South (Bend) to North(port)--Home!

We had our first sight of a three-bottomed semitrailer on the blessedly short stretch of toll road we traveled (my opinion: a toll road should not be bumpy) between South Bend, Indiana, and the Middlebury turnoff. Eek!



North of Middlebury on two-lane we had to slow for farm machinery. I never mind that. In fact, I love it! “No farms, no food.” True. This feels more like home.

Lowry’s books (Tom Lowry, prop.), still serving community and visitors in the heart of downtown Three Rivers, Michigan, along with a newcomer, the Stray Dog Bookshop and Coffee Bar (Larry Nelson, prop.), back on a side street in Three Rivers. Stray Dog has used and antiquarian, Lowry’s has everything in the way of books and more besides. Both merit long stops.




Blue scilla were blooming in the yard of Kalamazoo friends. We sat out in the sun next to them (humans sat by flowers, that is), enjoying the moment. Dinner later with family was full of laughter and good humor, finishing off with lemon Easter cupcakes. Yea, Carson and Chelsea!

Yes, we are—back in Great Lakes country!

At a quick gas station stop outside Mesick for coffee to go, I couldn’t resist this brightly decorated donut. It looked like a holiday, appropriate to the day. The girl behind the counter apologized, saying she wasn’t all that good at making them yet and pointing out that the result was somewhat lopsided (I really couldn’t see that), adding with a smile, “But it was made with heart.” “And,” I replied happily, “it was made in Michigan!” to which she responded, “That’s important these days, isn’t it?” We exchanged comments on the beauty of the sunshine and parted, probably forever, and that’s the whole story. But imagine it differently: put an unhappy clerk who hates her job on one end or a rushed, impatient, surly customer on the other, and the brightness would have gone out of the day. As it was, I returned to the car smiling, buoyed up for the home stretch. Friendliness and goodwill from stranger to stranger, in small encounters such as these, are that powerful.

Look at this pile of snow! It’s filthy! So why does it bring a wide smile to my face, as if it were a blooming dogwood tree? David and I had both wondered how it would feel to come back Up North to the ragged end of winter, with everything still brown and squashed down (cattails in the wetlands, last year’s bracken at forest edges), patches of snow lingering, no green yet in the woods. Is it only thanks to the sunshine that it feels so good, that everything actually looks great to us, just as it is?



Our first sight of Grand Traverse Bay!



The colors of the Bay were practically tropical, ranging from deep blue through brilliant aquamarine through sparkling clear water through which we could see the sand bottom. “It’s never looked prettier!”



There’s the sign for Northport!



Snow in the woods….



…but crocuses blooming in the yard!

Time to Travel and Time to Work

These are the long days, the lengthening days, the days of late spring or early summer (depending on your point of view), and time for some of us to go into high work gear while others go on vacation. That’s okay: our playtime will come later, and right now Nature is working hard, too, making flowers, forming fruit, producing young. Here is a promise--raspberries soon:



My first work of the morning is outdoors, at home, watering gardens and hanging laundry out to dry in the sun. My only peony should open sometime today. Before I go home to see it this evening, there's an afternoon at the bookstore, continuing with some of the always-ongoing rearranging of books. Where to put them all? Which ones need to move? And where?



This Saturday is the Wine Festival in Leland. We're only one week away from the Friday, June 19, concert at the NCAC in Northport featuring the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Youth Ensemble, and the day after that, Saturday, June 20th, is the Maritime and Lighthouse Festival and Fish Boil in Northport, so if you’re anywhere near Leelanau, it’s time to start marking your calendar for the season’s big events. If you’re traveling far from Michigan, I have another idea to share. The item below appeared in my “Shelf Awareness” newsletter on Thursday morning.

The Gainesville Sun observed that "local book stores are alive and well--and destinations for area book lovers and collectors" in its report on regional used and rare bookshops.

"I still have customers who want to pick up a book and open it before they buy it," said O.J. Brisky, owner of Brisky's Books, Micanopy, Fla. "I also have customers who stop by when they are driving south in the winter and stop by again when they are heading north in the spring."

This article reminded me that a lot of people will be setting out on summer travels and that it’s a good time for me to give a reminder about bookstores David and I discovered or revisited on the road this past winter. Before that reminder, I should first note that you have to get off the highway and go into the town centers to find these and other small town gems. You won't find either small town America or independent bookstores out in Generic Big Box Expressway Land.

Okay, here they are, the winners, our bookstore discovers, from South to North:

Rainy Day Editions in Inverness, Florida

Poe House Books in Crystal River, Florida

O. Brisky Books in Micanopy, Florida

A Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia

Well Read and Well Fed, in Americus, Georgia

Viewpoint Books in Columbus, Indiana

Lowry’s Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

Stray Dog Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

When you stop in and browse and buy, before you leave tell the booksellers that Dog Ears Books in Northport, Michigan, sent you their way.

Very Rainy Sunday Morning

It’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s not good weather for a long dog walk (picture above is from yesterday morning), but the ambience is cozy for my continuing reading of The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan D. Spence, an account published in 1978 of events in a small region of rural China in the seventeenth century, T’an Ch’eng county, which in that time period simply could not catch a break. If it wasn’t flood, it was drought and famine or bands of roving butcher-bandits in search of plunder and victims of soldiers requiring to be fed and sheltered. One year after another, crops were lost, families starved or murdered, and still the taxes came due. Of the “observers” (as Spence calls his sources), P’u sung-ling is definitely my favorite. In his stories, miracle and fantasy come interpenetrate reality, and there are moments of prosperity and occasional happy endings. Surely the people of T’an Ch’eng, gone so long now, deserved prosperity and happiness as much as anyone! P’u did not have an easy life himself, and there is plenty of murder and misery, hardship and poverty in his stories, but even at that, in his fictional renderings he was kinder to T’an Ch’eng and to himself than Fate had been.


David and Sarah and I went for a slow county cruise Saturday night here in Leelanau, where fields of green alfalfa and lush corn, bales of hay, orchards bent down with cherries and sturdy, healthy livestock made a picture of prosperity and good fortune that contrasted sharply with my reading. If this rain keeps up too long, the sweet cherries will take on too much water and split, and growers’ hearts will break over the loss of a beautiful crop. Ironic, though, that the better the overall crop, the worse the price and vice versa. It seems perverse. In any case, no one in Leelanau will face starvation.


Dog Ears Books had a lot of visitors on Saturday. Many friends who had not been in Northport for a while showed up, along with one couple who had not visited before, Larry Nelson of Stray Dog Bookstore in Three Rivers, Michigan, and his wife, Nicola. (Bookman’s holiday!)


Between visitors, I found time during the day to be transported by lovely images in two big, beautiful books, Wildflowers of the Western Great Lakes, by James R. Wells, Frederick W. Case and T. Lawrence Mellichamp, and Fred Petroskey: A Leelanau Portrait, by G. R. Kastys, both of which seem rather expensive until one thinks of all the years of happiness each volume will provide. One of the joys of being a bookseller is to hold and turn the pages of books like these, to place them into new hands, and to send them on to new homes. I feel I am thus, in my modest way, sending joy out into the world.

Finally, I've photographed Queen Anne many times but never, I think, more successfully than this.