Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

How Do You View It?

Weeds are looking weedier. This is chicory.

The Artist liked to call August “the rotten heart of summer.” It's the time when much of what was bright and blooming starts to look tired, tattered and seedy. The atmosphere reeks of pollen, especially that of Queen Anne's lace, rank smell belying regal name.

The more common name for late summer is “dog days,” the name coming from the Dog Star, Sirius, appearing in the sky close to sunrise. (“What is the brightest star in the sky?” my parents would ask little toddler P.J., and I would respond on cue with the answer they had taught me, “Sirius, the Dog Star!” Did I lisp the name?) Hot, humid, dense, thick, and heavy lies the air in northern Michigan during the dog days. 

The angle of the light seems changed (and probably is).

A time of thunderstorms and frequently the most uncomfortable stretch of summer, the dog days are also, paradoxically, a popular time for family vacations. My birth family—father, mother, three girls—always vacationed in August. The reasoning was that lakes were still cold in June, and if we put off vacation until just before school we could look forward to it for weeks. It was our summer's dessert. 

Sunny takes the seasons and their changes in stride.

When I look at the etymology for "dog days," I find the familiar story of Sirius but also learn that Swedes and Finns call this time the “rot month,” warmer weather making infections and food spoilage more likely. It seems the Artist was not alone in his thinking.

In France, traditionally, all family vacations were taken in August, which made it beastly hard on foreign tourists. All over the City of Light, shops were closed up tight. Where to obtain the daily baguette? Finally Parisians got wise and began staggering annual closures within each neighborhood so that every quartier had at least one bakery, one grocer, one cafe, etc. open that month. 

Restaurant workers and retail clerks in Michigan tourist towns are worked pretty hard by the time the dog days roll around. Many schools also begin before Labor Day, leaving many businesses short-handed without their seasonal student help. 

And yet also in August come many regular annual customers. For me, many are dear friends I look forward to seeing every year. Kids grow taller, graduate from high school and then college, get married, have children of their own. Grandkids arrive! And we older ones grab the opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives and wish each other healthy winters until another summer rolls around. For now, we’re still here! We’re still here!

More Friendship!

My friend Juleen and I RELAXED together!

Sunny and I had more company! A friend of mine from decades-ago Kalamazoo days, Juleen has made her home in Tucson, Arizona, for such a long time now that lush, jungly, green and humid Michigan was a visit to her past in more ways than one. Before coming up to see me in Leelanau, she reunited with old friends she had worked with years ago at a camp down in Arcadia, Michigan, and after our time together she turned back south again to Kalamazoo, where more friends awaited. While she was here, we enjoyed two leisurely evenings and two mornings together, and I shared with her some of my "wild nearby." She remarked on the look of so many Michigan gardens, with little to no space between plants: In Arizona desert landscapes, plenty of open space is left between plants to eliminate hiding places for rattlesnakes!

Sunny has become more gregarious this summer with each successive visit. She is finally starting to see visitors as playmates rather than as intruders. She was positively a pest at times, wanting Juleen to play, play, play with her all the time, but that was better than nervous, hostile barking, and by the second morning Juleen caught on to giving firm commands when she wanted a break. I was very happy that my dear friend and my dear dog got along so well!

"Come play with me!" Sunny kept saying.

Naturally, my friend spent time with me in my bookshop, also, where neighbor Clare obligingly photographed us together. The image immediately below is the only one that was slightly blurred, but I am using it, anyway, because I love its liveliness. 

We laughed a lot.

We laughed about all kinds of things!

And here is a photo that didn't make into a previous post:

My sisters and my dog!

Author! Author!

People who came to hear Tim Mulherin speak on Wednesday evening were glad they had made the time. His presentation was informative, sensitive, and entertaining (he has a subtle and wry sense of humor), and the audience was attentive and engaged, several people staying afterward to talk with him further. I was only sorry I didn't have twice as many people on hand to appreciate (and reward him for) his good work. I do, however, have signed copies of his book for those who missed meeting him and hearing him speak.

Other Books

Every American should read Robert Reich’s new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. Every American, from yellow dog Democrats to MAGA Republicans—and also all Independents and disaffected voting dropouts. Every American. Much more than a memoir, the book is American political history from postwar 1950s to the present day. Not from someone running for office or married to a political party or in bed with large corporate interests, either! Robert Reich may be smarter than you and me (he’s certain smarter than I am), but his head is not in the clouds. I have the hardcover book in my shop, and the audiobook is available through libro.fm. If your library doesn’t have it, they need to get it. Read the book! Then share your thoughts with me, please, whatever those thoughts may be.

I also want to plug a couple new nonfiction books with special regional interest. The first is The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan, by Robert "Carlos" Fuentes, a happy Lake Leelanau story. 

The second, very different book, is Prison: The Inside Story — Transforming Lives as an Officer and an Educator, by Jack Myette, the story of his 25 years in Michigan prison work, which I only received and am beginning to read today ( Thursday, 8/14). 

Agricultural work and prison life are two very different aspects of American life, common only in that many Americans never experience either one. That’s one reason I am recommending these books. Another is that both titles come from Michigan authors. And the third is that I believe both can help us, in important ways, when we are considering and making choices about the kind of Michigan and the kind of United States we want to shape for the future—a message that was part of what Tim Mulherin (section above) said in the conclusions of his prepared remarks on Wednesday evening. 

What's ahead? Who knows?

There is no stopping change, but we can at least try to guide it away from treacherous shoals and into safer water if we are clear about what changes we can accept and which we absolutely don't want. Farm workers, like all who live and labor, deserve safe working conditions and decent treatment, the kind Carlos and his family enjoyed. And when people who have committed crimes must pay the price by losing their freedom, they should not also lose their humanity. (Prisons should not be "monster factories.") I'll get back to you with more on Myette's book when I've had a chance to read it. 

Goldenrod is exploding everywhere like silent fireworks.

Is summer almost over?

Don’t cry! Summer’s ending is autumn's beginning, a cooling-off and slowing-down in tourist trade (though teachers and others are gearing up, I know), and then before we know it we will have beautiful fall colors and a tide of new fall books.

Black-eyed Susans have not all gone to seed yet.

 

A Lot Has Been Happening Around Here

From across Waukazoo Street (in my doorway) --

If you haven’t been to Northport in a while, you’ll notice some changes the next time you visit. The “big store,” current home of the Northport Inn, the restaurant called Faro, and a stylish new antique shop that goes by the name of Pernette’s, is getting an exterior makeover. Everyone is eager to see their new look.

Back of the building houses Pernette's.

The new look at Barb’s Bakery on Mill Street is already here. Pink! Also new at Barb’s is frozen custard, a very welcome treat on some of the hot days we’ve had recently. 

 

Does this color make you think of ice cream? At Barb's, it's frozen custard!

The New Bohemian Café folks have expanded their hours and are now open until 5 p.m. Good news! And while artist Deborah Ebbers, one of my neighbors here at 106, is away from her studio for a few days (gone to explore further the exciting world of carving sculpture from marble), she will be back early in July, never fear. Over on Mill Street, the Wright Gallery is open for the season on Wednesday through Saturday, 10 to 5, Sundays by chance.

Reflections of window letters with painting as backdrop --

In the nearby unincorporated village of Lake Leelanau, NJ's Grocery (since 1912!) remains closed at present while owners and crew clean up after a fire. No one was injured, and they hope to be back in business in about a month. I hope so! I miss my morning trips to NJ's.

Hope NJ's can re-open before too long!

What was happening at my bookshop on Tuesday was a visit from Kalamazoo poet Jennifer Clark, and, as is always the case with Jennifer, we had a great time and a lot of laughs. Those who do not associate either poetry or saints with happy hoots need to make the acquaintance of Jennifer Clark. I had her sign extra copies of her latest collection of poems, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, and will be stocking her volume of memoir essays next week when I do another new book order. Kissing the World Goodbye might not sound like a humorous title, but I was laughing out loud reading it. What a delight!

Jennifer Clark is a wonderful bookstore guest! 

To satisfy popular demand, I have restocked Mary Kay Zuravleff’s American Ending (I wrote about it here) and also have a new Michigan novel, My Pirate Summer, by C. J. Hagstrom of Traverse City. Hagstrom’s story, from the old days of the “tall ships,” was inspired by the “nefarious activities” of Captain Seavey, a name familiar to Great Lakes history readers.

 

Here's more new fiction from Michigan writers:

 

Viola Shipman, you ask? Yes, several titles from Viola Shipman, nom de plume of Michigan writer Wade Rouse, who writes gentle romance stories under his grandmother’s name. 

If mysteries are your thing, I have books by Leelanau author Aaron Stander (he calls our home ground “Cedar County”), U.P. mysteries from Joseph Heywood and Steve Hamilton, and exciting stories featuring fictional Sheriff Jules Clement of Blue Deer, Montana, by Michigan-native-gone-to-Montana Jamie Harrison. Karen Mulvahill’s historical fiction novel, The Lost Woman, continues to leap off the table, along with Marilyn Zimmerman’s legal suspense novel, In Defense of Good Women (review here). 

 

Under new nonfiction offerings, This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan is guaranteed to start many more conversations since it seems that everyone wants to be here! Climate change, migration, and tourism (I would add growing world population) are affecting places Up North, as they have elsewhere. Is northern Michigan’s tourism industry “too robust”? Poet Michael Delp, co-editor emeritus of the Made in Michigan Writers Series, calls this book “essential reading for anyone who claims to love northern Michigan for its beauty.”

What changes will we see in years to come?

Also for locals and visitors alike,“Perfect Omena Day!”: Selections from the Summer Diaries of Rebecca L. Richmond, 1907-1920 is going to be a sure-fire winner. What was daily life in Omena like over 100 years ago? Marsha Buehler, Omena's Putnam-Cloud Tower House Museum Director, calls the diary entries Christine Byron chose and transcribed “gentle lessons in cultural anthropology blended with a bit of archeology.” The book is also generously illustrated with old photographs and postcards – a perfect recipe for summer dreaming and time travel.

Sometimes it's comforting to look backward, isn't it?

Field guides to birds, board books for pre-readers, 100 Things to Do in Michigan [and in the Upper Peninsula] Before You Die (always, I think, the best time to do anything), and other books you didn’t know you needed until you saw them in Dog Ears Books – all are here for your summer reading pleasure, along with, always, an ever-changing inventory of used books, some quite recent and others from very long ago.

There are always lots of pre-loved volumes on my shelves.

The summer solstice has come and gone, St. John’s Eve has come and gone, and the 4^th of July is coming at us fast. Along the roadsides and in the meadows, milkweed prepares to bloom, and St. Johnswort is just getting underway. It is also the week of the strawberry – and strawberry pie – and strawberry-rhubarb pie – and maybe rhubarb chutney, if I can squeeze in that project….

Milkweed

Cinquefoil

St. Johnswort

Goatsbeard

"Can I help, momma?" (I just couldn't leave her out entirely!)

Stop-Action Moments

Sunny Juliet takes a play break.

I always say in the fall, when people ask, “How was your summer?” that it was a blur—and so it seems as it races by. There are, however, moments to stop and take a deep breath and look around in gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve had a lot of those already.

 

We had launch!

 

My dear friend Marilyn Zimmerman’s book launch was one such stop-action moment for me. All who could attend (and in the summer it is impossible to avoid every schedule conflict) were delighted to be together to celebrate the release of Marilyn’s novel. After the author described the setting and background of her story and read a passage from the book, questions and observations from the audience and further conversation while she signed copies kept our guest author too busy to have a piece of her own congratulatory cake until it was almost time to leave. Verdict: Success!

 

Author Karen Mulvahill was in the audience and had to leave early, but what a joy for me to hear from Marilyn and Karen the next day that they were avidly reading each other’s books! Northern Michigan writers I know are such generous souls, celebrating each other’s successes joyfully. That’s yet another lovely aspect of my wonderful world of books, and I am especially proud of the achievements of these two Northport writers.

 

Of course, Zimmerman and Mulvahill’s novels are available at Dog Ears Books. In Defense of Good Women is being marketed as a legal thriller, The Lost Woman as historical fiction, but I will tell you that both are much more than a single genre tag can capture. They have in common page-turning suspense; beyond that, however, Mulvahill’s novel lays bare the ways in which cruel authoritarianism divides a society, while Zimmerman’s explores hidden and complicated motivations and relationships.

 

In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman. Paper, 302pp, $17.99

 

The Lost Woman, by Karen Mulvahill. Paper, 280pp, 18.95

 

 

We had a summer reunion!

 

Omigod, is it really 18 years since our first lunch? The number has fluctuated from year to year, depending on who-all is available when Dorene makes her annual pilgrimage to northern Michigan, but here is our original tiny core from all those years ago. Back then Marilyn Zimmerman and Trudy Carpenter were taking writing classes together and writing short stories, so when writer Dorene O’Brien came up from the Detroit area the four of us got together for lunch to talk about the writing life. And here we four are all those years later! 

Left to right: Marilyn Zimmerman, Trudy Carpenter, Dorene O'Brien, et moi

A prior year with Elizabeth Buzzelli, Barbara Stark-Nemon, and Sarah Shoemaker

I had company!

 

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit for three days and nights last week. Breakfasts and dinners on the porch, one restaurant excursion, much relaxing outdoors—and Sunny got a lot of attention from my dog-indulgent sister! Somehow I guess we were too intent on conversation and food and relaxation to take photographs of each other. Even on Sunday morning when Sunny triggered a temporary crisis mode by encountering a porcupine at close quarters, there was no pause for camera work. Those quills had to be pulled out right away! After her ordeal, Sunny retreated to the other end of the porch to recover in solitude, not sitting next to the table as usual while we humans had our breakfast. She had completely gotten over the shock to her dignity and independence by afternoon, however, and meanwhile her momma had squeezed in a nap following the departure of beloved company.

I found a photo! This one of Deboran and Bob is at Nittolo's in Lake Leelanau.

 

We all had sun and rain.

Soft, gentle rain from the sky always seems better for young growing things than cold water from a hose. My gardens have had some of both so far this season. Little seedlings are emerging in the vegetable beds, and flowering plants are flourishing in the borders and fields. 

My apple trees, I report sadly, look as if they are not going to bear at all this year. Just when I thought I was on top of my game! I got the pruning done, and I was ready with my homemade codling moth traps after last year’s maddening discovery of a worm hole at the blossom end and core rot inside almost every piece of fruit! So what could go wrong? How about a failure to blossom and set fruit? Very disappointing! It seems my trees have definitely slipped into a biennial fruiting pattern, and all I can do now is to be ready again next year and hope for a good harvest in 2026.

 

Pretty tree, no fruit

We have plans --

 

Sunny Juliet and I will be having more company soon, and we will getting back to our agility work with Coach Mike next week if the weather permits. 

 

On June 24, Dog Ears Books will host another poetry reading, this time with Jennifer Clark from Kalamazoo. She will be our featured guest for the third time with her third collection of poetry, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, which is not, she says, your grandmother’s book of saints.

So if you can’t relate to sanitized, stained glass perfection, come and meet Jennifer Clark’s cast of helpers—cranky, insecure, doubting, and hilarious—saints maybe “for the rest of us”? Because we who don’t fully have our spiritual acts together certainly need guides who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty by interceding in our screwy, complicated lives!

 

That reading will be Tuesday, June 24, beginning at 4 p.m.

Poet Jennifer Clark

 

And then, the ongoing—what to call it?

 

I cannot see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil like those three little monkeys. Sorry! I cannot pretend that all is well in our society and our world these days. 

 

We have in the White House a president who “promised” he would be a dictator on “Day One,” seeming to imply that his dictatorship would only “need” to last a single day—and excuse me for all the scare quotes, but this is scary stuff, and whoever thought that any dictator would step down after 24 hours? This one sure hasn’t. And the most frightening part of it all is that his supporters, military and laypeople, continue to cheer his overturning of the Constitution and the rule of law that Americans have always considered guarantees of our country’s bedrock freedoms. 

 

Why all the arrests and deportations? It isn't about protecting us from crime. Undocumented workers doing their jobs, paying taxes, and taking care of their families are no threat to the rest of us. 

Think about it. 

He promised to bring down consumer prices “on Day One” and was unable to do so. Prices have not come down. He promised to end wars in Gaza and Ukraine “on Day One” and was unable to do so. The wars go on, as do the deaths. But deportations? That’s one area he’s been able to get some results, so by God he’s going to keep deporting! 

 

And never mind that he’s not singling out criminals but terrorizing and tearing apart families who have lived in and contributed to their communities for years! He’s a “tough guy,” right? Don’t you see it? Having gotten rid of many people in authority who took seriously their oaths of office, he is now able to command troops and appoint program "czars" to terrorize and also, often, try to quell protests against his bullying tactics. 

 

The man himself is a pitiful figure. He and his minions steal from the poor and give to the wealthiest, while they dismantle protections for civil rights, health, and our natural environment because it is much faster to destroy than to build. Destroyers make themselves feel big and powerful by tearing down or blasting apart, and that’s the name of the game.

 

This weak, whining blamer-in-chief would be less than nothing if there weren’t still many Americans who either look past his rhetoric of hate and blame and buy his pie-in-the-sky lies or actually feel their own impoverished spirits fueled by hate and blame. You hurt? Must be someone else's fault. Find a scapegoat to punish.

 

For a long time I wanted to believe that the people I know who support him must have, somehow, good intentions in their hearts, that they simply were not aware of what he was actually saying and doing. They couldn’t know what he really was and be okay with him, I told myself. They were good people, right? I wanted to believe they must be living in information silos, hearing only partisan propaganda and seeing only happy, smiling photos of him. 

 

But such total ignorance of reality is impossible, and I have to face reality. He has his own social media platform and spews his blame and hatred there daily, so his supporters cannot be ignorant of what he is. I have to face the fact that they themselves, apparently, have no loyalty to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law. I have to face the fact that “liberty and justice for all” is to them a meaningless phrase. “Justice” to them means “We win!” and everyone else loses. 

 

What does what's happening mean to you? To put party above country, loyalty above principle, might above right? Is this the United States of America your parents and grandparents fought to preserve? Is it the one you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?

 

Well, for now we go on with our lives. Those of us who write, write; those who join public protest demonstrations, demonstrate; those who lie awake night after night try to get enough sleep to face another day. We go to work, we care for our families and homes, and we treasure our friends—because life is essentially a beautiful gift, and it would be wrong not to be grateful and to appreciate what we still have. 

When my husband died, I learned that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the most meaningful experiences of our lives. And so I continue to be deeply grateful for all this country of mine has given me, even as I grieve these nightmare times and hope that we can still come out the other side into the sunshine of lawful liberty again. 

 

Hope. Community. Justice for our neighbors as well as for ourselves. Because there is no true justice that is not justice for all.

 

“We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.” 

 

That was the simple funeral speech actor Robert Duvall gave in “Broken Trail,” and I think of it often. We are here on earth for such a short time. We have such a short time in which to be worthy of our lives!

Lives were given for our freedom.