Searching for Sunshine

Briefly, sun broke through!

So far we have had two sunny days in January. On Wednesday a weak winter sun appeared in the morning sky, brightened with time, but by early afternoon sunshine had been replaced by familiar cloud cover and falling snow, so I’m not counting that as a third sunny day. A day must be bright for at least four hours to qualify as a sunny one, and I think counting a mere four hours as a day is generous, don’t you?

Beautiful -- but not a sunny day

Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Reading the biography by Jonathan Eig at the beginning of 2025 gave me a better idea of the complexity and also the dedication of King’s character. When I looked at MLK quotes on Monday morning, this one stood out, given the times in which we live: 

 

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

 

-      Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

These days I am finding myself more troubled by the complacency of some than by the despair of others. Despair I can understand, but how can anyone not realize the “fierce urgency of now”? At the same time, the “vigorous and positive action” we need to take can be difficult to identify, so I appreciated suggestions last week from Robert Reich and value the “action items” a friend includes in her frequent “enCOURAGEment” emails.

 

A gathering in Suttons Bay last week provided metaphorical sunshine, demonstrating that people far from harm’s way care about those caught in the crossfires and want to see the federal government’s policies and actions return to the rule of law.

 

Catalog cover is book's cover illustration.

Another, different ray of sunshine came with the Spring/Summer 2026 Wayne State University Press book catalog. Right there on the cover, and again on the inside first page, is Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, a collection of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and comics, all exploring joyful memories of growing up Black in a city and edited by Desiree Cooper. Three cheers! I look forward to the April release of this book so I can offer it to my customers in Northport.

More information inside catalog

There are occasional days of sunshine in the direst of winters and moments, even hours, of joy to be celebrated every day.

 

Far From Home

Recently I chose an autobiography written in 1937 for my bedtime reading, that of Isobel Field, stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. This Life I’ve Loved is interesting all the way through, right from the beginning, but when her mother, Fanny Osborne, married for love the sickly RLS (with no idea that he was going to become famous), something magical happened. Newlywed Fanny and Louis, as he is called in the book, went on a wedding trip to “Silverado,” a deserted mine in Napa Valley, where the hot, dry climate was expected to—and did—improve Louis’s frail health, and after a while the rest of the family joined them.

 

We had some very pleasant times together before they left [for Scotland], and I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch in my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.

 

-      Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved

 

Isobel, called Belle, was herself a married woman and mother by this time and had never before heard her mother laugh! Can you imagine that? The power of love! Note: It takes a while in the Youtube video to get to the song, but don't miss it! A great rock hit from the Michael J. Fox movie, “Back to the Future.”

 

The story continues in Hawaii and eventually Samoa, where the Stevensons bought land, built a house, and Fanny began all manner of agricultural and horticultural projects while Louis devoted himself to writing. Such a different world from Up North winter!

 

The perfume of Samoa reached us while the island was still a hazy cloud on the horizon, a blend of ylang-ylang blossoms, wood-smoke and copra. We stood by the rail of the little inter-island steamer Lübeck watching Upolu take shape before us; thickly wooded, lettuce-green hills piled up against a blue sky. Along the beach, a row of small shops faced the sea, half hidden by the foliage of trees and shrubs. Lying on the reef and towering out of the water were the hulks of three men-of-war, tragic reminders of the great hurricane that had cost so many lives the year before.

 

There was no wharf and only a few boats came out to meet us. The natives had not yet learned to barter their seed necklaces and tortoise-shell work, or dive for coins. Several outrigger canoes paddled about the ship, filled with brown men and girls garlanded in wreaths and flowers….

 

Field notes that while many Hawaiians at that time had already adopted European dress, Samoan men and women still wore the lava lava. It was the late 1800s, before the coming of world war, when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom, although the missionary faction was eager for it to be taken over by the United States. Samoa, already being governed by Germany, Britain, and the U.S., seemed to be holding more tightly to its island culture, but in neither place were there anything like the big American multistory hotels that have since made their way to the South Pacific. When Isobel leaves Hawaii for Sydney, Australia, prior to making the move to Samoa at Louis’s request (realizing his health will never permit a return to his native Scotland, he wants his family together in one place), she describes the islands where she felt so long at home.

 

…I leaned on the rail looking at the town before me. Flooded with moonlight, it was bright against the dark blue hills. Here and there roofs showed above the tree-tops, no one building rising high enough to spoil the symmetry. From the shrouded mystery of Diamond Head to the purple shadows of Waianai the city never looked more beautiful.

 

I thought that I was seeing it for the last time. In a sense I was, for a phase of my life ended then, utterly unlike anything that went before or came after.

 

Honolulu, so peaceful, so beautiful, was to suffer tragedy and blood-shed, and change into a bustling American city before I saw it again; the dignity, the romance, the charm of an island kingdom gone forever.

  

The United States of America annexed Hawaii in 1898, following what the American president himself acknowledged as an illegal invasion by U.S. Marines in 1893 supporting a local insurgency. There had been factions in Hawaii at least as long as Europeans and Americans had been accumulating Hawaiian land (often by marrying into landed Hawaiian families), a complicated history certainly not taught in my grade school when Hawaii became the 50^th state in 1959.

 

(What today of Greenland? Is there a lesson in the history of Hawaii for Greenlanders? For Venezuelans?)

 

As for me here in northern Michigan, Isobel Field’s stories of her stepfather have whetted my appetite for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the next book I have now begun An Inland Voyage. In the preface by his widow, she writes,

 

Like Branwell Brontë, of whom he could never speak without emotion, [Stevenson] would sit poring over maps, making imaginary journeys. 

 

-      F.V. de G.S. [Don’t ask me what these letters stand for, other than the ‘F’ for Fanny!]

 

Just so, as a lover of maps and of armchair travel, I anticipate sunny hours ahead in Europe with RLS as I turn pages and journey with him in my imagination. 

 

In his Samoan compound, where evening prayers were part of daily life, writer Robert Louis Stevenson soon tired of formulaic recitations and began writing his own prayers. Here is the last one he wrote, the day before he died: 

 

When the day returns, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to labor, happy, if happiness be our portion, and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

 

Really, what more can we ask?

Comfort in Many Places

Hilltop trees jump to life in morning light.

Can you identify the trees?

Books come to me in many ways, and just yesterday I received one in the mail from acquaintances in Traverse City, lovely people I don’t know very well but met back when I had my bookstore on Union Street for a couple of years. The book they sent me is called Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Writers, by brothers Dave and Jack Dempsey. Among the famous are my beloved Bruce Catton and my equally beloved Liberty Hyde Bailey. Among the forgotten I read about Maritta Wolff and resolve to read some of her books. It was a comfort to receive this unexpected gift in the mail when I was feeling sad.

There are poets, too, in the book. One of them is Jane Kenyon, included by virtue of time she spent in Ann Arbor at, of course, the University of Michigan. And in her brief poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” I find further comfort:

I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. 

 Now there is no more catching one’s own eye in the mirror, 

 there are no more bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of course, 

no illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing 

 of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket.  

The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, 

 and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.

Our friend’s graveside service was held this morning at the little country cemetery on Horn Road, in the neighborhood (there is no town) unofficially known as “East Leland,” under a cloudy sky but with bright fall colors and loving hearts all around. Along with traditional Jewish prayers, there was Woody Guthrie music and this poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me  

and I wake in the night at the least sound  

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,  

I go and lie down where the wood drake  

rests in his beauty on the water,  

and the great heron feeds.  

I come into the peace of wild things  

who do not tax their lives with forethought  

of grief. I come into the presence of still water  

and I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Good poetry comforts without misrepresenting either life or the world. A poem about death, Kenyon’s “Notes from the Other Side” is, in fact, a litany of some of the large troubles and small, troubling anxieties the poet faced toward the end of her life. The “first clod of earth [that] hits the casket,” hard as it is to see and hear, is the ushering out of all those woes. Wendell Berry seeks peace and beauty in nature to counter his middle-of-the-night despair and anxiety, knowing – don’t we all realize it as we read this poem? – that he will have to go again and again to the wild things for comfort. I love his use of the personal pronoun ‘who’ at the beginning of the line explaining why the wild things are so peaceful.

In times of grief, it is often the small, unexpected phrase or image that clutches at the heart. At the request of one of the daughters, as mourners were taking turns dropping shovels-full of dirt on the lowered casket, the rabbi began to sing “This Land is Our Land,” and, quietly, many of the mourners joined in, smiling. I was taken by surprise by the line about the “No Trespassing” sign. It jolted me because of a sudden, vivid association with the last walk I’d taken with my friend. We were on one of my favorite back roads, walking by the roadside as it runs along private posted land, my dog on her leash, and my friend suggested we walk out into the field. “I don’t think anyone would mind, do you?” she asked me with a smile, eyes twinkling, adding, “under the circumstances.” The circumstances were her imminent death and what turned out to be our last country walk together, but yes, the memory is comforting.

Our dog, my constant companion, is always a comfort to David and me.

Sarah is so patient! And much cuter than my poor drawing of her.

Last hawkweed?

As it was for my departed friend and is for Wendell Berry, nature is a comfort for me, too. Colors are bright even under cloudy skies, and there is color in small dabs as well as in panoramic scenes. Not only trees but also leaves of asters and goldenrod and forsythia give color to warm us before winter's cold arrives.

Surprise fall color radiates from neighbor's forsythia.

A close look shows goldenrod foliage turning, too.

Even without color, lines are fascinating.

Teapot

I find peace and comfort in my drawing class, in the practice of drawing, and in homework for the class, even when the assignment is to draw an old shoe. The instructor selected a shoe for each student. We had to take the shoe home Wednesday night to finish the drawings and will return with drawings and shoes next week.

Athletic shoe (my drawing, but not my shoe)

Adored husband, dear family and friends, familiar and lovely surroundings we never take for granted – another day of love and beauty, the value of these blessings is only underscored by difficulty and loss.

The Land Beneath Our Feet, Part III

The third book in my three-part review miniseries covers general land stewardship and responsibility, with most of the essays focusing on wilderness. Before reading this post, you may want to go back a few days and read some of the quotations I pulled from Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility, edited by Michael Katakis, that will not reappear today.

It is not a criticism of any essay in the book to say that the anthology as a whole lacks balance. The number of essays on fly-fishing could have been reduced to allow for a wider range of topics, producing a collection more representative of different regions and different kinds of stewardship. Farming, sadly, is not represented here at all, the state of Montana heavily overrepresented. That said, there is some excellent writing in these pages, and many important issues are raised and explored. I am not going to try to cover them all. Instead I want to select a few writers and ideas that are important to me and connect them to my two previous posts.

The only farmer contributor to Sacred Trusts is Wendell Berry, and his essay here is not about farming but about Christianity--and, I would add, Judaism, though he does not say so--and stewardship. Basically, Berry argues that the Bible makes a clear case that all of Creation is holy, all life holy, and that only misuse of the Bible leads to abuse of nature. Modern Christianity, he claims, does misuse the Bible with its narrow emphasis on the salvation of individual souls, counting larger Creation and smaller community as unimportant and disposable. A case against Judaism’s failure of stewardship would take a different direction, and I will neither make the case nor attempt to refute it but will stick to Berry’s argument.

There was at least one other essay in this book that mentioned a lack of stewardship teaching in--I’m sure the writer said--Sunday school. This struck me. I took note of the charge because my own religious experience growing up was very different. Ours was a fairly conservative German Lutheran congregation (my parents chose this church over my father’s upbringing in Methodism and my mother’s mother’s Catholicism), and I recall distinctly the references to stewardship, constant reminders that the earth and everything on the earth was the Lord’s, ours to use but also to protect and care for, and this teaching occurred not once but repeatedly--as did the old Lutheran minister’s warnings about “half-baked professors” who would tempt young college students away from their faith! That was the first time I heard the term “half-baked,” and to this day whenever I hear it I remember that first reference. But the same is true whenever I hear the term “stewardship.” I was taught the concept in Sunday School long before hearing of it in a college environmental ethics class.

Well, a small point. I do agree with Berry that saving individual souls for heaven is a terribly narrow concern, hardly geared toward taking earthly responsibilities seriously, and he is right to say that many draw a sharp line between Creator and Creation, claiming to worship the first while feeling free to denigrate the second. Honestly, though, I would rather have had one of Berry’s essays on farming in this book. As the collection stands, it is woefully incomplete, lacking any discussion of agriculture or food production.

On to the strengths.

The opening essay, “Into the Trees,” by Mary Catherine Bateson, is outstanding. Bateson’s subject is death, the changes that medical technology has brought to dying and the danger of our apparent “victories” over death. Her subject is also forests, their complexity, the necessary presence of death in their midst and the terrible possibility that we could lose them.

I knew people in my childhood who died, and I saw their bodies laid out for mourners. I learned something of death by reading the poems of a friend who committed suicide and from the death soon after birth of a premature son. But I did not begin to learn about dying until the death of my father. He had been impatient for years of medical and dental care, so his body was a clear testimony to aging. At the end, his death was expected and accepted, awaited without tubes and monitors, shared as an extraordinary gift. If my own aging brings me closer to him, does it bring me closer to the trees and to the forest?

Every tall tree is my father now.

That sentence, “Every tall tree is my father now,” is repeated through the essay like a response to more detailed thoughts, almost like “We pray to the Lord,” spoken by a congregation at various points in a longer spoken prayer. Every other sentence occurs but once--for example, “Death is like gravity, shaping and balancing our lives.”

Last Sunday’s “Quotation Potluck” included Bateson’s observation that a forest is unthinkable without death, and later in her essay she refutes the idea that the simple replanting of trees by lumber companies ensures the continuation of a forest.

In this system no trees will be allowed to mature like the ancients, and the elders of the forest will not be permitted to die and melt into the ground.

Some of my photographic images on Sunday may have seemed strange to anyone who missed the connection to Bateson’s words about death. I had photographed broken limbs, fallen trees, rotting stumps, fungi and dead leaves.

It is hard to imagine how those who live by the rejection of mortality and fallibility can care for and protect our natural landscapes. Surely they may be tempted to turn them into manicured parklands, to remove the signs of decay.... Surely the temptation to cut and clear and destroy, the assertion of power, is a rejection of the inevitability of death....

In the life of the forest, nothing is lost. One day, I too want to be a tree.

My time will come to die, the writer says. Death comes to all things in turn, in time, and from death new life springs.

Another essay that stands out is, I’m glad to say, by a writer I know, poet and native Michigan son Dan Gerber. Dan begins “Walking in Tierra del Fuego” with a series of questions. Perhaps the most penetrating question he asks, and the one his essay attempts to answer is this: “What does stewardship mean in a world in which change is not only the condition but the definition of life?” Gerber points out, as did Bateson, the consequences of human beings’ failure to limit their sacrosanct “right to reproduce, to overreproduce.” He tells of his realization that places he first loved as wild country or simply as quiet human habitats (Key West on his first visit) had looked very different fifty years before and would look different to people coming upon them fifty years later. He writes of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, the northernmost part of it a short walk from the house he lived in at the time he wrote the piece, and he recognizes the importance of having this beautiful shoreline accessible to anyone seeking even “the illusion, at least, of a little solitude.” I have written before of Sleeping Bear, Good Harbor Bay, and the old farms and woodlands now within the Lakeshore boundaries and how grateful I am to have that expanse of ungated, condo-free natural beauty.

Gerber brings another critical facet to the discussion, however, and that is the mind of the seeker of wilderness.

Often when I walk out from my house into the hills surrounding it, I discover after twenty minutes or so that I have taken the house with me, have taken the unanswered letters and telephone calls, the windows that need caulking, the slights I suffered last week, the things I should have said but didn’t, the things I plan to say next week but probably won’t. ... It doesn’t matter whether the ground I’m walking over is planted alfalfa or wild knapweed, whether the trees are virgin or second growth. If I am not aware of them, not conscious of their consciousness, nature doesn’t exist for me, though I may be walking in Tierra del Fuego.

Oh, doesn’t this hit home? The times I have left the house to walk across fields and through woods and realized to my dismay that “I have taken the house with me”! And yet, I also find a happier possibility here. In the same way that I might fail to be aware of nature’s existence in Tierra del Fuego or the most magnificent virgin forest, I can also lose myself in nature though it be only an old two-track between orchard and woodlot or a well-worn trail through a tract of public land. What are those lines from William Blake’s poem? “To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower”?

Since 1993 when these essays were published (coincidentally, the year Dog Ears Books first sprang to life on Waukazoo Street in Northport), Dan Gerber has left Michigan for Montana and is, I’m sure, very happy there, but for those of us still here, Michigan continues to offer a host of opportunities to experience nature’s power to those who bring an open heart to it.


Another writer in this book whom I know somewhat (and why not single out those whose lives have crossed mine?) is Guy de la Valdene, who tells here of the 800 acres of northern Florida land he manages for bobwhite quail. (His full-length book with the same title, For a Handful of Feathers, was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1955.) In former times this rolling land produced cotton, cattle, tobacco, peanuts and corn. What Guy plants now is not intended for market but to enrich bird habitat. He uses heavy equipment or fire, as necessary, to accomplish desired changes; his land, though tailored to the needs of wild birds, is managed, modified, “sculpted,” and he makes no apology for what he does.

When all is said and done, it boils down to this: the farmer in me grows an annual crop of wild flying delicacies, and the hunter in me harvests a percentage of this fruitage; the businessman in me recognizes a losing proposition, and the child in me doesn’t give a damn.

Here is a lover of nature who plans and works (and hires others to work) like a farmer but with very unfarmerlike attitudes. I am not passing judgment: There are many varieties of stewardship, and I would love a chance to visit these semi-wild red hills, where it seems likely that this writer comes face to face with nature on his managed acreage.

Many contributors to this anthology, if not all, seek solitude and crave wilderness. The reader discovers one after another who desires to live without neighbors and to be the only fly fisherman on a stretch of wild river. But such solitude is increasingly rare, particularly as a way of life, and so, while one form of stewardship is devoted to preserving wild tracts of land, these writers also realize the paradoxical irony of doing so. Any preserved wilderness will attract great numbers of solitude seekers, and crowds of visitors, however well-intentioned and well-behaved, would seem to mitigate against a solitary wilderness experience, especially if we cannot manage to “leave the house behind” and “see eternity in a wild flower” and not get all bent out of shape when we encounter others in the same “wild” space, looking for the same experience we are there to find.

When I mentioned Sacred Trusts to a friend the other day and observed that there was an awful lot in it about Montana and fly-fishing, he smiled and said that fly-fishermen are in the forefront of wilderness preservation. Okay, I won’t argue. I do think, however, that “stewardship and responsibility,” the purported subject of the anthology, is much broader than wilderness preservation and requires more than that civilized human beings set aside preserves and refrain from despoiling nature.

I think back to the farmers and ranchers in Lisa M. Hamilton’s Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness and to the urgency of the case for topsoil conservation made by David R. Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. I reflect on farming’s essential role in the continuation of human life. And I remember the necessary intermingling of life and death in productive, fertile land. Yes, I too love forests and wild, uncultivated, unmanicured landscapes, but when it comes to stewardship and responsibility, the acceptance of cycles of life and death and rebirth, the importance of letting land rest and welcoming wild plants and animals to fencerows, it seems to me that the best farmers and ranchers in the world, those men and women committed to caring for their land as their grandchildren’s legacy and committed to their communities as permanent neighborhoods, are the foremost exemplars of those virtues. Who is more a steward of the land than the responsible farmer? And what greater responsibility to the earth and to life can there be?

This Passing Time Leaves Gifts Behind

In a week, we’ll set our clocks back. What’s 8:30 a.m. now will then be 7:30 a.m., so we will have more light in the mornings, if I’m working this out correctly. (When these matters come into the conversation, David pleads dyslexia. What’s my excuse?) I do know that this morning’s sunrise made my heart sing. The blinding light, the long shadows, and the blessed, blessed lack of wind all seemed like gifts on this first day of November.


The main item of our day today was a memorial service for friend and neighbor John Brabanec. David has always called John and Julia “the Helen and Scott Nearing of Leelanau County.” According to John’s obituary published in the Leelanau Enterprise,

John and Julia spent their honeymoon in Northport in July of 1948, returning many times to their Land of Delight before settling here permanently in 1975. Together they planted an orchard of 1100 apple and peach trees, became certified in organic practices and were the first to sell quality organic table fruit in Michigan.

It always meant a lot to me to see bushel baskets of their fruit at Oryana Food Co-op in Traverse City. Today, just inside the front doors of Trinity Congregational Church sat two of those familiar “Brabanec” baskets below a hand-lettered sign inviting everyone to “enjoy John’s apples.” Following the service, outdoors on the sidewalk, there were groups of people doing just that, biting into crisp, sweet fruit, the season’s bounty, as they continued their remembrances. I didn't take my camera to the church but brought my apple back to the bookstore to photograph before eating.


It was a long service but would have lasted all day if everyone who had something to say had had a chance. Wisely, the family chose from their own number and from a circle of close friends those who would speak. The stories were wonderful, some bringing tears, others laughter, many tears and laughter mixed together. Many speakers also read poems, most by Wendell Berry, novelist, essayist, farmer, and John’s favorite poet.

The prayers were wonderful, some from the Christian tradition, others Native American.

The music was wonderful, from the Celtic harp to the hymn “Amazing Grace” to the solo “Blue-Green Hills of Earth” to selections from John’s favorite musical, “Mary Poppins,” with the congregation invited to sing along with “Feed the Birds” and “A Spoonful of Sugar,” that second number a tribute to John’s devotion to hard physical labor and his insistence that his children learn its joys. Then Lennon and McCartney's "Let It Be."

John was a gift to everyone whose life he touched. His trees will live on, as will the example of his life. The epitaph chosen from Wendell Berry says it all:

Having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.