Nineteen Years Ago

What is written down and kept brings the past back to life.

I read a lot of books (over 150 in this year that is soon coming to an end), but now and again I look back and read my own words. For instance, on and off in my life I have carried around little dimestore notebooks filled with random jottings. This red-covered one from 2006 that surfaced recently begins with names of people met for the first time in my bookshop and in social settings. Nancy P., Michael H., Angela W. and Dennis S., Trudy C., all of them lasting friends, I first met that year. 

 

A few pages in, however, the jottings change character, because when the Artist and I traveled, I always kept notes, so I see that we left Leland on September 10^th that year, with the odometer reading 176,729. The day was sunny, clear, and cool, morning wet with heavy dew. East and north of Traverse City, it seemed to me that we entered a different world.

 

None of the elements is foreign to our own peninsula, but here they occur in unfamiliar configurations—not the hills, trees, fields we know but strange hills, strange pines, strange oaks, orchards, barns, subdivisions and business development.

 

That would be Antrim, Charlevoix, and Emmet counties going north. The September sunlight, I had written, was 

 

…soft and glaring at the same time, bringing every color forward—asters and goldenrod, the subtle lavender and plum and purple underlying green….

 

When we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, I spotted the firewood drop-off site and vowed to drop off “my worries and frets” at that point in our travels and leave them there. What was worrying me in 2006? Luckily, I don’t recall.

 

Crossing from the lower to the upper peninsula is always significant, but that September we were going farther, crossing into Canada at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie). We stopped for gas on the U.S. side (12 gallons), and noticed a group of couples on motorcycles going in the same direction we were headed, searching for their passports to have them ready to hand, “so we won’t have to get off the bike,” as one of them put it.

 

In Ontario we stopped at the Visitors’ Centre to change money, then at a gas station to buy bottled water, and already I was “elated, giddy.” Everything was different! We were in a foreign country! I overheard a man at a pay phone speaking in a dialect of French so far from the French I had learned in school that I could hardly pick out a single word. Down the road at Bobber’s Restaurant (Bruce Mines, Ont.) was a trio of Germans conversing in their home language. A foreign country, a different Great Lake—not Michigan or Superior, our home lakes, but north Lake Huron, with pre-Cambrian shores and wild verges of tansy.

 

Next day: 

 

17-East is a road from heaven this morning. Traffic light. Fall color coming on. The bones of the Canadian Shield thrust up through a thin skin of soil. Old wooden fences surround pioneer fields, [and there are] small stone cairns on rock shoulders, glimpses of cool lakes and rivers, signs for trailer camping parks.

 

Sometimes all I write is a list of place names: Spruce Grove Cemetery, Iron Bridge (pop. 900), Iron Bridge Motel, Three Aces Restaurant, Elly’s Diner—“Mom & Pops,” I write. Then—“Mississagi River, big and beautiful, shining on its way.”

 

Finally, this list:

 

      patch of loosestrife

      iron bridge

      old board-and-wooden shingle house

 

with a note to self appended: “Picture these. Souvenez-les.” Remember them.

 

There were people congregated across the river at a rapids, many of them fishing, not many catching. Mississagi First Nation issues permits. And next came Blind River, pop. 3600. A float plane! Helicopter! Mixed yellows of tansy, butter-&-eggs, goldenrod, hawkweed, and coltsfoot.

 

Rocky points jut out, horizon filled with islands, sky with clouds, water with whitecaps and glints of reflected sunlight.

 

Next to the library (I remember the street and picture it today in my mind) was a real estate board listing 1000’ of shoreline, with 10 acres and year-round access, for $49,500. We were only in the market for lunch, though, and happy to find a Chinese restaurant and meet the proprietor, Ivy Chen, 16 years in Canada, over a year in Blind River, Ivy’s family including a husband and two children, 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl who sat with us while doing their homework. The soup was turkey broth with pork and pork wontons “and no MSG,” Mrs. Chen assured us. It was beautiful and delicious. I bought four books at the library for $1.25, and we were on our way again. Much later, when we were back in Leelanau County, I sent a couple books they had requested to the Chen children, who would be all grown up now. Looks like Blind River has grown, too, since we were there.

 

Serpent River … First Nation Trading Post … what I called “a sea of nothing but cattails in the sun, their seasons short-lived.” Above an outcropping, leaves were red and orange, “echoing the iron-stained color of the ancient rock surface.” Then I noted parenthetically, casting my mind back to the day before,

(Yesterday, somewhere, golden ferns and seedlings of red sumac on the ground looked as if the color had dripped down from the branches above.)

 

In Massy, Ontario (pop. 1,000), where we had stopped on a previous trip to photograph outdoor metal sculptures by Laval Bouchard, we decided to stay overnight at the Mohawk Motel, stopping while it was still afternoon. While the Artist rested from the drive, I sat outdoors with book and notebook, looking forward to exploring nearby Chutes Park and then, the next day, reaching Manitoulin Island, where I had arranged to rent a little cabin on a lake on the island for four nights. We decided we would come back to Massey on Saturday, after our time on Manitoulin, for a big street painting event. 

 

The Mohawk Motel was German-run and had a long list of written rules—quite a long list!—but the room was large and had “everything,” and the Artist loved it. Our cabin on Manitoulin would have no TV, so he was happy to have a movie channel for one night in Massey. Later we walked (1 kilometer) to Chutes Provincial Park and found our way through the campground to the waterfall before a light supper and well-earned sleep. Morning was coffee in our room, a dog walk, TV, then more coffee in the lobby, with toast, fresh muffin, and conversation with the owners, who were looking forward to the second year of their street painting festival. The wife had organized the event, and artists would be coming from Germany, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. Previous year’s attendance had been 10,000. Government funding had helped with a publicity campaign. I wonder if that festival is still going on…. 

 

And that is only a few pages in the beginning of a little notebook that goes on to recount our time on Manitoulin, the return visit to Massey for the festival, and finally a stretch of days in dear, familiar Grand Marais. It was one of our longer September getaways and one I love revisiting now, seeing those scenes once more as I flip the little pages.

 

Do you keep written notes on your travels? Sketchier or more fulsome than mine? Do your notes or diaries help you recall those earlier times?

Happy new year, if I don't write again until NEXT YEAR!

What Are YOU Doing These Strange Days?

Some of my indoor activities

And no, I do not generally have my books and journals on the kitchen counter. They were only gathered together there briefly (next to chocolate chip cookies on a rack and fresh fruits and vegetables in bowls and my cell phone on the charger) so I could economize on the number of images for this post, because the only way I have wifi “in place” (the library in Willcox, along with the schools, is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic) is by using my phone to create a hotspot, and while I have unlimited calling and texting on the phone, I do not have unlimited data, and I’ve been burning through my available data so far this month, posting to my various blogs and keeping up with friends on Facebook.

So the cell phone makes possible the online part of my life at present. It also makes possible the all-important calling and texting with family and friends — family as far away as Michigan, friends as near as right across the road, because we are all practicing social distancing, in order to stay safe and keep others safe, as well. 

My journals have taken on new importance for me as the days go by. Begun in December, they were only some kind of scrapbook-in-words, recording what I wanted to hold as memories of another winter in my beloved southeast Arizona. Gradually larger issues crept in and now absorb many pages, but even so, I continue to record the small and near at hand. My journal entries are free-ranging, like the cattle here in Dos Cabezas: there’s no saying where they may wander.

This morning I noticed a phenomenon connected to handwriting — the way my mind runs out ahead of my hand and shapes and reshapes sentences as they are being written. Once in a while I go back to scratch out a word or insert a phrase, but most of the time my insertions and deletions have been done mentally before my pen has gotten farther along. The rhythm of writing by hand, on paper, is very different from what I’m doing now, tapping at a keyboard, fingers flying, and seeing my words appear on a screen in front of me. The screen is more distant than the page, the page much more intimate. But some of what I write on my journal pages I later translate to the screen, and even when what you find here was composed on a screen rather than a page, I hope some of the intimacy of my thoughts comes through for you, my readers. 

You already know I do a lot of reading. That’s been evident from the very beginning posts of this blog in 2007. The comfort of books is not limited to reading them, however. There is looking at them and touching them, admiring them on the shelves. And now, beginning yesterday, in a more librarian-type undertaking, I began the task of making a catalog of my Western collection. So far the catalog is only author, title, category (broadly conceived), but I may go back and add publication dates. Already the nascent catalog been helpful to me in seeing where there are gaps in my personal library. For example, I’ve read books on Cochise, but those were library books. I have books of my own on Victorio and Geronimo but none on Cochise. 

We’ve all been cooking and baking more, haven’t we?  What delicious meals and treats are coming out of your kitchen these days? Food is such a comfort! Even the aromas of food add to our quality of life, don't they?

The Artist and I consider ourselves very fortunate, in that we are not sequestered in a city apartment (snowbound or otherwise) but can get out in the sunshine every day. The Artist has set up a little studio space in an outbuilding, Sarah and I have adventures with our neighbors, and for all of us there are daily explorations very close to home. So much to discover in a a ghost town, where traces of the past linger to the present day!

Often when I am on the phone with my son (our conversations daily since the unexpected decline and death of his father mere weeks ago), I am outdoors, and part of what I’m seeing I describe to my son and sometimes photograph, either while we’re talking or after we’ve ended our chat for the day. He also tells me what's happening in his world, where yesterday it was snowing in Kalamazoo and where he often sees deer in the backyard. We picture each other's worlds across the miles that way. 

I don’t often look straight up into the sky and might have missed this unique cloud formation, had I not been on the phone. The tiny, tiny flowers (most people would call them weeds) I would no doubt have noticed sooner or later, but because I was sitting in one place, I saw them sooner. 

The Artist and I have not been taking long drives to other areas of Cochise County for a while now, but there is plenty to notice and wonder and learn about right here in our own backyard. Next time I post here, I think it will be about adobe. But we’ll see. The “situation,” local, national, global, is changing daily. While I see right now a cardinal in the mesquite in front of the cabin, tomorrow it will undoubtedly appear somewhere else, and it could be that what I anticipate sharing with you the next time I write here will be superseded by another story. 

And you have stories of your own, too. What are they? This was Michigan when we left in December. So much has happened since then, it seems like a lifetime ago. Does it seem that way to you, too?

What Do You Think You Will Remember?

My desk in December

When we arrived at our ghost town hideaway for the winter, I made notes on the route we’d taken west and the places we had stayed: Kalamazoo, MI; Springfield, IL; Sedalia, MO; Wellington, KS; Dalhart, TX; Alamagordo, NM; and finally here, Dos Cabezas, AZ, 15 miles southeast of Willcox, AZ, and about 25 beautiful, winding miles west of the Chiricahua National Monument. The first page of the same composition book was already taken up with lists of things to pack (one list for the humans, another for the dog), and it was only on our second morning in the ghost town that I began keeping a sketchy narrative history of our season here. Back then, happy to be settling in for a few months under a sunny sky filled with wintering sandhill cranes, I had no idea that my notebook would become, in time a plague journal!

I always read a lot of books during our Arizona winters … write letters … blog about my reading and about our Cochise County adventures and explorations. It just happened that this year, for the first time, I also began keeping a journal. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would be recording historic events; I merely wanted to fix everyday small details on paper. Because those little everyday details, the stuff of short-term memory, are easily lost as days slip into the past, and my time here is precious to me. I want to be able to hold the days in my hand as it were, and look at them again and again when I am far from these mountains and this desert. 

Winter morning

So most of my mornings began, starting in December, with a session of journal-writing. The weather (no, it isn’t boring), social engagements, personal happenings (getting keys to the mailbox is a big deal to me), daily errands, and descriptions of surroundings flowed from my pen, along with re-emerging childhood memories and a few observations of the current national political scene. Quite a lot about hearing coyotes, through the night and in early, still-dark morning. A few notes on books read.

In short, nothing particularly earth-shaking. And that’s how it went, week after week.

… Sandhill crane count … first visit to the Smile4Jesus Thrift Shop … tales of my husband’s new friend in Willcox, the one I call the Born-Again Bear … brief accounts of dreams (very few remembered long enough to write down) … walks and hikes with neighbors.… 

There were only a few words on the impeachment, although I thought it would never end … and very little on presidential campaigns, debates, caucuses, as I tried to keep attention on politics to a minimum … much more on my volunteer mornings at the library bookstore and the elementary school in Willcox. Of course, the political issues bled in from time to time, from impeachment to debates to caucuses to the State of the Union, because that was the news, nonstop, on the radio and television, but I tried to keep my attention locally focussed, as much as possible, escaping from the news to the outdoors.

People I love found their way onto the pages. One of my sisters was in Mexico for two weeks. The other went through the pain of losing an old dog. We spent February 15-17 in Tucson and anticipated a return in March. The Artist had a birthday. Then in late February, my former husband, the father of my only child, was moved (after only three days) from hospital to hospice, where he died a week later, and my son and I began spending daily time together on the phone. 

In the larger world, a few of the Democratic hopefuls began to drop out of the race for candidacy, but too many yet remained, and far from business and home responsibilities in Michigan as I was, I found the world crowding in, events racing along, piling on top of each other without time to catch a breath. In many ways, the world seemed all present, minute by minute. 

Yet only on March 10 did coronavirus come into my journal, when I noted that the Tucson Festival of Books, scheduled for March 14-15, had been cancelled the day before, adding at the bottom of that page: “Politics and coronavirus — our world today.” Two days later, March 12, I recorded that the president had announced, the evening previous, a ban on travelers from Europe, Ireland and the U.K. excluded. We began hearing daily about the terrible situation in Italy. COVID-19, the virus was now called. Less than two weeks ago. And yet now, March 20 as I am composing these thoughts, just past the spring equinox — such a short time since we were first told to stock our pantries for a possible two-week emergency quarantine — almost all universities and public schools are closed, churches have stopped holding services, restaurants all over the United States are open for take-out only, grocery store shelves are near-empty in key aisles (paper products, soaps and cleaning products, the dairy case), and more and more Americans, even those not yet on “lockdown,” are “sheltering in place,” even if they have not put themselves under “self-quarantine.” That is our national language now. 

Still, though all of us are affected, each of us is experiencing these days of isolation differently. We are spread out across a very large country, and while some friends find themselves alone, far from family and close friends, others see their households expanding with schoolchildren and college-age sons and daughters home all day. I lost my volunteer jobs, but many other people have lost paying jobs, jobs they needed for basic food and shelter. “Lucky” ones see their savings “evaporating before our very eyes,” while the homeless appear at intersections, holding up cardboard signs. No one can hope to remain unaffected, from the most expendable part-time hourly wage worker to the most pampered trust fund baby whose investment portfolios has plummeting in value.

Here’s another personal note, this one I know shared by many — the strange realization that, simply because of our ages, the Artist and I are in a “vulnerable” group, members of an “at-risk” category. It was already strange enough just trying to get it through our heads that we are no longer young — hell, no longer middle-aged! — we still can’t fully believe that! — and now we are also particularly “at risk”?

For me, personally, there is the added strange feeling of being disconnected, physically, from the world that has been mine for almost 27 years, i.e., the world of books. I am not, after all, in my Northport bookstore, weighing the question of whether to entirely for the duration of the crisis or stay open to process phone and mail orders, make sales through the front door (or deliver books to local customers), and gratefully accept whatever help my little community might offer, along with doing what I might do to help the community. I’m not there. Instead of being “on the front lines,” as it were, I only read each day in Shelf Awareness what is happening with other bookstores around the country. So peculiar and unsettling! My feeling must be something like what my sister felt when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans just after she had moved away, that feeling of I should be there! Then added to that the uncertainty of not knowing if we will even be back in early May as planned — if that will be possible at all. 

That’s part of my story. Everyone else has a story, too, quite different from mine. The general point I’m making is that each of us is having a unique subjective experience of these times, which means that together we will have a staggering number of stories, coming from myriad different vantage points, looking through lenses offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives. 

So, are you keeping a “plague” journal? Years from now, what will you remember? What is strangely ordinary about this time for you? In what ways does the crisis seem real or unreal? What other times of crisis does it call to your mind? How is it unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced? 

What books are you reading, and what kinds of meals do you find yourself putting together? Are you able to get outdoors for fresh air and exercise? Do you listen or watch or in some way follow news compulsively, every waking minute, or do you ration what you let into your consciousness each day? Do you sleep through the night or lie awake? If you sleep, what do you dream? If awake, what are your thoughts? How do you seek out comfort, and what gives you comfort?

With how many other people are you “sheltering in place,” and how is that going? Are you spending more time on the phone, calling and texting, or on your computer, e-mailing and following friends’ posts on social media? Do you feel more or less connected to those you love? Differently connected?

What is the best and worst aspect of this time for you? I should add so far to that previous question, shouldn’t I? Because we don’t know yet what will be the best and worst in the days and weeks ahead.

When I look at my own handwritten journal and see that I only used the word ‘coronavirus’ there for the first time ten days ago, I can hardly believe my eyes, but there it is on the page, although subjectively, right now, it feels like at least a full month that we have been obsessed with this news, every waking minute, to the exclusion of almost all else. I know I heard the news from China before March 10, but at that point, as the absence of it in my journal illustrates, the danger must have seemed very remote, a foreign problem only. That’s how fast everything has been happening.

Friends, I see some of your posts on Facebook, but those “news feeds” will be superseded overnight, you know, by whatever comes next, and even a year from now we will have a hard time remembering exactly when and now the pandemic (another frequently occurring word these days) first touched us personally. And besides, as long as you are “sheltering in place,” wouldn’t you like to use some of your time to make a lasting record for yourself and those who come after you? In all human lives, there are watershed events, some personal, others part of a national or world-historic fabric, and this is one of those times that will stand out whenever, in future, we look back on our lives. If you don’t see yourself as a writer, maybe you can keep a scrapbook or a photo album or make a quilt of “plague times.” We don’t have to be greedy opportunists to find opportunity in crisis. 

What stories will you have to tell years from now?

We each see the world from our own little corner....

Busy Life, Desultory Reading

des-ul-to-ry: adj. [from L. leap down from]

1.  passing from one thing to another in an aimless way; disconnected; not methodical;

2.  lacking direct relevancy; random; incidental

That definition is taken (though modified) from The New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, 1974. I looked the word up because I don’t trust myself with a word I never use in conversation, only in writing. It looks like de-SUL-tery, but the dictionary says the strongest stress is on the first syllable, with a minor stress on the third: Dessle-tory. Yet I’ve also heard educated people pronounce it as Dessletry, i.e., as only three syllables and only the first one stressed. I play it safe and keep my mouth shut. But the word did come to mind the other morning.

Recent activities at home have not desultory: packing, organizing, cleaning. I may look aimless, especially in those moments when I pause to wait for my brain to kick back into gear, but everything I’m doing is connected, if not thoroughly methodical, all actions (except for episodes of escape reading) aimed at a single end: departure! Sarah knows something is up but little does she ken what it is. No matter. Sarah is always willing.

What has been desultory of late in my busy life is that reading I mentioned parenthetically above, episodic escapes to rest a fevered brain. It doesn’t matter much what the book is, so the first one on my Books Read 2015 list is a book on grammar. Why? It came to hand, that’s all. Focused on an imminent road trip, I don’t need thrilling bodice-rippers: anything with printed words and pages to turn is an escape from bags and boxes and scribbled lists.

And so, in the search for self-soothing comfort, I skipped ahead to the last episode in the last section of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, those final pages of Time Regained in which the mature Marcel, arriving at a reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes, enters her house in the middle of a musical piece and must wait in the library until the next intermission, which gives him time to reflect on a small but crucial incident that occurred between his carriage and the house.

...I had barely time to get out of the way and, in stepping back, struck my foot against some unevenly cut flagstones leading to a carriage house. In recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was a little lower than the one next to it; immediately all my discouragement vanished before a feeling of happiness which I had experienced at different moments all my life, at the sight of trees I thought I recognized when driving around Balbec, or the church spires of Martinville, or the savour or a madeleine, dipped in herb tea, or from many other sensations I have mentioned....

Examining that sudden feeling of happiness, he realizes that the sensation delivered by the uneven paving stones has carried him back to Venice but brought to him much more than a mere “moment from the past,” and there in the library, reflecting on various similar moments of happiness, the character Marcel conceives the book he will write, the book that Proust has in fact written, the fictionalized memoir in which this last section shows the author before he has begun his great work. It will be a “solid” psychology, not “plane,” and he sees the challenge in all the demands it will make on his powers and remaining life.

To convey an idea of it, one would have to go to the noblest and most varied arts for comparisons; for this writer, who, moreover, would have to shew the most contradictory sides of each of his characters in order to give his volume the effect of a solid, would need to prepare it with minute care, constantly regrouping his forces as if for an attack, endure it like an exhausting task, accept it like a rule of conduct, build it like a church, follow it like a regimen, overcome it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, feed it intensively like a child, create it like a world, without overlooking those mysteries whose explanation is probably to be found only in other worlds and the presentiment of which is the quality in life and art which moves us most deeply [my emphasis added].

Read again the task as he set himself to it: “build it like a church ... overcome it like an obstacle ... create it like a world....” That string of similes, all those strong verbs with their substantive objects! Doesn’t it make your heart beat faster and shivers run down your spine? Don’t you sit up straighter and want to cheer the author?

-- And yet, stirring and compelling and moving as I always find this section -- I must confess I would read a few pages and then pick up another book, and I have no way to explain my going back and forth, other than the general unsettled atmosphere that fills a house and pervades life itself in days preparatory to a long road trip. Desultory reading.

My other main reading during the same unsettled days (I must hunt up information on this book and author sometime) came to me at random, as had the grammar book, although no doubt the title was a strong attraction. The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene, written in journal form, without any prologue, background, or introduction given, is an account, not surprisingly, of one writer’s winter, specifically in this case a winter on a farm in New England following World War I. A reader gathers snippets of the writer’s background as the journal goes along. (Not until over halfway through the book do I realize at last that the farm is in Vermont, a fact she had not mentioned earlier.) She is a single woman, with a grown daughter. The daughter now lives in the city, but before this season lived with her mother. The writer is also an artist, although she seems to be doing little or no drawing or painting this winter. (But what is this ‘frontispiece’ she keeps mentioning, without telling us any more about it?) There are no more chickens – all gone -- but numerous horses and ponies, one cow, and, in the house, one dog (a collie) and one cat. Essentially, hers is a pony farm.

[Oh, how my grandfather would have loved this book! When he retired from the Pennsylvaia Railroad and moved from Ohio to Florida, his dream was to establish a pony farm, a dream I encouraged with all the enthusiasm of the horse-crazy ten-year-old girl I then was. Alas, his second wife was working against me, and she had daily access 365 days a year. Don’t get me wrong: I loved her, too. But oh, how thrilled Grandpa and I would have been with a pony farm! I might even have moved to Florida to help him with it, and then the entire course of my life would have been different --. But there. I cannot regret the life that has brought me to where I am now, so be off with you, pony dreams!]

The author of The Lone Winter rides (horses, of course), skis, and snowshoes, besides regularly milking her cow and pitching hay to her “children,” i.e., the cow, horses, and ponies. When she drives, she is driving a horse, and the horse is pulling a sleigh. There is no plot, only life events  -- e.g., her daughter visits, ponies break through their fences, a pipe freezes. Mostly what happens is that the weather changes and changes and changes again.

Again the uncertain thirties have yielded to a solid zero, and the world is a-crack with cold. Even my bed seemed a shivery spot this morning; so by a pale, surreptitious sunrise I was already down, shuddering, and poking at the fire.

Supplies run low, and the resourceful countrywoman attempts a sort of cowboy pan bread, flung into a hot, greased pan, coming out at last “toothsome” and “white as sea-foam under a somewhat charred exterior.” I imagine my far-flung blogger friend, Cherie, out on the Atlantic coast, enjoying this book. But would she chafe at its slow beginning and the many, many pages of chasing and feeding ponies? I think I would urge her to open right away to page 167 and read from there until she lost interest, if she were going to lose interest. If she didn’t, of course, she could go back to the beginning and start there. Cherie, shall I send you the book when I finish it? It’s in the car with me now!

Here at home in the Upper Midwest, while Arctic “clippers” made necessary errands and organizing and packing and everything more difficult– frigid dashes from house to car! – the weather also made sense of our winter change of venue. Not so long ago, back in the mild days of December leading up to the end of the past year, we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going away?” We’re not asking that in what must be nearly the hundredth hour straight of fierce winds with subzero chill coming off nearby Lake Michigan.

It’s really happening. The pony farm was only a dream, but the life of the artist and the bookstore were dreams we turned into reality and have kept afloat year after year. Well, now our winter sabbatical dream is becoming reality, too, so stay tuned for pictures of “elsewhere,” postcards from the road. The scenery will be changing, that I can promise.