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!

It’s NOT All About Me

Ruby red osiers (red-twig dogwood)

It’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.

So began Robert Reich’s April 7, 2025, Substack post. It’s true he doesn’t mention what was happening in Gaza ten weeks ago—that wasn’t good news—but it’s hard to argue with what he does say about our world ten weeks ago. 

And now? Barbarians running amok throughout the federal government at all levels, slashing and burning, wreaking retribution wherever possible on particular states, universities, law firms, judges, and anyone else who has dared to stand for the rule of law against the lawless, monolithic attack, and now punitive tariffs on everyone from China to penguins. What can one little bookseller in a small, quiet village possibly hope to say to draw attention away from the national scene and toward her own small interests? 

Does she look dubious?

But I don’t want to divert your attention from the national scene! I want you to pay attention to it. If I include photographs of my dog now and then or images of beauty found in my country neighborhood to give you a reason to smile, that’s not because dogs and scenery are more important than imminent threats to our democracy (as well as our livelihoods) but simply because we need to remember, in the midst of chaos and horror and destruction, that our world, the basic reality being so egregiously attacked, has an essential goodness. 

As for why I include snippets of big news here that you can easily find elsewhere in far greater detail, it’s because I hope that at least one or two people who depend on (dis)information silos to guide their thinking—I cannot stop hoping—will find something I say, some random link I include, if not their stock portfolios tanking, a serious challenge to their ”God’s got this” complacency, because I know that many of them have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as do I, and surely they don’t want our country destroyed before those younger generations have a chance to enjoy a good American life. 

How many people do you know who are downsizing households and reducing material belongings so “the kids won’t have to deal with a mess” when they’re gone? Well, how about a country without respect for the Constitution, without freedom of expression, a country loathed by the rest of the world for not keeping its word? What parents want to see their kids having to deal with a mess like that? 

The Secretary of the Treasury (another billionaire—surprise!) does not think (my sentence should really end there, shouldn't it?) that ordinary Americans facing retirement “look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening” in the stock market. He thinks they don't pay attention to the market, which is somewhat like (although not quite as bad as) the Secretary of Commerce saying that only fraudsters complain about not getting their social security checks on time. What planet do these idiots live on?

Mr. Bessent, sir, Americans preparing to retire are paying more attention to financial indicators than you realize. And Mr. Lutnick, sir, your mother-in-law may not worry if her social security check doesn’t arrive on time, but many Americans rely on those checks to pay their rent. How out of touch with your fellow Americans can you possibly be? 

I’m thinking that right about now, with Social Security threatened and world trade in crisis, Americans who didn’t worry about international students or undocumented aliens being kidnapped without grounds for arrest and without any semblance of a trial—those Americans might be getting a little nervous now that their pocketbooks are threatened. People who were perfectly comfortable with nonstop lies, fear-mongering, and violations of the United States Constitution might not be quite so comfortable with value erased overnight from their own stock portfolios and retirement funds.

Many of us have long wondered what it would take, and maybe this is what it takes. Cart our immigrant neighbors off to prison in El Salvador; cut off funding and trash years of research into serious health issues; make the United States a pariah among nations—but my stock portfolio? My money? You’re messing with my money?! 

Yeah, well, if that’s what it takes, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their pocketbooks. If that’s what it takes for people to start paying attention to the Constitution, now is the time to wake up!

As for what inspired the absurd tariff plan that has the stock market in freefall, the true story would not be believed if it were written in a novel. The actual fiction writer may be offstage for a while (we can only hope), but for now the damage has been done. We’re told it will be GREAT “in the long run.” In the long run, of course, all of us will be dead, and our poor grandchildren will be left to put together whatever pieces of freedom might be left.

This is what happens, friends, when experience, knowledge, and solid background are considered as disqualifications for the highest positions in government. Take a look at the Cabinet and the advisors to the president. Just take a look. The rest of the world is looking on with horror!

Meanwhile, in my little corner of the big world, more snow arrived on Monday and a dear friend died. Time is inexorable. Larry Coppard, we will miss you in Northport, and your absence will be felt far from our village, as well, because a good man is hard to find and heartbreaking to lose. But every life well lived is an inspiration to others, and so the good life Larry lived will continue to light our hearts and our way forward.

The Artist called his dear friend Larry "Lorenzo"!

These are the things that matter: dear friends and family, principled human beings, the reassuring cycles of Nature, art and literature and music and memory and all the ways our souls live on past the body’s return to earth. 

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. In other words, tyrants come and go, but love remains.

A David Grath sky --

Postscript 4/10. Nope. I’m not done. Do you know what the president’s golf outings cost taxpayers? Do you know that the new 100% unqualified assistant director of the FBI, a big “strongman” podcaster, apparently needs a 24-hour, 20-man security team, no matter where he is or what he is doing? (Those guys don’t work for free.) Do you know that the Secretary of the Interior, at the same time that park rangers are being fired across the United States, has paid aides baking cookies for him on demand, because he has to have them warm? 

Oh, right! It’s all about cutting costs, trimming waste, making government more efficient. You believe that?  This, friends, is how autocrats rule: Living like pashas, they take from the people and give to themselves.

Happy New Year!

 

Northport, Michigan, December 31, 2024

We are a port town, so instead of dropping a ball, 

we will drop anchor at midnight. 

Happy new year, all! 

Note: Dog Ears Books will be closed on New Year's Day. 

Open again Thursday-Saturday, 11-3.

Catching Up -- Partway, At Least

Foreground: coreopsis. Background: Duck Lake.

When someone the other day told me she follows my blog, besides being surprised I was also chagrined to realize how far I’ve been falling behind on posting. It’s been almost two weeks. Yikes! That is not because nothing is happening! (Far from it. Quite the opposite.) Lots more news soon, but for now, here are a few notes from Northport and nearby.

 

 

First, the Blossoms

Old Dog Ears Books home, 1997-????

Coreopsis (opening image) are going crazy right now in Leelanau County. There is a corner down by Duck Lake (south of Leland, where M-22 meets M-204) that is almost solid gold, while in Northport, brilliant red poppies (immediately above) in front of Porcupine (once the home of Dog Ears Books, back in the late 1990s), on the corner of Mill and Nagonaba, are still vivid though beginning to fade. Spiderwort, on the other hand, will go on and on and on, something I really appreciate about spiderwort, along with the sculptural quality its leaves add to a vase of flowers, either wildflowers or blooms from the garden. There is more spiderwort in my old corner garden on the Nagonaba side, right next to this welcoming bench in front of Sally Coohon’s shop, Dolls and More (her building another of the many homes of Dog Ears Books over the years).

 

Other Northport News

 

Here on Waukazoo Street, our building is having a modest makeover. Fresh paint! Very nice! Deborah Ebbers, Studio and Gallery; Dog Ears Books; Red Mullein – all with a newly spiffed-up exterior as we head into the heart of summer.

Former Tribune, now Big Dipper

Ice cream! Northport will not be without ice cream this summer, as that wonderful Kevin Murphy (Kevin and Amy have New Bohemian Café on Waukazoo and the Omena Country Store in Omena) has teamed up with one of his café baristas to open the Big Dipper. Perfect name, isn’t it? Hard and soft ice cream, many brands and flavors. 

New restaurant, Faro, on SE corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba

 

Meanwhile the folks who used to be in that building where you’ll get your ice cream this summer, the Tribune gang, have moved down to the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba and are serving meals as Faro. 

 

And did we mention (probably not yet) that Northport is celebrating its 175^th birthday this summer? 

 

Today, For Me

 

Forty-four years ago, June 18, 1980, the Artist and I were married by a magistrate in the old downtown courthouse in Kalamazoo. I picked wildflowers in the early morning for our late morning civil ceremony. Our children were our witnesses. Afterward, a dear friend took us all out to lunch, and following lunch we, the newlyweds, went home to change into old clothes and work in the yard. You see, we had had our “honeymoon” trip to the U.P. long before (never mind how long), and working outdoors together on that lovely June day felt just fine – on a day very like today, with flowers blooming and sun shining…. 

Kalamazoo, June 18, 1980

All the Artist ever wanted to do was to make a living with his paintings, but we also fantasized for years about having a bookshop in a little town. Living in the country was another dream. Leelanau County? Could any of it ever come true? Years later, we made it all happen.

 

 

Reminder: Author Visit on Saturday

 

Bonnie Jo Campbell will be at Dog Ears Books this coming Saturday, June 22, signing her latest novel, The Waters, beginning at 1 p.m. We are fortunate that Bonnie found time in her busy schedule to come to Northport – her third visit to my bookstore! – so please come and make her welcome and buy a copy of her book. A few of you have already bought the book from me, so by all means bring it with you on Saturday, and she will sign it. If you have any pictures of donkeys, bring those along, too. Bonnie has donkeys, and they loom large in her legend (as Ringo said so memorably of his drums).

BJC at home as Lady Liberty! Isn't this the coolest?

More:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural noir, returns with the fierce, mesmerizing novel THE WATERS, a story about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp-an area known as "The Waters" to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan-herbalist Hermine "Herself" Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy "Donkey" Zook, to grow up wild. Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. With a "ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world" (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with donkeys. 

Total Immersion Recommended

[Note: Images in this post are photographs from my Leelanau home, not the world of downstate Whiteheart, but I tried to get as close in spirit as possible.]

 

Weeks passed between the day I received my ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel and the evening I finally gave myself the delayed pleasure of opening it and plunging into that rural mid-Michigan world, familiar to me not only from her previous books but also from my years spent in Barry and Kalamazoo counties. It’s a rather different world from Leelanau. The soil is different, the sun rises and sets over different landscapes, and the people inhabiting that world live different lives from most of Leelanau. Most. Not all. The thing is, Campbell’s world is one not often ventured into by American literature, but it's been there all along, waiting to be seen.

 

One of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story collections focused on men, another on women, all apparently lost souls to whose lives she brought great sympathy. Her novel Q Road gave us three protagonists -- a man, a young woman, and a boy -- along with a host of fascinating minor characters. Then came Once Upon a River, the novel completely owned by Margo Crane. 

 

The Waters is a different kind of story. Large and ambitious, containing themes and worlds both mythic and postmodern, The Waters gives us from Campbell, for the first time, an entire community, bound together -- and torn apart – and bound together again -- by its own unique history. A community seeking redemption and a way forward in difficult and uncertain times. They often have a hard time showing it, but these people care about each other.

 

The home of Hermine (not Hermione) Zook, healer and matriarch, is a bog island protected by a drawbridge. When local people come to her for healing medicines, consultations take place off the island, out by the house built and formerly lived in by Hermine’s husband, the legendary Wild Will Zook (long ago banished by his wife), a house he lived in alone until joined by Hermine’s oldest daughter, Primrose, who has also disappeared, moving across the continent to California. Molly, a nurse of modern medical ways, is the practical, nearby (and only biological) daughter. Finally, there is the lazy, lovely, magical Rose Thorn, golden-haired mother of eleven-year-old Dorothy, known as Donkey, a mathematical genius made nervous by infinity, a child being raised on M'sauga Island by Herself (Hermine).  

Donkey milks the cow, avoids eating meat, eavesdrops and spies on adults, and longs for a father. Titus is the father she wants, and the choice is logical (passionate Donkey tries hard to be logical), given the electricity that has always crackled between Rose Thorn and Titus. In this postmodern rural Michigan fairy tale, as in European fairy tales of old, however, missing fathers are a recurring theme. Never mind that the entire community of Whiteheart, Michigan, longs to see Titus and Rose Thorn together.

 

“Once upon a time” opens Chapter Zero: Prologue, and Chapter Six opens with an echoing “Once upon a time,” the phrase signaling both history and fabulism. Each chapter bears, besides its number, a sentence heading. Chapter One announces a crucial truth: “Rose Thorn always comes home.” Whiteheart can accept the absence of Wild Will Zook, but they need Rose Thorn. They need Rose and Titus together. This is where we begin.

 

Chapter One introduces us to Whiteheart. With the addition of Smiley, the barkeeper, the men drinking beers and pops at the picnic table outside the Muck Rattler Lounge after church on Sunday – Rick Dickmon, gun-totin’ Jamie Standish, Tony Martin (known as “Two-Inch Tony,” but not for reasons you might at first imagine), Whitey Whitby, pot-bellied Ralph Darling – constitute the core community we come to know as we read. The men reappear singly and as a group throughout the novel, their wives and girlfriends remaining in the background, along with Titus’s father and his Aunt Ada, but together they fill in a picture that foregrounds the reclusive healer and her three daughters. It is, however, Titus Clay to whom all local eyes turn. It is Titus, together with Rose Thorn, they believe, who will hold them together, if only --. But it is Rose Thorn, not Titus, who leaves and returns….

 

Old celery fields, a cranberry bog, a gravel truck that makes its regular run along Lovers Road (that truck reminds me of the caterpillars in Q Road, easily overlooked but a symbol of what life has become in this place), rumbling past Wild Will Zook’s empty house and the Boneset Table where Hermine leaves her cures to be retrieved by those in need. Farm fields and giant black willows. Somewhere in the background, the Old Woman River and pollution from a paper mill no longer in operation. Donkeys and wild, flowering plants, massasauga rattlesnakes (“muck rattlers,” Whiteheart calls them) and church-going people, unsure of what they believe but longing for beauty.

What will become of them all?

 

A customary request accompanying ARCs asks that reviewers refrain from making direct quotes, as changes may be made between advance copies and the book as later released to the public, and only that request and my bookseller conscience could have stopped me. But this post is not even, I realize, a book review, as I have written almost nothing about the conflicts and secrets that create a taut, suspenseful story line. So be it. I waited as long as I could before beginning this novel, because I knew before opening to the first page that I would not want it ever to end, and what I want for you, dear readers, is to have the whole of the pleasure, also, as you immerse yourself in The Waters, of coming to know the world of Whiteheart and its people for yourself, as I did. 

 

Before writing this post, I read no other reviews of The Waters (and still have not), though eventually I’m sure I will. For now, I am simply basking in the luxury of being a small-town bookseller and blogger rather than a paid reviewer who must meet certain conventional expectations. I am also happy, in my modest role of bookseller-blogger, not to be preparing a class in American literature, which would require me to trace out echoes of mythic themes that reverberate through the novel. 

 

(After you read this marvelous story, you may want to review the story in Genesis of the snake in the garden and explore other stories, as well, such as the Brothers Grimm tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” and the Lives of the Saints -- but please wait until after you have read the book! What you already know and what you find in the novel’s pages will be enough for your first time through. Just be immersed in the experience, please.)

 

Afterward. After-word. Ah, yes! I finished the last chapter of The Waters before going to sleep and saved the Epilogue to read the next morning. My last word today is that if an epiphany be tearful and inarticulate, that’s what I experienced. Stillness. Gratitude. Perfection.

 

The Waters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

W.W. Norton & Company

Janary 2024

Hardcover $30

I will happily take orders in advance for reserved copies!

Dear Faraway Friends

 

Sunday, November 26, 2023

 

Those of you as far from me geographically as Seattle, Washington … Tucson and Dos Cabezas, Arizona … northern and central Illinois … and, coming closer, Kalamazoo, Michigan … all of you are in my thoughts today, but Leelanau County and Traverse City friends seem “faraway,” too, as the first real snow accumulates in the yard and on the roof of my old farmhouse. I’m not feeling isolated. Cozy, rather. It’s so lovely, after a busy week, to have a whole day at home, me and Sunny Juliet, with nowhere else we need to be. -- Wait, wait, wait! I did not mean to forget those in Minnesota, New York State, the U.P, and Brazil!!!

 

Did I say it was a busy week? Monday was a trip to Traverse City for new snow tires. I took Frederick Franck’s Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing to read while the tires were being mounted, because just reading Franck’s books is a meditation -- actual drawing practice that much more so, however, and something I want to get back to this winter. Tuesday I cut a tiny little pine tree and took it to the bookstore, then cancelled agility class for Sunny and me, needing those four hours at home to mix cookie dough and shop for Thanksgiving. Wednesday was my day to decorate the bookstore tree, along with accepting deliveries of new books, and that evening I began preparations for the next day’s dinner. 

Like Charlie Brown, I love my little tree!

Because Thursday, of course, was Thanksgiving! A different kind of holiday for me this year, as I fixed turkey dinner for a friend and took it to his house to share the meal with him. This man was like a brother to the Artist for many years, they were that close, so I would tell people, “He’s like my brother-in-law,” and now he has forgotten the Artist and had no clue who I was, either. He knew me a few short months ago, but when I arrived at his house on Thursday afternoon, having called the previous Saturday to tell him I would be coming, he asked, “Do we know each other? Do you live around here?” When I reminded him it was Thanksgiving, he was astonished. Still, he was pleased to have company, and his appetite was good. It was strange to be with someone so familiar to me, whose house is so familiar to me, as well, a friend with whom the Artist and I shared many holidays past, but for whom I am now become a stranger. How much more difficult it must be for family members in such a situation….

 

Friday evening was a cookie baking session with my friend Susan, accompanied by lots of visiting, naturally. (Susan and I shared happy memories!) Then at last came Saturday! Horses in Northport! (Sadly, for me, on a shorter loop this year that did not include Waukazoo Street, but I think that was to avoid long wait times for all the families who wanted the horse-drawn village tour.) Activity gatherings and open houses all through the town! And at 6 o’clock, Santa turned on the tree lights. What a day!

Carolers at the bookstore

Darkness falling...

Fire truck in front of bookstore, blocking traffic...

Passerby stopping to admire artist Deborah Ebbers's work...

Crowd awaiting Santa and tree lights...

Our beautiful village tree!!!
 

So you see why I was ready for a Sunday of rest!

 

After busy days all week I turned at bedtime to re-reading: Ellen Airgood’s The Education of Ivy Blake and Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog. Two very different works of fiction, but both favorites of mine, with characters I love and satisfying but not simplistic conclusions. Writers whose work means a lot to me. Another comforting young person’s novel was Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. Enright really knew her botany! Then, beginning Friday night, came a first-time read, The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse, by Alexander McCall Smith, Not one from any of his series but a stand-alone tale from World War II England and Germany -- and not sugar-coated, either, but still, in the most difficult decisions his characters must make and in the complicated emotions they experience, delivered with Smith’s characteristic gentle wisdom. Peter Woodhouse, by the way, is a dog….

 

Now two nonfiction books, both begun but neither more than one-quarter read yet, await. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, needs no introduction or explanation. The other, Beyond the Outer Shores, by Eric Enno Tamm, is the story of the man who inspired Steinbeck’s “Doc” in Cannery Row, and I’m learning a lot more about Steinbeck, too, namely, his friendship with Ed Ricketts and their collaboration on tidewater collecting expeditions. Fascinating. 

Ricketts and Steinbeck on the Pacific shoreline, Enright delighting in her bogs. For me the natural world these days is snowy meadow, woods, and orchard -- 

And yet, although I could not possibly be more at home than here in my Leelanau farmhouse, it felt strange this month not to be crossing the country from Great Lakes to Southwest, as the Artist and I had done for several years and as I did once again last year with Sunny Juliet, from the north woods and Great Lakes to prairie to Great Plains to high plains and mesa lands and finally mountains. My little ghost town neighborhood, our “mountain family,” so far away! One friend there sent me a Thanksgiving video her son made of wildlife in their yard (deer, fox, coati mundi) and her house and yard and the entire ghost town from a drone overhead, a video I know I’ll watch over and over. The music with it is perfect, too.

Other years ... another life

But here I am in my own beautiful home place! And it is snowing! What kind of a winter will it be? I remember my first northern Michigan winter, Traverse City in 1970-71, when it was never not snowing, whenever I looked out a window, and the icicles grew like stalactites from roofs to the ground. Bundling up my toddler to pull him on his little sled to the tiny Oleson’s store on Front Street a couple of blocks from our house was an expedition that consumed half a morning! 

 

Whatever comes this year, right now it’s good to be in a warm house, looking forward to homemade turkey soup and meanwhile catching up on desk work and housework, with periodic breaks for outdoor dog fun. Winter is underway, my friends. And when spring comes again, we older ones will be looking back and saying that, in retrospect, winter flew by. I already know that will be true.

 

May everyone traveling today be prepared and safe, and may the freeing of hostages from Gaza continue with maximum happy results -- until all are once again home.