such a question?

On New Year’s Eve I opened a new book that I took up again in the morning, as the new year officially began. A gift from friends who were here in the cabin for six weeks before our arrival and the most appropriate possible reading for me, here, as we usher out the old and welcome in the new far from northern Michigan, the book is Drum Hadley’s Voice of the Borderlands, poetry of his cowboyin’ experience along la frontera, the mountains and high desert of Sonora, Mexico, and Cochise County, Arizona. Names of familiar places recur in narrative vignettes: Sulphur Springs Valley, Willcox Livestock Auction, Agua Prieta, and there are mentions also of places I know only from maps, such as Guadalupe and Antelope Wells. I finished the first section, “Cowboys and Horses,” with great satisfaction as the new year began and the first snow of 2019 fell on Dos Cabezas. On the morning of January 2nd, we are under a winter storm warning still, with accumulations of eight inches possible at elevations above 5,000 feet (that’s us) and temperatures not to rise above the freezing mark until Thursday.

Beginnings, endings. Human beings designate moments, days, years as such, but are those designations anything more than mileposts we drive into time as a way to organize our stories?