Back For the Holiday

 

Welcome to Hell!!!

Since my last post, I have been through Hell. Literally. The little stop in the road in southeast Michigan, that is, on what was a purely delightful road trip down to Vicksburg and Kalamazoo, over to Ann Arbor, and north through the Pinckney area. But let's backtrack a bit. 

My companion on the trail, Tree Guy, had a medical appointment in Ann Arbor that served as our excuse for the trip. I drove the first stretch, taking my one of my old favorite two-lane roads, M-37, which allowed a pause in Newaygo at the River Stop Cafe.

River Stop Cafe, Newaygo

Good place to take a break

River Stop hasn't changed its look since my last visit, but they now have menus and table service, even to the outdoor tables (but we sat at the back table inside). Sadly, the bookstore I visited last spring was no longer in operation, and a nearby business that had some used books was not yet open, but we admired a couple of giant sycamores that made the stop memorable.

Giant sycamore in Newaygo, Michigan

Tree Guy had friends in Vicksburg we could stay with for two nights, and then a friend of mine in Ann Arbor invited us for our third night away from home, so we were all set. We were extremely lucky with the weather, too. We dodged all the downpours, possible tornadoes did not materialize, and though many trees had come down in high winds, none fell on us or on the homes of our hosts. Sunrise the day after our arrival in Vicksburg was over a lovely pond. The pond was large enough to hold an island, a dock, and a couple of pontoon boats.

On the other side of the island lived the family's momma pig and her little ones. I did not venture too close, as the quick, unpredictable movements of pigs make me nervous, so none of my pig photos are going to win any prizes, but if you look closely you can see them. The momma weighs 600 lbs. Reason not to get too close! 

Look closely to see the pigs.

There were many other animals I didn't mind approaching. I missed Sunny, so dogs Miles and Louie kept me on an even keel.

There were also ducks and geese and hens and chicks and even duck eggs incubating in the guest bathroom. 

Ducks

Hens

Young poultry

On our one full day in Kalamazoo County, we were able to see grandson Jack's show at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, paintings done during his past year's residency there. Jack, as well as my son, Ian, met us at the KIA for a tour of the show.

Self-portrait by artist Jackson Willits

It was impossible to see all friends and family members in a single day, although I managed phone conversations with a couple more, and then we were off to Ann Arbor, Tree Guy at the wheel on I-94 and around that fascinating but (to me) very confusing town. It was a relief to get the medical appointment behind (after three hours at the clinic, mostly waiting for the doctor) and relax with delicious take-out Moroccan food at the home of a dear friend I've known since our kids were in grade school together.

And the morning after that, we drove through Hell for a brief visit with my former Arizona hiking partner, who now lives in southeast Michigan after 20 years in the Cochise County ghost town where we met and spent so much time together with our dogs. We missed the excitement of the Memorial Day weekend by going through Hell on Thursday, but that was fine with me. One of the reasons I love rural two-lane roads is that they are generally quiet. We did not visit the Hell Saloon but drove right past.

Because the shop in Newaygo was closed and time did not permit exploring Ann Arbor, I did not visit a single bookshop on this road trip, and yet I came home with my car loaded with books--backseat and way-back full!--thanks to friends who remodeled their home and thanks to my son who been storing their de-acquisitioned personal library items for me.  I did some reading on the trip, too, finishing up a Charles Baxter novel, First Light, interesting in its structure, as the story begins at the end and goes backward, step by step, to the beginning of the brother-sister relationship. That might not sound like a novel with a satisfying finish, but I appreciated it more and more as it went along, and closed it with a sigh of satisfaction. And now I'm halfway through Gerald Green's To Brooklyn With Love and enjoying the writing immensely.

And now here I am, back in Northport shop, with my newly organized section of Michigan used books (among many other treasures).

Used Michigan books, on table and on shelves

Books and dogs: That's my life. So here are the friendly Vicksburg dogs again, one more time. Miles and his antler reminded me of Sunny with the deer legs she brings home, and Louie, a tidy little Lab-beagle mix, had a head that put me in mind of James Thurber's dog cartoons. Both were very sweet, laid-back company.

Miles

Louie

And what, you may wonder, was Sunny Juliet doing while her momma was away from home for four days? No cold, lonely kennel time for my girl! She had the constant companionship of her Auntie Deborah, who spoiled her rotten with attention and tennis ball play. Sunny is a lucky, lucky dog!

HAVE A SAFE MEMORIAL DAY!!!

Look Near, Look Far

That green pointillist flush I love!

Season’s Progress

Orchard buds on 5 May 2026

Cherry blossoms in the orchard around my house have yet to appear (still in bud), though young orchard trees out on Stony Point, on the bay side of the peninsula, were in blossom for Mothers Day, and the big black cherry trees (a forest hardwood) are blooming, too. The season is advancing, albeit by fits and starts, with overnight temperatures below freezing.  I harvested enough fiddlehead ferns to accompany two meals last week. 

Black cherry at the edge of the woods

Looking up through its crown

Blossom cluster

In Traverse City, the decorative pear trees are radiant in the sunshine. Is there a danger, though, in having planted the city streets with so many of one tree variety? What if a pest were to strike that landscaped monoculture? I looked online for an answer and discovered an even more alarming possibility: This variety of ornamental pear is now considered invasive because, while sterile itself, it can cross-fertilize with other varieties and produce thorns monstrous enough to puncture tractor tires! It also has hazardous weaknesses due to its branching habit, and some states have already outlawed their sale. Don't plant them in your yard! 

Look beyond looks!

If Traverse City follows other cities in eliminating this tree (which seems like a good plan), I hope they will do it on a gradual basis and replace the pears with two or three different kinds of trees, maybe redbud and dogwood and something else. Suggestions? 

Changing the subject: Isn't my hellebore beautiful?

What Makes a Good Book Review or Reviewer?

I hate to say it, but I can’t help concluding, after reading a raft of online amateur book reviews (I am tempted to put “reviews” in scare quotes, like so), that there are a lot of very lazy readers in our country who should not be claiming to be reviewers. Or maybe they are simply reading books that are not right for them. After I finished reading what struck me as a brilliant first novel, curious to see what others had thought about it, I looked for reviews, and three particular criticisms that I discounted as inappropriate stood out, each made by more than one person. I have condensed to give composite comments, so the following are not quoted directly: 

(1) There are too many new novels set in World War II. Here's another one. Yawn!

(2) If you don’t know Paris, you’ll be lost in this book. It's probably okay for people who know Paris, but for me? Yawn! 

(3) The action and time jumped around in a confusing way. I'm outta here!

Here is my first round of responses:

(1) Are there too many boy-meets-girl novels? Too many novels about American family life? The question isn’t the number of novels available on any given subject, but their quality and how worthy they are of readers’ time. 

(2) I know Paris pretty well, but I’ve never visited Salinas or San Francisco or Brooklyn, let alone Moscow or Mumbai or anywhere on the African or Asian or South American continent. I’ve never anywhere near Australia. And yet I have read avidly novels set in all these locales, as well as stories set in earlier centuries in America and Europe (despite my inability to travel through time except in imagination and, therefore, in books). For those of us without the means to afford constant world travel, books give us wings! In fact, I learned Paris from books long before I ever set foot in its streets, just as I recognized my first sandhill crane from having seen it pictured in bird field guides. 

(3) Fiction with multiple narrators and nonsequential time sequences has become a norm in Western fiction, from YA titles to the most abstruse literary works. At times it is confusing, and when I’m reading a book written that way it often takes me 20 or 30 pages to get into the rhythm, but seldom does the difficulty persist, and in the case of this particular novel italics that set off the ghost character's viewpoint help a lot.

And here is round 2: 

(4) If you’re tired of WWII novels or only want to read books set in geography you know well, don’t read such books! Skip them entirely, or if you find one in your hands and can’t get into it, at least don’t foist your dismissive opinion off as a “review.” If you don’t want to travel, stay home rather than go to another country and complain because it isn't like home.

(5) There is nothing wrong with preferring a simple, linear, chronological narrative, either, but readers don’t need opinions on novels structured otherwise by people who object to alternative structures. You can find plenty of books written with your preferences in mind. There is fiction for every taste. Read with your preferences in mind and review those books. You will find some successful and others disappointing, and that’s as it should be. 

(6) We all have limitations. I would not presume to review books of fantasy or science fiction, because those are genres that don’t speak to me. They never have. I get bored, and my mind wanders. People who love sci-fi and fantasy and have a strong reading background in the field apply quality standards to their reviews that I could never hope to achieve. So I’m not dissing anyone for their reading choices. All I’m saying is I don’t see the point in someone purporting to review a book she couldn’t begin appreciate and, in many cases, didn’t even finish.

Okay, that’s my opinion as a reader, bookseller, and occasional book reviewer. I don’t expect it to change a single mind or alter anyone’s practice—people will keep doing what they want to do—but I wanted to put it out there. Agree—or disagree?

I highly recommend this brilliant first novel!

You may have read other novels set in Paris during World War II, but no two are alike, and this one (as does Karen Mulvahill's The Lost Woman) shows how very particular chance events in one era continue to reverberate and affect individuals and families in following years. Also, the prose is enchanting! 

Don't miss the cowslips. They are blooming now.

Really, Really Here

Cinco de Mayo in the cherry orchard

The Most Beautiful, Most Uncertain Month of the Year?

May has arrived, right on time, and never have I watched the buds of fruit trees as closely as I’m watching them this year. My interest is personal, social, and community-minded. 

My two little apple trees, after several years of bountiful harvest, succumbed to codling moths in 2024 and a late freeze in 2025. I’ve taken proactive measures against the codling moths but can do nothing about the weather. That’s personal. Fingers crossed!

Will there be apples this year?

The social aspect of my interest has to do with friends and neighbors who want to get together when the orchard is in bloom. When will that be? they ask. Twenty days from Stage 2, an online guru says, and yet what looks like Stage 2 to me seems as if it’s been going on for a week already. Please tell me the buds have not been killed by cold overnight temperatures, as so many were last year!

As for community, in a farming neighborhood such as mine it matters to most of us that our farmer neighbors have good harvests. Few of us are invested financially, but we want their success. 

Of course, you know I’ve been keeping track of wildflowers in the woods, too. For such a long time, it seemed that Dutchman’s breeches were the only ephemerals daring to bloom. Spring beauties, usually the season’s first, had popped above the forest litter but were hesitant to open their faces to grey skies and cold winds. (I had similar feelings.) Trillium, like the spring beauties, kept their flowers shut up tight, waiting. Then finally I spotted a bellwort, one of my favorite spring flowers with its shy, gracefully drooping habit, and two days later, after warmer temperatures and sunshine, there were crowds of trillium and bellwort, along with bracken fern fiddleheads, and spring seemed truly to have arrived at last. One day, a single trout lily, a.k.a. dogtooth violet! 

Defense of John Steinbeck

Everyone, it seems, wants to “reassess” the last published book of John Steinbeck’s career, his bestseller Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I'll begin with the AI overview served up by Google, because it's the first thing most people will see when they do an online search: 

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) is not a strictly true story and is considered a heavily fabricated or "fictionalized" non-fiction book. While John Steinbeck did take a road trip with his dog in 1960, he created fake characters, invented conversations, and falsified where he slept.

Other critics are more specific, sniffing haughtily that he may have driven a truck with a camper but that he stayed in motor courts. Well, sometimes he did, and he says so right in the book, at least three times that I recall without looking for citations. Or that it wasn’t a completely solo trip, as his wife met him on more than one occasion, times together in Chicago and with her relatives in Texas that he also recounted in the book itself. Did these critics read Steinbeck's book at all? 

A more general criticism (see above) is that he invented characters and conversations. I wonder how they would know. Right at the outset he said that he was not a note-taker. And Travels with Charley was not a diary, after all, not a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account. That the author came to no very definite conclusions is something else he admitted himself, more than once. He could not distill the United States down to a single personality with universal coast-to-coast characteristics. I should hope not! 

I wonder what Steinbeck would think if he could take his cross-country trip again in 2026. He wrote this of the Monterey Peninsula, a place he had known well in earlier years:

…The beaches are clean where once they festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries which once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out. And Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there….

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.

- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

That was in 1960, when the population explosion he saw, staggering as it seemed at the time, in retrospect has nothing on today’s California crowded and expensive real estate.

I was disappointed that Steinbeck hurried through Arizona in a single paragraph, but it was his trip, not mine, and he admitted he was tired of traveling by then and headed for the barn, planning immersions only in Texas and the South farther east, focusing on New Orleans. That South in his time was the South of early forced desegregation, angry, bullying local crowds, and what he calls “the breath of fear” everywhere. No wonder he felt his trip was over by the time he reached Abingdon, Virginia. 

As for fabrications, however, according to Steinbeck,

Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory.

Well, then, are some of the people in this book fictional characters? I am willing to accept that the author may have presented composites and that his “almost total recall” would not have been word-for-word of every conversation, but I’m also willing to believe that his trip was basically the trip he recounts in his book. He could have invented more dramatic scenes and more outrageous characters, had he wanted to do so. He was, after all, John Steinbeck.

The Girl Who Doesn't Read

Every morning's companion

Not fair to say that of Sunny Juliet, is it? She reads me pretty well, and I don't do too badly reading her, either. We were happy to see her dog friends two days in a row on Sunday and Monday, and we're happy every day to spend time out in our yard at home and in the meadow and in the woods. 

Reading her dog momma's face

Bookstore Schedule for May

In general, hours for May will be Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; however, the shop will be closed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, May 19, 20, 21 while I’m out of town, then open again Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. 

Memorial Day! At last or already? How do you feel about it? Are you ready?

We are happy to be into porch season at last.

As May Approaches

Do you see her?

Seasonal sights

A recurring obsession in my life, spring ephemeral wildflowers, comes into focus now for its all-too-brief season, briefer than spring itself, which began earlier with winter aconites and Siberian squills (blue flower above) in the yard and will extend beyond the days of shy woodland beauties as the first impressionist flush of returning life in the branches of trees all too quickly swells unfurling into shade-providing leaves. Right now, however, the time of ephemeral blooms is just getting underway, although my photographs here, from two and three days ago, are not an accurate report of today in the woods. 

My old news here is of Dutchman's breeches, blooming above, and of trillium and toothwort preparing to bloom. Will trillium and toothwort flowers open today before I get these words thrown out into the world?

Daily I watch buds in the orchard, as well as on my own little apple trees and solitary plum. When will the cherry trees blossom? people ask. We are all hungry for spring’s abundant, harmless beauty.

Spring rain was abundant this year, far too abundant in many places (lots of flood damage), and even in Leelanau swelling creeks and ponds and creating temporary bodies of water in low places. Some, like the ponds in my yard, lasted only 24 hours, while others deserve their lovely name, vernal pools, and these days, morning and afternoon, I visit both the ephemeral and the year-round ponds to watch ducks and geese and cranes and gulls. 

One morning I was rewarded by seeing three lesser yellowlegs, a single bird at a vernal pool and a pair on a larger, more populous body of water. The pair was gone the next day, the bachelor a day later, all of them on their way north to Canada’s boreal forest land. Hawks, too, are migrating north, but wild turkeys remain, turkeys and mallards courting and breeding here among us.

Just passing through....

A busy bookshop day

We had a lovely gathering of people for poet Fleda Brown’s reading last Saturday as we celebrated National Poetry Month and Indie Bookstore Day. I forebore photographing my guest, as it was her first public event since back surgery, and she was still strapped into a white plastic, torso-hugging brace. “A bionic poet!” I exclaimed. She may not have appreciated that name but was pleased, as was I, by her audience, and we were all very pleased with her. On the most serious of subjects, this poet manages to cast a sideways glance, providing a wry look at our human absurdity, while never losing sight of life’s priceless details. Her poems and essays are gifts to the world.

For all Saturday’s unwelcome cold (spring is a season of many short, teasing setbacks), even after the poetry crowd dispersed my day in the shop continued busy right up until 4:30. Where did all these book-lovers come from? Serious browsers, good sales, great conversations—it was like a day in July, all the more heartwarming coming as a surprise in chilly April.

Fleda Brown's 2025 visit to Dog Ears Books

Trend or anomaly?

My phone often makes a sound as for an incoming text when no text is coming in, as if the phone is tugging at my sleeve or nudging my arm to say, Pay attention to me! You’re not paying attention to me! Apparently a new "thing" for young people on college campuses these days is the phone-free gathering, where attendees sit with hands free and look into each other’s faces and talk directly to one another, making the conscious decision not to let their phones dictate their every waking minute. Isn’t that a hopeful sign?

(When an old friend and I were going to get together for the first time in many years, I suggested that we leave our phones in another room. We didn't miss them at all.)

Another development in the growing rebellion against digital technology (more astonishing to me than a return to vinyl records) is the rediscovery of VHS. Movies in boxes! Don’t have a VCR? You can rent that, too! I am told that even CD and DVD technology amazes more and more young people, accustomed as they are to streaming music and movies. What do they make of VHS tapes?

(In novels written a hundred or more years ago, we read of parties where young people gathered around a piano, singing songs, thrilled with the arrival of new, up-to-date sheet music. Country life without a piano might still feature a fiddle, guitar, harmonica, or other instruments. Stamping feet. Clapping hands.) 

I wonder (the eternal springing of hope!) if perhaps my busy spring Saturday of bookselling is related to these other stories, another turning away from tiny screens. Maybe we will have an Indie Bookstore Year!

What is on your mind these days?

This morning I watched grey clouds outside my window as they moved slowly from south to north. A south wind. Occasional glimpses of blue sky. Then a more uniform grey, devoid of contrast, reminding me of ground recently monochromatic white. My first coffee of the day, whether at 5 a.m. or 6:30, is my time to come awake to the world gradually, to look back on days past and plan the days ahead, to read or write, to—I admit it!—look at my phone to scan headlines as well as to see the weather forecast. “Violence is never the answer,” people around the world say solemnly today, a predictable chorus, as they condemn the latest lone shooter. Who would disagree? Yet if war is not violence, then nothing is. That is one of my morning thoughts.

First faint flush of green!

Trees. I think about trees daily and look forward every morning to being outdoors again among them, although I confess to taking up arms against autumn olive and popples advancing into land I want to preserve as meadow, just as I contemplate possible ways to discourage spotted knapweed in my meadow without the use of poison. Controlling nature is not possible, nor is it my wish. I am grateful for the proliferation of squills and forget-me-not in my yard and yellow-headed coneflowers in the meadow. Finding another hawthorn in the meadow delights me. I don’t want to be engulfed by autumn olive and knapweed, however, and they would take over the world if they could. Such greedy bullies! 

My constant companion

Sunny Juliet has no such concerns. Whatever grows or doesn’t around us, the outdoor world delights her, and she has a genius for turning up deer bones. It is as if she and the coyotes have made an agreement—they will make the kills, and she will scavenge the bones—while in the yard at home, life this spring involves an astounding number of tennis balls, more and more of them turning up where they had been lost in winter’s snow. 

Sunny taking a bone break from tennis ball play

It is good to have a dog in one’s life. A constraint on freedom, to be sure, but then, there are many constraints on freedom, which can never be absolute. In our family and civic lives, we are frequently held back by consideration for others; in our outdoor lives—every move we make!—nature sets boundaries on what we can do. I step carefully in the woods, watching where I put my feet and testing a slender tree before trusting it fully as a handhold. Sunny bounds ahead confidently, much more stable on four legs than I am on only two, but we are together in our enjoyment. We are here now. We are blessed to be here now.