Of Farms and Books

 

The days were long and fine and very warm. They practically abandoned the house. They worked together, all three of them in the hay-field.

- Adrian Bell, Shepherd’s Farm

If Shepherd’s Farm is, as I suspect, typical of Adrian Bell’s fiction, many readers I know would not care for it. I can easily imagine some literary critics calling it a weak novel, if a novel at all. There is little drama; what there is of conflict never boils over. Our main characters work hard and strive patiently and gradually achieve their goals, and while they ultimately lose, in a material sense, all they have gained, it is not through tragic flaws of their own or wickedness on the part of some antagonistic force or other character in the narrative, and they are not driven to despair or madness by their losses. Simply, life goes on.

Since I don’t believe Shepherd’s Farm has ever been published in the U.S. (Bell's stories are set in England), I'll give here what would be ‘spoilers’ if I expected any of my blog readers to be picking up the novel: 

We fear initially that Miriam will choose the wrong man and create tragedy for three people. She does not. When the wrong man marries elsewhere, it seems he may go frightfully more wrong and lose himself entirely. Nothing like that ensues, and his life goes on as it was expected to go on, in conformity with his family values. When Miriam’s uncle, who is her guardian, opposes her marriage to Luke, threatening to have Luke's dear-won farm bought out from under him if she persists in wedding plans, she and Luke quietly agree to wait, not seeing each other at all for the time being. Eventually the uncle dies, and they marry. Again, quietly. Everything is done quietly, without, as I say, drama. The gypsy girl does not seduce Luke. The horse does not trample the child. There are no murders, no suicides, no hatred-fueled feuds. 

I loved the book and only wish it had been three times as long and three times fuller of agricultural and environmental detail, all those descriptive passages that readers longing for action find tedious. 

All summer, market day at Winslowe was desultory and unsatisfactory. People would run in for half an hour and then hurry back to their hay-carting. There was a sense that the centre of gravity was elsewhere. But now winter bore in; the town was cheery; farmers came early and left late. Down the street pigs and cattle went in droves; barley, wheat and oats lay spilled about the steps of the Corn Exchange, where farmers appraised each other’s samples.

Or --

…It was a bad time with the ewes. The weather had been so wet that they had strained themselves heaving their heavy bodies through the mud from the field to the yard, and several lambs were born dead. In the living room of the farmhouse there were always one or two new-born lambs before the fire hand their bleating sounded loud indoors.

On the shepherd’s farm, horses are of prime importance. It’s horses that make or break a farm, and it’s best to have a pair that pull well together, plus a third that can do other jobs when the pair are harnessed together. Feeding the horses is Luke’s first job every morning. Miriam will make the fire, milk the cow, and churn butter. Luke loves the feel of the horses’ oats running through his fingers. Miriam pitches into the hay-making from the start of the book to the end.

A dear, loyal bookstore customer and reader of this blog once mused that perhaps I romanticize farming life, which is in reality dirty, hard, repetitive work, but I don’t see the contradiction. A career in fashion design or event planning would never have suited me, but if I had married differently and had farm work all my life, I don’t think I would have been discontented. Outdoor work that challenges physical strength and perseverance is much more to my liking than housework, although without livestock or poultry and with no field crops, my work life outdoors is limited to mowing grass, planting and tending gardens, pruning my apple trees once a year, picking fruit in season (soon, black raspberries; later, apples), and keeping the dread autumn olive at bay—that last a never-ending chore but one I keep at, year after year, because I will not give over my small piece of land to the invader. There is satisfaction both in the work and in surveying the results, temporary (the grass grows back, and the autumn olive rears its head in new corners) though they will always be. 

The other day I was thinking of books I love and feel are not well enough known, and I realized how many of them have agricultural or at least outdoor themes: Mary Webb’s Precious Bane; Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm; Conrad Richter’s The Trees and The Fields. Richter was awarded the Pulitzer for The Town, the third book of his “Awakening Land” trilogy, but it’s the first two that I love. Even in Mary Norton’s series of children’s books about the little people called borrowers, it’s the second in the series, The Borrowers Afield, that is my favorite, the time in the little family’s life when they live out-of-doors and must live off the land. 

Why would anyone think life has to be easy to be good? Where is the pleasure in not working? In my winters of seasonal retirement with the Artist, our seasons in the Arizona ghost town cabin, my days were filled with hiking, learning the desert vegetation, feeding wild birds, cooking and baking and writing and studying Spanish, all that indoor activity with sun flooding through the windows and, whenever possible, doors open to the air, so that—not in the middle of winter but as winter segued into spring—indoors and outdoors became one.

Indoors and outdoors as a seamless whole, going from one to the other without putting on or shedding extra clothing—that is another glory of summer, along with the outdoor work. “They practically abandoned the house,” writes Adrian Bell, and I smile happily at that sentence, although I certainly do love my porch!

For now, the grass in my yard is mowed (hours of satisfying work for me, my exercise, lots of “steps,” as people say) and Sunny’s jumps set up again so we can keep at our agility teamwork, also. She and I did well at last Monday's session after a winter away from the sport.

Getting there --

Black raspberries are beginning to ripen, and I have warned Tree Guy that soon we will be harvesting berries morning and evening, day after day, filling the freezer against the time of jam-making. In the orchard surrounding me, many varieties of grasses grow tall, and there is alfalfa blooming now, its flowers from deep purple to pale lavender and even a light yellow. Alfalfa is so lovely! Farmer Tom Koch down on South Lake Leelanau (he also has the Polish food truck in Cedar, behind his wife’s wonderful shop of Polish wares) feeds his animals on barley, not corn. It was good to enjoy Polish food and farming talk one evening with Tom. I'll bring photos from Cedar the next time we go.

Grasses in morning rain

Adrian Bell again --

Hill Field was the best of it: this field would grow the finest malting barley, with that delicate almost silky look to the skin and pale golden. And when one cracked a grain it was not steely inside like that which grew on the light land, but white and mealy.

Meanwhile, of course, for me, my bookshop life continues, and lest I grow melancholy over reminders that I am not a farmer and don’t have time left in my life to become one, I thank my lucky stars ever day that I am a bookseller. (Especially, yes, a bookseller lucky enough to live in the country!) Schlepping heavy boxes of books, I think of my graduate school friend James, who when we were graduate assistants to professors called us “donkeys for philosophy” and then of the Artist, who, loving James’s phrase, when joining me in a big book move (such as Tree Guy and I undertook last week), called himself a “donkey for literature.” Bookselling is a much more physical line of work than many casual shoppers might imagine! 

Just as many people claim affiliations to larger groups, groups so large they can never know all the members personally, some political, and others consider themselves related by a sports team or a university (and of course there are many other possibilities), thinking it over I realize that book people are my tribe. 

Ah, yes, book people are my tribe, farmers are my neighbors, and I am a lucky woman!

In the shop

Outdoors

Visual fruits of my labors

The Summer Blur Is Underway

(Reminder to self and others: Make time to write letters.)

Calendar and community are full to overflowing.

When summer hits, it’s hard to keep up. Everything—grass, gardens, weeds—is growing; everyone is shopping and visiting; and not a single day on the calendar is empty of some sort of meeting or concert or lecture or art opening. There are more temptations and obligations than there is time to fit them all in, but we do our best. 

This Friday--today!--is the Friends of the Library book sale in Northport, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. It's also the weekly farmers market, and when I was at the market I saw that people had already staked out territory, with folding chairs and tablecloths, for tonight's Music in the Park. 

On Saturday, the 4th of July, tomorrow, there will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence in front of the post office at 10 a.m. The Cancer Run for Funds race also begins at 10 a.m. on the 4th. And of course, in the evening there will be fireworks, best in the county. 

Northport Flood, 2026

The big news this past week in our village, though, was a flood of historic proportions on Monday. It made the news far from northern Michigan, with distant friends calling and texting to see if we were all right. We’re fine. No loss of life, and as far as I know no injuries, but lots of road damage and some structural damage to buildings. Second Street was a river, and the edge of the parking lot at the visitors center was the top of a waterfall, as a cascade descended from there to the overflowing creek. More rain pounded down on Wednesday, but not as much, for which all were grateful.

A few of the delicious dessert offerings! Can you say "sugar buzz"?

Then there was a lovely gathering at the Willowbrook on Tuesday evening, hosted by Mimi and Joel Heberlein, to celebrate the life and honor the memory of the late David Chrobak. David’s specialties were flowers and delicious, beautifully decorated cakes, so along with shared stories we enjoyed all manner of sweet desserts and then tossed flowers wild and tame into the creek to be carried down to Grand Traverse Bay in his memory. The Fabulous Fish Queens were on hand in their regalia. David Chrobak loved the Fish Queens. When asked if he had invented them, he is reported to have said, "No, but I made them famous."

Note one of my favorite wildflowers top left. Can you name it?

The FABULOUS FISH QUEENS!

The preceding Saturday (unfortunately, on the same evening as a village choir concert at the auditorium), the Northport Arts Association hosted an open mike night (now called open mic, but I am old-fashioned) for writers, poets, and story-tellers. Featured guest was Traverse City author Jerry Dennis, whose readings moved me to tears, but all participants were excellent. 

I was glad I went that night and also on Tuesday night to the Willowbrook and am sorry I can’t get to everything, but my energy runs out faster than it used to, along with my young dog’s patience. People are getting used to hearing me say, “I have to get home to my dog."

Farm news is news for everyone. 

It’s been 12 years (is that possible?) since I first wrote a blog post about where I get my news. Yes, way back in 2014. I did an update in 2021 and am coming back to add what has become my #1 source of information on current events, because more than anything else I now rely on a weekly midwestern newspaper called the Farmers’ Advance to keep up-to-date. Published in Mansfield, Ohio, Farmers’ Advance (since 1898!) focuses on Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan but covers issues from local to global. It is way more than a report on soybean futures. 

Almost every policy decision our federal and state governments take affects farmers one way or another. The Farm Bill is only one example, but naturally that gets coverage, the July 1 headline on the topic reading “Senate farm bill omits E15 [biofuel], Proposition 12 [which would have imposed California standards on animal housing across the nation] and pesticide labeling.” Another article in this same issue bears the headline “Missiles, drones and rising prices: What Trump’s war in Iran has cost the US.” There’s more. Farm production costs, like fuel and grocery prices, are up and expected to hit record highs next year, according to the USDA. Fewer Americans are now receiving SNAP benefits (rolls down 10%), and administrative costs are moving to the state level. New immigration policies, it turns out, are lowering legal immigration faster than illegal entries—2-1/2 times faster in the first nine months of 2024, which makes it more difficult to find farm workers while reducing the number of workers paying into social security (non-citizens have to pay in, though they do not receive the system’s benefits), the generally declining workforce also leading to lower economic growth. These policies affect all of us: Farmers just see it more easily and faster than the rest of the nation. 

The July issue tells of fairs in Ohio, equine therapy for people with physical disabilities, what to do for monarch butterflies, and a rare goat-sheep hybrid born in Olmstead Falls. Most issues have at least one story on organic methods. There are warnings of invasive plant species and unwelcome animal pests. (July 1 issue shines a light on invasive elm zigzag sawfly, not nearly as terrifying as the horrible screwworm found in Texas recently!) There is a Bible trivia quiz in every issue and, often, memories of family jam-making sessions. 

One ongoing saga since I started subscribing is data center developments in rural communities. Well, naturally, that’s where “empty” land can be found, but rural areas usually constitute also what might be called news deserts, something like the food deserts found in poor urban neighborhoods. Even in cities, local newspapers have been in steep decline, but in rural areas if there is one newspaper in a county, it may have only one reporter. Add to this the rash of nondisclosure agreements insisted upon by developers and the middlemen who scout locations for them, and you can see how difficult it is for local residents to have the information they need to govern their rural communities. The July 1 issue of Farmers’ Advance directly addresses the question of middlemen, while previous recent issues have looked at acreage lost, volume of necessary water inputs, etc. 

There’s no way I can get everyone in Michigan to read this newspaper every week, but I did the next-best thing and paid for a second subscription to go to our local township library. As I read my own copy, I generally pass it along to one friend or another. 

Leelanau Township Library

What I have been reading lately

A couple of new memoirs went home with me recently, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery and the Currents That Carry You Home, by Kimberly Warner, and What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis, by Theodore Richards. The Warner book has a northern Michigan connection, and Richards promised a bit of philosophy. I found both engrossing enough that I rather raced through them. 

John M. Barry’s history of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is impossible to race through, and there are a lot of interruptions, as I’m reading it at the shop, but I have made my way into Chapter 5 and don’t intend to stop. Quite extraordinary, how the issues of Englishmen in the 17th century feel so relevant in our United States of the 21st century! King Charles I, who succeeded King James, warned Parliament in his opening address to them that if they failed to give him

“What the state at this time needs, I must, in discharge of my conscience, use those other means which God hath put into my hands…. Take not this as a threatening, for I scorn to threaten any but my equals.”

Barry notes that Parliament “bristled” at the king’s words, telling them they were not his equals (as if they didn't know that!), and they reminded him of the “many necessary liberties and Privileges” that belonged to the king’s subjects, “by the common laws and acts of Parliament.”

Freedom of conscience—and, by extension, speech—was one those liberties exercised by the brave and repeatedly punished by the king. Also habeas corpus and due process. Plus ça change…. Oh, my, what drama Chapter 5 holds! Is the king above the law or the law above the king? Can the king imprison his subjects, seize their private property, even have them executed on a whim? This is the issue at stake. Chapter 5 alone is worth the price of the book, and if I could quote the entire chapter here, I would. 

As for fiction, I have ventured a few pages into an old novel but not far enough to tell much about it yet except that the pace and setting please me. More on that next time.

What is blooming these days

Bee balm, bergamot—call it what you will. The species Monarda is one that both bees and butterflies appreciate, and I like it as much for that reason as for its deep colors. Pansies are annuals always worth having around to fill in between blooms of perennial species and for their own cheery faces. Snapdragons, now: I did not buy new snapdragons this year but took last year’s pots in onto the front porch, where they overwintered in freezing temperatures, without any water, and came back again this year. That is one hardy annual! 

Second summer for these snapdragons

Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, has long been one of my favorites. I like the way it takes care of itself, the way it multiplies, and the way it lasts for days and days as a cut flower, its leaves possessing what I think of as architectural interest. And it’s blue. Blue like lobelia, blue like false indigo. Blue makes such a statement in a garden border, impossible not to notice.

Purple? Okay, that's in the blue range.

And everywhere, for the monarchs, milkweed!

On the home front

We three --

Besides gardens, the big news at home is that Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and yours truly have formed a new household. We are embarked on a new adventure, unforeseen a year ago, and it feels exciting and entirely natural at the same time. Tree Guy hit the ground running, as his first two evenings with me involved packing and schlepping heavy boxes of books. I told him my life isn't always this arduous: It's not every week I buy a three-carload private library, in the middle of a heat wave, with 4th of July coming right down the pike at us!

Happy 4th, everyone! Be safe, celebrate the holiday, count your blessings, smile at your neighbor, and signal all your turns, whether in an electric or gasoline-powered vehicle or on a bicycle. And watch out for deer and pedestrians on the roadways!

Now, if ever, come perfect days.

Weeds have their place in my landscaping.

As it always does, June is racing by, and our northern Michigan world is a flowering chorus. Can’t you hear these hawkweed and lobelia singing? Lilacs are spent, poppies dropping their petals, but the show goes on and on and on, succeeding blooms arriving on cue to fill the stage with song. Hawkweeds are a special favorite of mine, both the dandelion yellow and the lollipop orange colors.

A volunteer rose made itself at home in my small shade garden, and I let it be for a while, but at last it had to move, as it was blocking from sight the more appropriate shade garden inhabitants. And a rose, anyway, needs sun. So on Tuesday evening I dug it up, replanted it in a border, pruned it back, and tucked a couple of cuttings into what I think of as my “nursery,” where this summer I hope viburnum and lilac cuttings in vermiculite will also take root. 

Before, with volunteer rose hogging the stage --

After, with evening light reaching everyone --

and finally, rose in its own new location. There!

As always, I am digging into books, too, though my reading progress slows when summer arrives. Whereas in winter I can get through three books a week, now in June, with so many customers in my shop (not a complaint!) and so much work to do outdoors at home (I love that, too!), it can take a week for me to read a single novel, so you can imagine how long it may take me to get through a serious book of history, even one as brilliantly written and engrossing as John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Barry tells a compelling story: that of the 17th century’s search for a balance between government and religion. The ascent of King James, son of Mary Queen of Scots, to the English throne in 1603, made a lot of people nervous. Would he lead them away from Calvin and back to Rome? But James was more concerned with his own power than with that of any religious group: The “divine right of kings” was his own pet theory. Kings are gods, claimed King James, in that they can “make and unmake their subjects, …have power of raising and casting down, of life and death, of judges over all their subjects of all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only…,” and so to question or rebel against a king was to rebel against God! The problem for James was English common law, which had long established property rights for Englishmen. Thus, the law and the king were in conflict! Interesting, no? And yet, how many times did Parliament roll over to placate the king? You can see why the 17th century is still relevant for Americans today.

I finished the second of my Jean-Luc Bannalec policiers as recent bedtime reading. Quoi qu’il en soit.... I translate that as “Whatever!” Bannalec’s characters say that or a variation of it all the time. 

Now my bedtime book is a slow meander down the shores and lakes of the Mississippi River with Virginia S. Eifert’s River World: Life of the Mississippi. Her piling on of adjectives in the Introduction made me wary, but I relaxed into the first and second chapters as she described the spring breakup of ice and the first birds and frogs and green plants arriving and appearing for another season of life and growth. The Upper Mississippi, after all, is much like northern Michigan, so I felt right at home, especially in the section on ground pines, which called up for me memories of walks with friends in the dunes near home, the place I remember seeing these little plants and knowing what they were for the first time.

The ground pines or club mosses, those miniature evergreen “trees” which are more closely related to the ferns than to anything else, standing nobly a few inches tall, are plants of ancient design and incredible endurance. Each year they faithfully bear thin, spore-filled, primitive cones on the tips of their stalks. 

They have been doing this since the Carboniferous period some 250 million years ago when the Lepidodendron trees reached their greatest size and variety. They were giants as they grew in the ancient coal swamps and prehistoric forests of the world….

- Virginia S. Eifert, River World: Life of the Mississippi (1959)

The ground pines are part of what Eifert calls the “Canadian carpet,” and here the term Canadian refers to C. Hart Merriam’s life zones, which I first learned about far from the Mississippi, out in southern Arizona, where one can ascend through life zones not by traveling north but simply by climbing a mountain. In the West (where I think Merriam came up with his categories), it is elevation rather than latitude that determines a biome.

Eifert’s book (with illustrations by the author—always a plus in my eyes) was written and published well over half a century ago. How different is that same river world today? Am I reading of a world that was, or one that still is? That I can recognize the Canadian carpet from her description and place it here in my own Leelanau County gives me hope that the river world the author described in 1959 still lives on, if only in certain stretches of the river’s length.

I pause briefly over “250 million years ago” and think of the difference between that and the mere 250 years that our country has been in existence. Our country’s age times a million—that’s the age of club mosses, and yet how many of us give a thought to their existence? Did you even know of them? What will the universe look like 250 millions years from now? Will there be anyone then to give a thought to us?

St. Johnswort

We’ve had a cool stretch of sunny days in Leelanau, perfect for making hay. Today is the Feast of St. John. Last night, on St. John’s Eve, I saw the first bloom of St. Johnswort. Cool weather must have slowed it down, or there would be more in flower by now. Meanwhile, coreopsis, which I associate with the Longest Day, was going gangbusters long before the solstice. 

Coreopsis

One tragic note this June is the extreme heat in Europe, casting a pall (in the form of a heat dome) over summer festivals such as Faites de la Musique, or Fête de la Music, which in Paris took the place of the old St. John’s bonfires back in the late 1980s. (In 1987, St. John’s Eve was in full swing; after that, music took the stage in place of the traditional bonfires. I had mixed feelings about the change, but Quoi qu’il en soit!) Celebrating music or a saint or national history is joyful. Celebration is joyful! People dying of heat is not at all a cause to celebrate, and finding relief from deadly heat in a city like Paris is difficult, to say the least. Fountains will be teeming with microbes, and in an apartment without air conditioning (or anywhere else), there is a limit to how many clothes a person can remove: skin stays on! I was there one summer in the early 1990s, my head wrapped in a dripping, water-soaked towel, and the maddening heat made me want to scream! Although I guess wanting to scream was a good sign I was not on the brink of death, so I pray for those in Europe who have gone beyond screaming.

Beautiful Sunday clouds. Today (Wednesday), rain?

Sunday was a day to make hay.

My Michigan life did not slow down with cool weather. Far from it! Mowing, planting, pruning, weeding, watering—I’m not making hay myself (not literally, anyway), and yet the pace of summer can sometimes be daunting, and I remind myself to stop and take a deep breath and employ my mantra: I’m here now. I’m here now. 

Sunny reminds me that she’s here, too, and ready for action! Enough with the books and gardens! Time to play, Momma!

Momma's girl!

And Then It Rained

(I am in love with pagoda dogwood!)

Reminder: This Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m. at Dog Ears Books, author Robert Downes will give his presentation on Native American history prior to European exploration. This is a free event and one you can take in before your dinner hour!

Seasonal thoughts and projects

Reading one of Jean-Luc Bannalec’s murder mysteries the other evening at bedtime, I ran across a phrase—and here I have to paraphrase what would be a translation, anyway—about summer always arriving on a certain day. That is, there is a day when you feel, at last, Yes, this is summer. I felt that way last Friday. It wasn’t the first day I’d been able to have the bookshop door open, nor the first day warm enough to go about in sandals and without a jacket, but it felt different. Not just a temperate spring day, but summer. 

That being the case, my two “days off,” Sunday and Monday, were busy ones at home. Accomplishments included getting my lawn mower working again (it had gone on strike, and I was able to persuade it back to work again all by myself!), mowing grass, running out to a couple of nearby garden centers for more plants (both flowers and vegetables), getting all the new arrivals in soil (either in the ground or in planters), along with catching up on laundry, hanging the heavy items out on the line and later bringing them indoors to fold, wrapping up the day by watering everything, even though rain was in the forecast for after midnight.

The garden is coming together.

Did it rain overnight? If so, I slept through it. Morning was misty and calm, my world jungly green, only a sweet, slight breeze through the open window. No need to water on Tuesday, so, after her morning sortie, Sunny and I had a leisurely porch breakfast. Later in the day, it rained for sure. 

Poppy after rain

All three cuttings I took from my cranberrybush viburnum survived the winter well, one of them even flowering its very first solo season, which encourages me to try more of this manner of propagation. For 2026, the experiment I have in mind is pagoda dogwood, Cornus alternifolia, which I am delighted to discover blooming very close to my house as a volunteer, not far from the legion of volunteer black raspberries I depend on harvesting every summer for my signature ‘blackstraw’ jam, a combination of black raspberries and good local strawberries. Yum!

Dogwood again...

...and raspberry-to-be!

Again, reading

Besides the Bannalec mystery, I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time and in English translation, Rabelais's big work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, but don’t know if I’ll get through the whole fat paperback volume. It is entertaining, I admit, but entertaining in the way of “Saturday Night Live” rather than as a movie with a strong narrative from beginning to end. Lots of smart-aleck nicknames and jokes. Lots to do with controversies of the time of Rabelais and his opinions. A few pages at a time, I can do. The whole thing? In my mother’s deadly phrase, We’ll see!

Thoughts on “being an author”

An author is the originator of a written work. Some authors are writers by profession, while others are not. 

Being a professional writer, like being a professional musician or fine artist, involves long-term commitment, sometimes lifetime commitment. Other people come late in life to writing, often as a second (or even third) career in retirement. 

Not all professional writers are book authors; they may author (the word here functions as a verb) articles or short magazine stories. Some are journalists or columnists or grant writers. Also, not all authors of published books consider themselves—or even aspire to be—career writers.

I’ve been sorting through my thoughts on this because a couple of women visited my bookshop recently with a new book written by one of them. “I’m not really an author,” Jennifer Sager said, modestly introducing her book. “She keeps saying that!” her friend protested. After the three of us conversed for a while, and I took a careful look at the book they had brought in to show me, I said to Sager insistently, “You are the author of this book!” And she is, whether or not she ever writes another. 

Steph’s Story, published by a relatively new small press in Bloomington, Indiana, Filibuster Press, is a story Jennifer Sager felt “compelled” to write. Jennifer is a middle daughter who grew up with an older and a younger sister. The oldest, Stephanie, was born with Down syndrome. In telling of her sister’s life, the author of Steph’s Story also tells her own journey from sheltered childhood to dawning realization of handicaps faced by many different groups of people for various reasons. Because her parents did not heed doctors’ advice to put Stephanie in an institution (and “try again” for a “normal” child), Jennifer’s growing up introduced her to a range of other young people with disabilities, from those in wheelchairs to those with high-functioning autism. Only as she grew older and had experience outside her immediate neighborhood did she realize that poverty and skin color, like disability, could trigger discrimination. 

All of the author's factual information, history, and advocacy, however, is woven into a very personal, engaging story. I started reading on Monday evening and had soon eagerly devoured over 100 pages.

Three sisters! For me, as the oldest of a trio of sisters, that idea alone sparked my interest, but it was Jennifer’s love for Steph and her joy in their bond that is holding me page after page. Who wouldn’t enjoy this book? I’m sure the affirmative messages will be especially important for anyone with a child or grandchild who diverges from the “norm,” but I’m also sure that anyone at all interested in families—and who of us is not?—will enjoy reading Steph’s Story. 

From where I stand

Is this section a rant? Call it what you will.

Let me first note, briefly, that a request for evidence is not satisfied by insults, name-calling, or the sheer repetition of an unsupported claim. However loudly you may yell, however nasty you get with the person who asked for evidence, if yelling and name-calling and hurling insults is all you can do, that just tells me is that you have no evidence, no ground for your claim. (You know who and what I'm talking about here.) 

Day after day, it remains astonishing to me how many Americans are willing to accept not only patently false claims but outrageously bad public behavior from someone elected to serve our country. Serve, not harm, not injure, certainly not destroy. What are they, those sticking with him, getting from supporting loss of dignity and destruction of hope for others? Anything other than the satisfaction of seeing their opposition’s misery and frustration? 

Now, something else: Less than 1% of the American population identifies as transgender. One percent. Of this one percent, only 0.002% (ten out of 500,000) are college athletes. How and why did transgender people come to be such a huge political issue? 

Two words: smoke screen. 

Just say the word ’transgender,’ and certain groups of people completely freak out. They are filled with fear, their fear fuels their rage, and they forget everything else. Jobs are vanishing while wars are not, and the rich get richer and richer as the poor get poorer and sicker and more and more disenfranchised. 

Someone must be blamed for the woes that afflict us! Where do we look for a scapegoat? Let’s find a very small, vulnerable population and focus fear and anger on them!

I am so tired of that cruel strategy and sick of watching people fall for it!

On the other hand--a life well lived!

Leelanau Township lost a priceless citizen recently. At 99 years of age, however, Julia Brabanec was ready to go. “I don’t know why I’m still here,” she had confided to me in one of our visits in her last year. 

Julia's contributions to the northern Michigan food landscape were featured in Emita Brady Hill’s 2020 nonfiction book, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming.  In fact, the first chapter in the book is “Julia Brabanec,” in the opening section, “Two Orchards and a CSA: Becoming Organic.”

Julia and her late husband John first came to Leelanau County on their honeymoon in 1948. Later they bought land here and on it developed an organic orchard. The Brabanecs lived simply, pumping water from their well and lighting their house with kerosene lamps until a home wind generator enabled them to electrify. They did almost everything themselves, too, so although they built the foundation for their new (second) home on the property in 1985, the house was finished only in 2005 with the help of their children. Julia and John were always too busy farming to build a house. One thousand, one hundred trees—apples and peaches—“mom & pop” doing it all, from planting to delivery.

If you haven’t read Northern Harvest yet, you really should, to learn the rest of Julia’s story, as well as that of other women in food and farming in Northern Michigan. 

My late husband always referred to John and Julia as “the Helen and Scott Nearing of Leelanau County.” John died 16 years ago, and I remember his funeral well. Julia wanted to go out more quietly, and she got her wish. 

It’s easy sometimes to say and think, as we witness the passing of the old guard, that the future will never again know such good people, and yet I see men and women in younger generations already coming up with solid values such as Julia and John lived by: love of the land; belief in organic methods; a strong work ethic; and dedication to the future. That last is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Care for the future and all who live on the land, urban and rural. Respect for life and the dignity of all.

I am honored to have a beautiful portrait of Julia Brabanec, a photograph by author Emita Brady Hill, behind my bookstore desk, as I am honored to have known Julia Brabanec and to have counted her as a friend.

Julia Brabanec: A good life, well lived!