Winter has arrived! Are you prepared?

Winter is all around us.

A friend of mine goes places in her car in winter in her indoor clothes, adding only a down vest. No gloves or mittens. No knitted cap. No heavy jacket. “I’m in the car!” she tells me. I ask her, “What if you had car trouble?” and she replies, “I would use my cell phone!” 

So wiper blades don't freeze to windshield overnight....

By contrast, I am not only layered up for driving but have an extra pair of work gloves with me in case I need to, say, open the hood—or get that shovel out of the back of the car to dig myself out of a snowbank—or whatever! Yes, I have a shovel with me. (No sandbags, but I figure I could use the car’s floormats, if necessary. Sandbags are very heavy.) Also engine oil, windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, flashlight, and jumper cables. The bottle of drinking water, for myself and my dog, if she happens to be with me, has to come in the house overnight, or it would be just a bottle of ice, and who needs that in an emergency? (Note to self: Put blanket in car!) I take my clue from the old Tom Lehr song, “Be Prepared!”

 

On the evening of the day of his state funeral, I began reading Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Keeping Faith, about his years in the White House. I have had the book for several years but hadn’t read it because, while I have always loved Jimmy, I am usually bored by political memoirs. Too many big names, too many dates, generally not much that is personal, not much to give me insight into the writer’s personality and character. 

 

I’m happy to say that Carter’s book is very different. For one thing, he wrote it himself. It isn’t the work of a ghost writer. For another, he begins at the end, leading off with the most painful episode of his presidency, the hostage crisis. How many presidents would ever have done that? In the first pages of his memoir, he shows himself at his most vulnerable. And, of course, by then he has already lost his bid for re-election, so as the hostages are being released, he is onstage at the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Hardly a moment of glory for Carter. But he had done the work, and the hostages were freed and came home alive.

 

He was never one to take shortcuts or “fake it,” in any of his life roles. He took the job of president of the United States seriously, writing of his preparation:  

 

From the beginning, I realized that my ability to govern well would depend upon my mastery of the extremely important issues I faced. I wanted to learn as much as possible…. (p. 57 of the Easton Press edition)

 

In his first campaign for the presidency, coming to national politics from the governorship of Georgia, Carter was so confident that he would win the White House that many called him overconfident. Yet he wrote that his “freedom to act and speak during the campaign was severely restrained by the same confidence.” What could that mean? How and why would confidence of victory restrain his freedom to act and speak? Precisely, again, because he took so seriously the job of president.

 

I ran as though I would have to govern—always careful about what I promised and determined not to betray those who gave me their support. Sometimes I irritated my opponents and the news reports by firmly refusing to answer to questions to which I did not know the answers. And repeatedly I told reporters, ‘If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president.’ Even during the earliest days I was always thinking about what would have to be done in the Oval Office after the inauguration ceremonies were over. (p. 65)

 

It drove reporters crazy that he would occasionally “I don’t know” to a question. What he needed to know, he worked to find out. What he couldn’t know ahead of time, he admitted. But always, as he campaigned for the highest office in the land, he prepared himself not only to win but to govern.

 

My life is ever so much simpler. I prepared for winter with snow tires, a new furnace, and a refill of my propane tank. Good thing, because in keeping with yo-yo weather patterns of recent months, our temperate winter weather over the holidays in northern Michigan has now given way to January temperatures in the ’teens, with single-digit wind chill (or “feels like”) readings. 

We have wind chill!

("When I was a kid," I used to tell my son, "we didn’t have wind chill!" That is, of course, we didn’t have a name for it. What would the word ‘rose’ name if there were no more roses?)

She doesn't mind snow or cold.

Dogs, though. A dog is like the legendary postman: Whatever the weather, out we go, and little does Sunny Juliet suspect how slight is her dog mom’s inclination for outdoor adventures in a punishing, sub-freezing northwest wind, sun perpetually hidden above low-hanging clouds of depressing gunmetal grey! I make my voice enthusiastic and let her watch me load my pocket with treats.... 

 

She doesn't mind at all.

Every day of our human lives, in one way or another, we are preparing for days to come, aren’t we? For me, Sunday was housework (an attempt to keep entropy at bay), Monday paperwork (getting ready for tax time), and Tuesday an early morning expedition, sans dog, to Leland to have a new (working) headlight installed, which gave me an opportunity while my car was at Van’s Garage to have coffee and breakfast in what was formerly the Early Bird (now Great Lakes Chocolate & Café) and to sit in the very corner where the Artist and I sat so many, many mornings in past years. 

View from the "bus driver's seat" --

The restaurant has not been the Early Bird for a long time, but after we moved from the village of Leland out to Leelanau Township in 2021, the Early Bird routine was no longer part of our lives, and more recent incarnations of the place never really registered on my radar. Anyway, the building has the same configuration, and the view from what the Artist used to call the “bus driver’s seat” (no booths now, but I hitched my chair around to face north) is pretty much the same. I should have been prepared for the flood of memories, but the emotions caught me off-guard. 

Then, home to books and dog! I am so lucky to have a warm, sheltering home and a lively, affectionate little companion! I still inhabit the life the Artist and I made together, and Wednesday will find me back in Northport, on Waukazoo Street, in my other little world, surrounded by books. 

Be prepared!

Voluptuous Winter Pleasures

Indoors, winter need not be monochrome.

Long Days, Long Trails

 

Though winter days be the shortest of the year, they often seem longest, when for days on end we see not the sun. –The voice of that sentence, although I am its author, is an echo of the long book that occupied my bedtime reading for a week, a novel written in the late 19^th century, its story set in the 15^th. But more of that anon!

 

Back to the present year, 2025, Sunny and I encountered a pair of interwoven coyote trails one recent January morning. I noticed that one animal of the pair had veered briefly from the straightaway to leave a circular path before returning to its mate’s side. What was the motivation for that detour? I could spot no clue.

Can you see the circle?

Closeup of tracks

We see—and Sunny Juliet scents—the trails of many neighbors in the snow this time of year. We discovered a wild turkey trail on Christmas Day. Deer, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, mice, and more live near us all year ’round. It is in winter, though, that the paths they take appear most sharply to me, an eye-dependent explorer.

Her nose tells alerts her to secrets hidden in the snow.

What did you find, girl?

 

Long Creations and Events

 

Thinking how to ease into a discussion of long books, I considered other ways that life’s gifts are enriched by length of time spent on them. Long friendships came first to mind. Then long travels and long residences in particular places: an entire month spent in Paris on my first trip to France; the months the Artist and I spent in our rented mountain cabin in an Arizona ghost town for several winters; past years in Kalamazoo and recent decades in Leelanau. For me there was one year, beginning in January, when I spent an hour each week sitting outdoors in one place, with only a sketchbook in which to make occasional notes, the object being awareness of everything around me in the natural world. Not rushing from one encounter to another or one place to another but immersing oneself over time: That is the common thread, also to be found in reading a long book.

The Artist had a gift for friendship!

Long, Slow Books

 

Are long books also always slow books? Maybe others have thoughts on this question. I do think the long book generally invites slow reading. When I first came across The Flowering of New England, by Van Wyck Brooks, earliest (I believe) of his volumes of American literary history, it seemed to take forever to get underway, and for a while I was impatient at his slow setting of the stage, until finally it dawned on me that this was not mere introduction but the overall pace of the book, and my reading spirit slowed to an almost voluptuous pace as the author carried me back in time. Delicious!

When a friend wanted me to read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, at over a thousand pages, I quailed at the prospect. “Just read the first hundred pages,” she urged. I was thoroughly hooked long before that, and while I thought the novel would last me a complete summer, the month of June saw me from start to finish. Still, an entire month! At that pace, my year’s reading list would be very short! But the aim of a list is not to make it as long as possible, only to keep a record. (Note: I do wish Seth would make good on his promise of a sequel to that story, and I would happily give it a month or even an entire season!)

 

Book lovers of the long and the slow can hardly omit Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, though I admit I have read and re-read only the first and last volumes of that monumental work. The first volume alone constitutes a long book, not to be hurried through. Proust took pages to describe the angle of light coming through a window, a description which, like descriptions of hand-to-hand fighting in books of swashbuckling adventure, take much more time to put into words than the incidents would take in living time. 

 

But that’s just the point. We’re not in a hurry. We are giving ourselves time! Delicious! And while I read A Suitable Boy in June, winter is the more obvious season for a long, slow book.

 

A Forgotten Classic

 

And now I come back to the sheep I left grazing in the first paragraph of this post. 

 

Describing Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth is a tall order. It is a love story; a tale of innocence lost and redemption found; an epic of the road and a “buddy movie” on printed pages. It is an exposé of the absurdities of war and religion, as well as an encomium for true bravery and piety; a tale of danger and adventure, with cliff-hanger episodes; and a soap opera of characters we come to know better and better as we progress with them through time and their lives’ changes. How likely is it that the hired assassin would be the husband and father of the woman and child the intended victim saved from death in a storm at sea? How believable that the masked woman seeking to wash the wandering friar’s feet as an act of penitence for her sins would be the woman who hired the assassin to kill this very man? In all of Europe, throughout all the countries encompassed by this meandering, melodramatic tale, a small cast of characters intersect again and again, as in a television soap opera—or, truly, in the stories of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens—but a reader accepts these amazing coincidences, as we do in Hugo or Dickens, realizing that the meetings are integral to the story being woven, a story in which every page draws us further in. We as readers find ourselves deeply invested in these people and their conflicts. 

 

The single illustration in the Modern Library edition.

What do you think of Chaucer? Maybe find his language difficult? Reade’s on-the-road chapters are written in English close enough to our own that they are much easier to read, with plenty of adventure, danger, violence, humor, and vivid characters that make the Middle Ages seem not so very different from our own times, though there is a strong flavor of Canterbury Tales, as well as echoes of Don Quixote. 

 

I would say more and urge all my friends to seek out this novel, but I realize that an 1880s bestseller, set in the 15^th century, has tough competition with so many new books—and worthy, too!—coming out continuously in our own times. I do, however, recommend it, along with Proust, along with Vikram Seth, along with Van Wyck Brooks, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and others. While Blustery winds blow, you can give yourself a travel vacation without leaving home.

"Except for outdoor adventures, right?"

Books to Own

 

My last post contained a paragraph on libraries, with the admission that one need not always buy a book in order to read it, and yet all of us who are lifetime readers surely have a few books that we must own. The list may be short or long and would vary from person to person and household to household. In our home, the Artist and I always had more than one copy of Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, along with its human equivalent, Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat. I had my Proust, of course, and the Artist his Painting Nature’s Quiet Places, by Thomas Aquinas Daly. Jane Austen and Jim Harrison share shelf space in our home. How many copies of Malabar Farm have I bought and given away? The Artist loved to read Machiavelli but also the Tao Te Ching. In the last weeks of his life, I had finally persuaded him to read The Little Prince, and as he lay unconscious in the hospital I read aloud to him from one of his lifetime favorites, The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

One reading corner in our old farmhouse

My personal copy of The Cloister and the Hearth, Modern Library edition, will not be offered for sale in my shop. Text block having parted company completely with binding boards, the book came home with me because of that condition, an orphan I could neither sell nor discard, and I am so glad that it did! The condition was another feature that suited it for life in the slow reading lane and led me to begin reading it at last. After all, Modern Library—how could it not be worth my time?

 

Rubber band holds cover to text block on this orphan volume.

Are you immersed in a long book yet this winter? Maybe instead, several of moderate length? What books call your name when the temperature remains stubbornly below the freezing mark for days on end?

 

For my thoughts on the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, visit one of my other of my blogs. Thank you for taking this time with me today.

The book I began reading Thursday evening

As We Begin a New Year

Domestic vs. Wild 

 

Let’s lead with Sunny Juliet, looking back to see how far behind her momma is. We start out untethered when we leave the house, but I have taken to employing the leash on return to ensure that we arrive home together. Sunny doesn’t try to evade the leash. Neither captive nor wild canine, she generally accepts what I propose--though if her opinion differs from mine she will let me know. Oh, yes, Sunny still has opinions!

When she was an opinionated little puppy...

On the evening of Christmas Day—not Christmas Eve but late Wednesday, on our final sortie of the holiday at home—Sunny and I were startled to hear from across the fields a terrifying scream. Not a hooting owl or a yipping coyote but something neither of us had heard before, and I had to do some online searching later, back in the house, to identify the sound as coming from a fox. Talk about the hair standing up on the back of your neck! A screaming fox is a truly alarming wild sound!

 

When we’d started out the first time that day for our morning walk, the bells of St. Wenceslaus greeted us, so our Christmas Day 2024 was bookmarked by two very different voices in our country neighborhood, morning church bells and evening fox scream.

 

 

Bookstores and Libraries Are Not in Competition!

 

Once again the other day, someone in my bookstore referred to our township librarian as my “competition,” and once again I made my usual correction: The correct term is colleague. Booksellers and librarians are colleagues, not competitors. Other booksellers with bricks-and-mortar stores are also colleagues, not competition. (The online behemoth is something else.) There is no necessity for buying every single book you want to read, and I use the library myself. On the other hand—and I should probably explain this, too, when I make the point about librarians being my colleagues—a house without family books is incomplete as a home, and all children deserve to have a few books of their very own, books that belong to them. I’m not going to repeat today everything I’ve written before about bookstores and libraries, though, so here’s a link if you want more than this one paragraph.

Leelanau Township Library on Nagonaba St.

 

Past Light on Present Days

 

Living wholly in the past is incompatible with sanity, but living wholly in the present is no great shakes, either. Give up memories? Give up history? No, thank you. I spent a good part of 2024 in 18^th- and 19^th-century North America, through both fiction and nonfiction, motivated in part by a wish to retreat from the 21^st century, but also, as there is no escaping one’s own time, again and again in my reading finding events and thoughts from our nation’s past shedding light on our present. 

 

It was James Boyd’s novel, Drums, set in the early 1770s, that got me started. My main takeaway from this book was that ours is a country that was born splintered and divided. Not every American wanted to break away from England. All on the North American continent did not see eye to eye with each other. Then I read Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi, a volume from the “Rivers of America” series, and that strengthened my insight about our divided origins. What we usually learn in school about the region of our country covered in Carter’s book begins only with the Louisiana Purchase and visits the area only once again, briefly, for the Battle of New Orleans but otherwise? The Lower Mississippi, by contrast, concentrates on a complete history along the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, with a cast of characters including Spanish, English, French, European-American, African-American, and Native American, with economic and military and political plans and objectives creating dissension at every turn. A country born divided….

 

Neither Daniel Mason’s North Woods and Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River is set exclusively in the 18^th century, but both continue a theme, for me, of the ways in which politics and war impinge on individuals and families and leave marks that endure sometimes past specific memories. While Mason’s time scope is broad, he limits his spatial canvas to a few acres of woods in western Massachusetts. Lawhon also places her two main speaking characters, both Black women, in a small community, a Canadian village peopled exclusively by refugees from American slavery. As different as they are, both novels incorporate voices and stories from far away and long ago, Mason more chronologically, for the most part, Lawhon in a brilliant, dizzying splendor of tales told and read within other stories shared, stories from the Underground Railway, the War of 1812, and complex relationships between indigenous peoples and those escaping slavery. Neither of these novels offers simple reading, but the challenges they present are well worth the effort.

 

Also during 2024 I read a couple of accounts by Englishmen who spent in the early United States and Canada. One of them, disappointed in his hopes for clerical preferment in his native land, hoped for more success in the U.S. but, again disappointed, moved to Canada and might have made a permanent home, except that his wife did not find Canadian life sufficiently civilized. Disappointed in their hopes, they returned to England after only a few months in the New World. The other man had no intention of transferring his allegiance to America, but he made a thorough, three-year tour of the country, including the Southern slave states and the Western frontier. If one were going to read only one of the two accounts, I recommend that of James Stuart, Three Years in North America, over the bare three-month account of the more self-seeking Rev. Isaac Fidler.

 

Margaret Van Horn Dwight’s A Journey to Ohio in 1810 told in diary form of her travels from New Haven, Connecticut, to Warren, Ohio, and was as entertaining as it was eye-opening. We like to think that settlers of that time were sober, God-fearing folk, but Margaret tells over and over of Sabbath drunkenness and “so much swearing … I have never heard before during my whole life,” such that when she encounters a Pennsylvania Dutchman not given to profanity she is amazed. As Margaret was traveling with a deacon and his wife, she had a few observations to make on religion and the clergy, but hers is a very personal account, written for her best friend; however, while not pretending to be anything else, it is a vivid picture of travel at the time. 

 

And then I come to a 2007 ARC, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again, by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes. I am only halfway through this little paperback (which is already on my current new book order list), but the authors’ claims are that (1) the writing of the Constitution should be regarded as a second American Revolution and that (2) the Constitution’s ideas are our national political conscience—“conflict within consensus, compromise, representation, checks and balances, [and] tolerance of debate.” The authors wrote their book, they say, because they see Americans “losing touch” with these basic Constitutional values, “most particularly a commitment to compromise and a tolerance for competing ideas.” 

 

Michigan’s Representative Dan Kildee, who has served the 8^thdistrict in the state Congress for twelve years, said in a recent radio interview that he thinks citizens often mistake disagreement for dysfunction, that disagreement is valuable and only becomes dysfunction when legislators place a higher priority on ideology than on collaborating and compromising to solve problems. This accords with Oreskes and Lane’s thesis. Unfortunately, what we see in Congress these days has been exactly that: an exaltation of ideology and a refusal to compromise.

 

The Framers of the Constitution debated the question of state power and federal power: Which should have priority? In what areas? They wrangled over how states would be represented in the national legislature—equally or according to population—and whether to have one legislative house or two. And when all the compromises had been accomplished and the Framers were reasonably content with what they had put together, they submitted their document to the American public, some of whom still hoped that their new government would have a king at its head. After all, monarchy was the form with which they were familiar. 

 

“No other nation,” the authors note, “had ever submitted its Constitution to its people.” Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the various state constitutions had been submitted for popular ratification. Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death”) was appalled (“inflamed,” the authors write) by the phrase “We the people,” which he saw as pledging allegiance to a centralized power at the expense of the states. And “in the fall of 1787 the People were divided.” There was strong feeling among many that the Constitution needed the addition of a Bill of Rights—and yet the Constitution had to be ratified by the states before it could be amended, and it took until 1791 before the amended Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, was finally ratified. 

 

Had it not been for compromises all along the way, the Constitution of the United States would never have come into being at all.  

 

What would a Constitutional Convention look like today? Here are a few thoughts (not mine). 

 

 

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

 

Many, many people found their way to Northport and to Dog Ears Books for the first time in 2024. What was most gratifying to me personally was how many people, both newcomers and repeat visitors, expressed appreciation and gratitude for my bookshop’s existence and the quality of its offerings. That’s a good feeling, knowing that what you are doing with your life matters to other people, and I had that good feeling frequently in the past year. Thank you so much, friends! It means more to me than I can express in words! 

Now, on the way to the 32^nd anniversary of Dog Ears Books in July 2025, I’m here for another winter, with a short week and short hours while the nights are long and the village streets—let’s say, “uncrowded.” 

The shop will be closed on Thursday, January 9, for our national day of mourning and the state funeral of President Jimmy Carter. 

After that, barring holidays, the winter schedule will be Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (weather and roads permitting, of course). And new book orders only once a month during the winter. That’s the plan.

 

Again, thank you for your custom, your appreciation, and for, as Mr. Rogers used to say, being my neighbor--in this hard, cold, wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world of light and life!

A patch of blue appeared!

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.

Christmas Present

The book I chose to give myself this year was North Woods, by Daniel Mason, one of my stepdaughter’s favorite reading experiences of the year about to end, but on Christmas Eve I had fallen asleep without finishing Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book I had searched out in my shop’s storage area after reading the same author’s novel about a young orphaned half-gypsy girl, The Diddakoi, which I’d turned to after an interval of other books that succeeded my reading of An Episode of Sparrows. (Phew! Does this count as a binge?) In many ways quite different stories, the three Godden novels in this paragraph have one thing in common: each tell stories of girls and women, and the young girls in Sparrows and Diddakoi and the young woman in Five for Sorrow all have much to overcome in order to find strength in themselves and happiness in their lives. 

So there I was, awake at 5:30 a.m. (as usual) on Christmas morning, with an engrossing novel yet unfinished and waiting for me. Also waiting for me, as she is every morning, was my dear Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist knew I needed. “I could live without a dog, but you can’t, so we need a dog.” Then, “Take that motorcycle money. Go get the puppy. Yes, I’m sure.” This puppy (I still call her that) is three years old now, and she has a clear and steady grip on her momma’s morning routine. First the momma gets up to make coffee and brings the first cup (mug) back to bed, where she sits up with a book or a writing tablet. The puppy curls patiently at my side, un chien croissant, or drapes herself over the momma’s feet, biding her time. When the momma gets up a second time, the puppy knows it’s only for a coffee refill, not really “getting up,” per se. 

"This is subtle, isn't it?" Sunny asks wordlessly.

But when the refill finally begins to cool in the mug, Sunny feels it’s time to make her presence felt with greater immediacy. First she takes a position more demanding of attention than her Sleepy Girl mode. Then, increasingly proactive, she stands up and begins to give kisses. I say “give kisses,” but this move is as much a demand as an offering. Fair enough. She has been a very patient girl for an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours, and that’s long enough! Besides, who can resist a happy, wiggly little dog girl’s kisses? Who would want to try? She's no fool!

My “plans” for the day, laid in advance, were simple. It would be a day at home, just Sunny Juliet and me. We would have our usual morning ramble outdoors before breakfast. Breakfast would be special, with little bites of pancake and bacon for Sunny, besides her usual dog food, and then, while the momma opened a few presents for the two of them, a brand-new beef bone for Sunny to gnaw. And maybe that bone would give the momma some quiet reading time.

Later: waiting for the "Okay!"

Every morning Sunny lets me know when she’s ready for me to get out of bed, even though she knows that going outside is still maybe an hour in the future. If I tarry too long beneath the covers, she lets me know I’m disappointing her (bark! bark! bark!), but once I’m on my feet, her patience returns, and I can have another coffee refill. On this particular Christmas morning I have time to fry up the bacon and assemble separately the dry and wet ingredients for the pancakes I’ll make after our outdoor time, sneaking in a few more pages of my book. 

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is one of Godden’s very Roman Catholic stories. The title refers to the rosary, and the protagonist’s continuing spiritual difficulty over the rosary stems from a painful episode—one of many—in her life journey. Lise, an American, a driver with the Army, arrives in Paris during the joyful chaos of the Liberation. When she becomes lost, on foot, in the crowds, her unintended life in France begins. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the many steps that take her from this beginning to her life in a French convent among a very special order of Dominican nuns, but I will say that the particular convent that comes to be her home sounds very congenial. There is hard work, with long hours, but also farm animals and the beautiful French countryside, and the work, while often dirty, is largely healthy farm work. The sisters eat well, too. Even during fast periods, there are feast days, so while not exactly lenient, the lives of the nuns are not uncompromisingly harsh.

 

In Chapter 8, Godden summarizes a year in the life of the convent called Belle Source, beginning in the earliest signs of spring in February: 

 

The Normandy February was usually wet and cold, but there were days of clear sunshine that reminded Lise of her childhood in England when there might be catkins; the willows turned red and the first snowdrops were out. There were no catkins at Belle Source but she found an early primrose in the bank below the aumônier’s house and a scattering of snowdrops.

 

At New Year’s Eve,

 

Another year was rounded, and nothing anyone could write or say, thought Lise, could tell the whole meaning of each succeeding year, of its unfolding; what is a day-to-day miracle is unexciting because usually it’s so sure—and yet it is a miracle; only if it’s taken away, as in a famine or drought, do we see that.

 

The day-to-day miracle of everyday life is what we so often overlook, isn’t it?

Sunny Juliet: my everyday companion

Living in the country with my dog, operating my little village bookshop, my life has its daily and hourly routines. Christmas Day is a quiet feast day at home. I am enjoying my reading of Rumer Godden and look forward to Daniel Mason’s book. Opening gifts and talking to and texting with family will be a pleasure. Will it sound strange, though, if I say I want to pay special attention today to my dog? The Artist never had a chance to meet her face-to-face, only to see puppy pictures, but this morning as I look at that furry face and into those bright eyes I say to her, “He knew I needed you.” By my side every day and precious in herself, she is a living gift from someone who knew me, who saw me, who loved me. I want to be present with my girl today. She deserves that. She is a miracle. Snow is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Light. Life.

(Now THAT is a Charlie Brown tree!)

-      12/25/2024, 8:25 a.m. And now, out into the snow we go!!!

 

Postscript: Images added before upload and after a lot of activity outdoors. In addition to all the usual neighbors—deer, rabbits, mice, squirrels—this morning we found turkey tracks in the orchard, wandering off into the woods. More miracles all around us! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Turkey track

Turkey trail

She always finds treasures!