Look Near, Look Far

That green pointillist flush I love!

Season’s Progress

Orchard buds on 5 May 2026

Cherry blossoms in the orchard around my house have yet to appear (still in bud), though young orchard trees out on Stony Point, on the bay side of the peninsula, were in blossom for Mothers Day, and the big black cherry trees (a forest hardwood) are blooming, too. The season is advancing, albeit by fits and starts, with overnight temperatures below freezing.  I harvested enough fiddlehead ferns to accompany two meals last week. 

Black cherry at the edge of the woods

Looking up through its crown

Blossom cluster

In Traverse City, the decorative pear trees are radiant in the sunshine. Is there a danger, though, in having planted the city streets with so many of one tree variety? What if a pest were to strike that landscaped monoculture? I looked online for an answer and discovered an even more alarming possibility: This variety of ornamental pear is now considered invasive because, while sterile itself, it can cross-fertilize with other varieties and produce thorns monstrous enough to puncture tractor tires! It also has hazardous weaknesses due to its branching habit, and some states have already outlawed their sale. Don't plant them in your yard! 

Look beyond looks!

If Traverse City follows other cities in eliminating this tree (which seems like a good plan), I hope they will do it on a gradual basis and replace the pears with two or three different kinds of trees, maybe redbud and dogwood and something else. Suggestions? 

Changing the subject: Isn't my hellebore beautiful?

What Makes a Good Book Review or Reviewer?

I hate to say it, but I can’t help concluding, after reading a raft of online amateur book reviews (I am tempted to put “reviews” in scare quotes, like so), that there are a lot of very lazy readers in our country who should not be claiming to be reviewers. Or maybe they are simply reading books that are not right for them. After I finished reading what struck me as a brilliant first novel, curious to see what others had thought about it, I looked for reviews, and three particular criticisms that I discounted as inappropriate stood out, each made by more than one person. I have condensed to give composite comments, so the following are not quoted directly: 

(1) There are too many new novels set in World War II. Here's another one. Yawn!

(2) If you don’t know Paris, you’ll be lost in this book. It's probably okay for people who know Paris, but for me? Yawn! 

(3) The action and time jumped around in a confusing way. I'm outta here!

Here is my first round of responses:

(1) Are there too many boy-meets-girl novels? Too many novels about American family life? The question isn’t the number of novels available on any given subject, but their quality and how worthy they are of readers’ time. 

(2) I know Paris pretty well, but I’ve never visited Salinas or San Francisco or Brooklyn, let alone Moscow or Mumbai or anywhere on the African or Asian or South American continent. I’ve never anywhere near Australia. And yet I have read avidly novels set in all these locales, as well as stories set in earlier centuries in America and Europe (despite my inability to travel through time except in imagination and, therefore, in books). For those of us without the means to afford constant world travel, books give us wings! In fact, I learned Paris from books long before I ever set foot in its streets, just as I recognized my first sandhill crane from having seen it pictured in bird field guides. 

(3) Fiction with multiple narrators and nonsequential time sequences has become a norm in Western fiction, from YA titles to the most abstruse literary works. At times it is confusing, and when I’m reading a book written that way it often takes me 20 or 30 pages to get into the rhythm, but seldom does the difficulty persist, and in the case of this particular novel italics that set off the ghost character's viewpoint help a lot.

And here is round 2: 

(4) If you’re tired of WWII novels or only want to read books set in geography you know well, don’t read such books! Skip them entirely, or if you find one in your hands and can’t get into it, at least don’t foist your dismissive opinion off as a “review.” If you don’t want to travel, stay home rather than go to another country and complain because it isn't like home.

(5) There is nothing wrong with preferring a simple, linear, chronological narrative, either, but readers don’t need opinions on novels structured otherwise by people who object to alternative structures. You can find plenty of books written with your preferences in mind. There is fiction for every taste. Read with your preferences in mind and review those books. You will find some successful and others disappointing, and that’s as it should be. 

(6) We all have limitations. I would not presume to review books of fantasy or science fiction, because those are genres that don’t speak to me. They never have. I get bored, and my mind wanders. People who love sci-fi and fantasy and have a strong reading background in the field apply quality standards to their reviews that I could never hope to achieve. So I’m not dissing anyone for their reading choices. All I’m saying is I don’t see the point in someone purporting to review a book she couldn’t begin appreciate and, in many cases, didn’t even finish.

Okay, that’s my opinion as a reader, bookseller, and occasional book reviewer. I don’t expect it to change a single mind or alter anyone’s practice—people will keep doing what they want to do—but I wanted to put it out there. Agree—or disagree?

I highly recommend this brilliant first novel!

You may have read other novels set in Paris during World War II, but no two are alike, and this one (as does Karen Mulvahill's The Lost Woman) shows how very particular chance events in one era continue to reverberate and affect individuals and families in following years. Also, the prose is enchanting! 

Don't miss the cowslips. They are blooming now.

Day By Day

A new day dawns...

My “New Normal” Life

 

There were a couple of big songs with the title "Day By Day," very different in nature. Sarah Vaughn sings the first one, a love song, here. For the song from “Godspell,” sung by the Fifth Dimension, visit this video. 

 

My own “day by day” life is something else right now: the challenge of another 24 hours without the love of my life but with a challenging little puppy for a companion. If I’d been offered the trade – cute as the puppy is -- I would not have taken it. This is, however, what life has given me, and having Sunny Juliet as companion is better than being all alone. Also, everything is beautiful these days in Leelanau County, orchards full of bloom along nearly every road. “We live in a beautiful place,” the Artist so often remarked. I mustn’t lose sight of that truth.

 

When SJ and I arrived home from our cross-country odyssey a week ago Saturday, and she was introduced to her Michigan house and yard for the first time, the air felt like June, at least. It cooled down to an April kind of evening, but those first spring days back in Leelanau were followed by others that felt way too much like summer. “If May is this warm, what will July be like?” everyone wondered. Kind of worrying.

 

Then my puppy didn’t feel well the following weekend. (Of course, the weekend! When the vet’s office was closed!) Her little head and tummy felt unnaturally warm, feverish. She was lethargic and had no appetite. That was very worrying! Her behavior and demeanor were so unlike her that I yearned for her usual maddening naughtiness. Please, let my puppy not be sick!

Not herself

Monday I took her to see the vet, and by that evening, after IV fluids and antibiotics, she was ready for a good dinner. The furnace came on that night, also, and Tuesday morning was so chilly I had to layer up to go outside, with Sunny so much herself again that I could hardly get my socks on, what with her wanting to make a game out of pulling them off my feet before they were all the way on. Cool weather, challenging puppy. Back to normal. 

"Mine!" She has recovered!

And so we go forward, Sunny and I, day by day. 

...and comes to an end.

 

My Recent Reading

 

Last night I finally finished a nonfiction I began reading while still out in Cochise County, Arizona. The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, by Katherine Ashenburg, was inspired by research she undertook after her daughter’s fiancé was killed in a road accident, so that, instead of the wedding she had been planning, Hannah found herself participating in a funeral for the young man she had planned to marry. Ashenburg reviews mourning customs around the world and historically in Western culture but comes back again and again to mourning rituals that Hannah devised for herself, since in today’s United States there are no universally prescribed and accepted forms. 

 

At first, I was interested in how naturally Hannah’s homegrown practices had welled up in her, and how similar they were to age-old ways. More and more, as I thought about mourning customs, many of them made psychological sense to me. 

 

This is an unusual book, both personal and general survey, but the two aspects join well. For example, in the chapter entitled “Sad Clothes,” a history of mourning dress (with Queen Victoria centrally featured), the author reports that she asked her daughter --

 

…if she wished she lived in a world where she could wear a universally understood mourning sytmbol, like an armband, and she said simply, “I would love that.” …Other mourners corroborate Hannah’s feeling. A few months after her father died, the writer Barbara Gowdy was walking down the street, missing him. A stranger in the opposite direction took note of her woebegone face and jokingly ordered, “Smile!” Months later, she was still angry as she remembered the episode: “That never would have happened if I had been able to show by my clothes that I was in mourning.”

 

Hannah’s personal mourning garb was a “vivid orange vest made of padded parachute silk,” a Christmas gift from her fiancé. My own widow’s weeds are an old, faded t-shirt of the Artist’s, and I also wear his watch and, almost every day, with jeans, one of his belts. 

The author mentions more than once that during gatherings of mourners, Hannah was offended by social conversations having nothing to do with Scott, her deceased fiancé. It is all too true that "life goes on" and that people have many personal concerns of their own besides the loss of a friend or acquaintance. But grief is unavoidably self-centered. Regardless of how many friends and relatives I lost prior to losing the love of my life, with the loss of him I felt like -- knowing full well that it was not at all the case -- the first widow in the world and the most deeply bereaved lover of all time. So when someone says helplessly, "I don't know what to say," I am not offended in the least; when they utter stock phrases, such as "I'm sorry for your loss," I appreciate the effort; and any time someone has a story or a personal reflection on my husband to share with me, I am grateful. When no reference is made to his death, however, I feel as Hannah did, resentful and aggrieved. One world has vanished, and another, left behind, has been shattered. How can that be ignored?

Another nonfiction book I read in the past week concerned the last days of the author Marcel Proust. Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris, by Richard Davenport-Hines, started off slowly for me, with far too many facts and names crammed into the first chapter, and there were many repetitions through the work, but it held my interest and kept me company and lulled me to sleep for my first week back in Michigan. The detailed report would be meaningless to anyone not familiar with Proust’s work, but for those in love with A la recherche du temps perdu it is fascinating to see the concentrated effort needed for the writer to finish his work, as well as to learn that all Paris, from titled nobility to cab drivers, came to a shocked standstill when they heard of his death. 

 

 

County in Bloom

 

Cherry blossom time!

I was only home a week before the cherry orchards burst into full bloom, along with all the wild cherries, and now my little apple trees, too, are flowering, and I find myself telling Sunny frequently what David so often exclaimed to me, “We live in a beautiful place.” I imagine Sunny appreciating the landscape with her nose, taking deep draughts of orchard tree and dandelion perfume. Lilacs will open soon. Orioles are passing through! (See more blooms here.)

And I will be opening the bookstore soon, though "regular" hours may be elusive for a few more weeks, as my life remains in disarray, regardless of how many tasks I check off the list of things to do.