“Locals’ Summer” Is Underway

Friends of the heart

Labor Day is past, but for locals who work all summer, it has only just arrived, and I started the season with Sunday and Monday (September 8 & 9) spent mostly outdoors, under alternate cloudy skies and sunshine, when Sunny and I hosted our hiking buddies from Arizona, who now live in southeastern Michigan. The four of us picked up right where we left off with our last visit. 

Auntie Therese is Sunny Juliet’s second mom and young husky Yogi SJ’s best friend. Wrestling in the yard, chasing tossed balls, walking on the beach, wading in Lake Michigan, or just lying down near each other, Sunny and Yogi reunited were in seventh heaven. We left them alone in the house for a couple of hours (first time ever!) and returned to find everything exactly as we’d left it. Happy dogs, happy dog moms!

Lunch without dogs, can you believe it?

Then Tuesday it was back to work for me, refreshed and relaxed, bookstore door open to balmy September air. The giant book purchase and move, all seven or so trips with car loaded down with heavy boxes, was finished before our friends’ visit, so I was able to start my slower season without the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

 

Of course, besides integrating as many of the “new” additions into my preexisting collection, I squirrel away a book here and there for home reading this fall and winter, awaiting a future time when shelf space opens up on Waukazoo Street. One book I took home expecting something very different was an exciting surprise. The cover didn’t look like much, the dust jacket was missing, and the title didn’t tell me anything at all, but a little voice whispered in my ear, and home with me it went. 

Faint pine cone only clue....

How wonderful! Driftwood Valley, far from being the Western novel its title and brown cloth-covered boards seemed to indicate, turned out to be – well, a reissue of the book in 1999 by Oregon State University Press clearly informed potential readers what to expect with a subtitle: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness. 

 

The author, Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher, and her husband, Jack, entered the wilds of northern British Columbia in 1937 and lived for a year and a half on an otherwise uninhabited lake (after building a log cabin) hundreds of miles from towns and roads, in country noted on maps only as “unexplored” and “unsurveyed.” Their nearest neighbors were Indian trappers; their work was “collecting” (she generally wrote of “collecting” and avoided calling “killing” by that name) animals to ship skins and skulls to an American museum. They returned in 1941 for another couple of seasons before world war intervened.

 

Prior to their marriage, Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher had accompanied her naturalist father on many of his travels and earned her doctorate in animal ecology from Cornell in 1936, while her husband, John Stanwell-Fletcher, had experience in the Arctic. Their modes of travel including snowshoes, canoe, pack horses, and pack dogs, Teddy and Jack traveled and hiked by themselves at times, other times with Indian guides. They camped outdoors in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero, when managing to make a fire meant the difference between life and death, as did succeeding in killing a few grouse – better yet, a moose -- for meat to sustain them on the trail. Following the text at the end of the book are lengthy lists of plants and animals the Stanwell-Fletchers collected in the wilds of British Columbia. The lists alone, with genus and species names, is impressive. Four varieties of horsetail alone!

Only the first page of the lists --

 

Driftwood Valley, I learn online, was Wendell Berry’s favorite book during a period of his boyhood in Kentucky, and it's no wonder. Wilderness adventure! I reached the final page on Tuesday morning before breakfast with my company and a long walk with our dogs, drinking in the beauty of Michigan at the same time as we reminisced about our hikes with these same dogs in the mountains of southeastern Arizona. My Michigan country life is tame and domestic compared to northern British Columbia in the 1930s and ’40s or even Cochise County ghost town winters, but I am happy to live where I live. It's a very good place!

Happy dogs off-leash in the yard.

Tomatoes seen behind non blooming (so far) morning glory vine

Tomatoes are ripening at last in my garden, and jalapeno peppers have formed nicely. Okra was a total bust, even though started early from seed, and my friend said hers in southeast Michigan didn’t do anything, either, though she’d had success in warmer Arizona summers, but Japanese anemones have bloomed at last (they need a tomato cage support to keep from falling over) ...

 

... and the brilliance of velvety scarlet snapdragons rewards my decision to introduce a few annuals in pots among the perennials. Only one chrysanthemum blossom so far, and that’s fine, because ’mums need to wait their turn, and it is not their turn yet. Plaintively, however, I cry out, “Where are my purple coneflowers?” Little grey-headed coneflowers in the meadow have been prolific again this year, and asters are coming along nicely, but not a sign of the purple coneflowers do I see. 

 

Wednesday:

 

I began writing this post on Tuesday before remembering the evening’s scheduled presidential debate. I had no intention of watching (no TV) or streaming (my watching would not affect the outcome), and I didn’t even want to get into the frequent Facebook checking with friends who would be watching and commenting, because Wednesday morning, I assured myself, would be soon enough to hear what happened. Meanwhile, having wrapped up the story of the Stanwell-Fletchers in British Columbia, I chose for Tuesday evening’s bedtime escape reading a John Dunning murder mystery, Booked to Die, something I read long enough ago that I didn’t remember anything about the plot, only that the used and rare book business played a prominent part in the story.  

 

Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway, a compulsive book collector outside of work hours, finds in the murder of a book scout all the earmarks of the same murderer who has eluded him multiple times. By the middle of the book, Janeway has gone beyond the law to punish the murderer, turned in his badge, and is preparing to open his own shop on Denver’s Book Row.

 

…Bobby [the book scout] had come to Madison Street alone. … He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping, anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. … [He] loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.

        - John Dunning, Booked to Die 

 

The paragraph quoted speaks not of the romance of rare books but of the physical reality of a big book “deal,” the one where you get a good price because, rather than being able to cherry-pick a collection, you agree to take everything. This is the part of a bookseller’s life that does not involve “thinking outside the box” but thinking constantly, obsessively, about boxes: Too small, and they won’t hold enough books; too large, and they’re too heavy to lift. They need to be sturdy. Cartons from the grocery store that held jugs of water or bottles of wine are a good size and appropriately sturdy, but storage boxes for legal files have handholds and lids so are more readily stackable. 

Object of bookseller obsession

.

Too many when you don't need them, too few when you do.

Yes, it’s mundane, but the mundane is often a crucial consideration in any endeavor, and it cuts a lot of ice in bookselling. As a colleague likes to say, “You only get one back.” A good sturdy handcart with tires that won’t go flat is also worth its weight in gold. So it is that the concerns of Janeway’s murdered book scout resonate with my experience, as does advice Janeway’s new colleagues give him. 

 

People often say, “advice is cheap,” because people give it for free usually when you don’t ask for it. Over the years, I’ve learned to smile when people who have never owned or managed a bookstore or any other kind of business tell me what I “should” be doing. Once, though – and I’ve never forgotten it – a seasoned bookseller turned around in my doorway as he was leaving and said, “A word of advice --.” I smiled, and he said, “Good shoes.” That’s all he said. Years later he reappeared in Northport and said, “You probably don’t remember me.” I said, “Yes, I do. ‘Good shoes’! It was the best advice anyone’s ever given me!” Good shoes and a well-cushioned mat behind my desk are my recipe for extending the health of my feet and back, and the shoes also go well with dog walks and agility practice. 

 

Back to Tuesday --. As I say, I figured my watching or not watching the debate wouldn’t change the outcome and that I’d hear all about it the next day. Then Wednesday morning I woke to realize that it was once again 9/11, that infamous date on which our country was attacked. No rush, then, I thought, to post to my blog. What with the debate the night before and the sad anniversary come around again, who could possibly care about the life of one little small-town bookseller, even if she also has a dog whose online face makes strangers smile?

Sunny says, "I'm the cute one."

So now it’s Thursday, and here’s my post for the week, with bits from my reading, my business, and my life with friends and dog, here on a little northern Michigan peninsula, now all-too-thoroughly discovered but still quite beautiful and with protected public shoreline for us all to share. We are so lucky!

 

Change is in the air.

Is there a breeze stirring? What does your nose tell you? Is it the first hint of autumn, creeping in step by furtive step whenever your head is turned, as in that old game of “Statues”? 

 

I am grateful not to have pollen allergies at this time of year and hope those who do are finding relief in some form. No, no pollen allergies, but I wonder if there is a fall equivalent to spring fever. For years the Artist and I habitually took September vacations – once to France, more often to Ontario or Michigan Upper Peninsula or over to the Lake Huron shore. So these days when I see birds lined up on the electric lines, I am reminded of a line from the refrain of an old Anne Murray song: “And if I could/you know that I would/fly away with you.” But not really. Not fly, anyway….

 

The good news, though, is that my former Arizona ghost town hiking partner, now living back in Michigan, is coming for a visit soon and bringing her dog, Sunny’s best puppy bud. Sunny Juliet and Yogi will pick up right where they left off, and so will Therese and I, and now that it’s September, “locals’ summer,” I’ll take Sunday and Monday off and play tourist with my company. Well, maybe not “tourist,” exactly, but there will be long walks and lounging around, and aren’t those the best parts of a Michigan vacation?

 

Our June visit

People discovering my bookstore for the first time keep asking me how late into the season I’ll stay open, and I tell them, “Right on through the year.” My work weeks will be shorter, and eventually days will shrink, too, but the winter plan, beginning in November, is Wednesday through Saturday, 11-3, weather and roads permitting, just like last year. Until then, Tuesday through Saturday is the bookstore week.

 

You saw my famous visitor from Illinois in last week’s post, and today’s featured bookstore guest is the rare books curator from MSU, discovering Dog Ears for the first time with friends. The book he chose to hold for his photo isn’t one he purchased but one he was attracted to by its title. I think he has done very well himself for his somewhat-over-30 years. As for me, I must say it feels good to be discovered.

Tad Boehmer from East Lansing

Between customers, I’ve been rearranging bookstore categories. The “books on books”/literature section is newly organized, purged of short stories, the latter acquiring a bookcase all their own, displacing in turn the Pearl Buck novels, which are now housed in fiction (as are Gene Stratton-Porter novels). Phew! 

Books on Books (on Books!)

With so many acquisitions of “new” old books lately, it’s hard to select among them for a sample, but I’ll share a few illustrations from The Traverse Region, published in 1884, an intriguing folio that desperately needs rebinding but contains all its pages and maps. Leelanau County looks familiar, even with different spelling, but would you recognize Northport from these illustrations?

Wednesday afternoon I stopped at the Happy Hour after bookstore closing, had a draft at the bar, and took home a couple orders of the famous “bar chicken” to share with a friend. She brought pumpkin muffins and wine, and we visited outdoors over our meal, chatting about our lives and lives of friends and family, until the temperature told us to say good-night. 

 

The season is changing. Lives are changing. Change is nothing new but the eternal way of the world. We get so wrapped up in our daily concerns that it can seem as if they will go on forever, but change is always in the air. Always.

 

August Got Away From Me

 

Winter will come!

First, Books (Because, After All....)

 

For one thing, I purchased a very large collection of books and have been busy boxing and unboxing, boxing and unboxing, repricing, shelving when and where possible, exclaiming over treasures, and generally doing what dealers in old books do from time to time. Today’s illustrations for the first section of my post, in fact, are from a somewhat shabby but intriguing volume called The American Boys’ and Girls’ Annual: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for Young People. This particular annual (assuming that one came out every year) was published in 1861 and so appeared for the first Christmas of the Civil War. I imagine it as a book Louisa May Alcott would have known, don’t you? Little did our country realize on that Christmas of 1861 that the war would last through three more brutal winters and only come to a close in the spring of 1865.

Imagine the March girls, all dressed up.

Partly as a result of the recent private library purchase, though also (at least initially) as an escape from present concerns and worries, I read a lot of books from past American centuries during August. The first several on my “Books Read” list do not reflect that direction, but remember, I always have several books going at once. Anyway – or ennaway, as the Norwegian farmers say -- here they are:

Books Read August 2024

 

117.        Justice, Damaged. The Devil You Know (fiction). This book is the first in a fan fiction trilogy. If you are not familiar with fan fiction (I was not), here is my take on it: The writer begins with characters and a universe already established by another writer or writers, either in book form or (often) in a television series. The Devil You Know brings together characters from two different series, “Dexter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Dexter Morgan, a serial killer of serial killers, enters the world of vampires, other demons, and their Slayers, thanks to his talented stepdaughter. Dexter’s sister, Deb, a foul-mouthed cop, gets in on the action, too – and there is plenty of action, but also a lot of emotion, along with the questioning of emotions and perceptions, all vividly written to keep the reader turning pages until late in the night. As far as Damaged Justice (a pen name) knows, I am the first reader of The Devil You Know who came to it with no background in either Dexter or Buffy, and it still worked for me, as I was able to pick up the characters’ backgrounds as their story moved along. If you would like to read this book online, here is the link. 

 

118.        Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (nonfiction). When something unpredictable occurs, some event that carries a huge impact, we make up narratives after the fact to explain it, as if we should have seen it coming. This denial of the randomness of the universe is itself universal, Taleb writes, but we can learn to inoculate ourselves against the effects of black swans while positioning ourselves to benefit from them when they appear. Fascinating ideas from a highly original thinker.

119.        Trevor, Douglas. Girls I Know (fiction). Walt has dropped out of his graduate program at Harvard and now works half-heartedly but contentedly at a couple of low-level jobs that allow him to stay in Boston, his only life ambition to stay in Boston and have breakfast every day at the Early Bird Café, where everyone knows him. Maybe he will ask the waitress out on a date. Calm, ordinary life is shattered when a shooter enters the café and kills the owners and waitress. The shooter’s gun jams, however, when he tries to pull the trigger on Walt, who must then stagger on with the rest of his life. Becoming friends with a rich, hyperactive undergraduate girl obsessed with a nonfiction book project challenges both Walt and Ginger in their assumptions about life. And then there is Mercedes, the child of the dead restaurant owners, who hasn’t spoken a word since her mother and father were killed. Can Walt really help her? The city of Boston is a major character in this book of ordinary people making their way through trauma and confusion.

 

120.        Rives, Hallie Erminie (Mrs. Post Wheeler). The Magic Man (fiction). I did not intend to read this novel. It had the look and the opening chapters of hundreds of other 1920s novels, all set on the East Coast and featuring beautiful rich girls. Surprise! Something much more interesting entered the story, as the rich girl’s scientist father sets up an experiment with an amnesiac would-be burgler to prove to one of his European colleagues that environment makes all the difference in the production of criminals vs. successful, honest adults!

 

121.        Olson, Jim. People of the Dune (fiction). One review of Jim Olson’s book, his first novel, called it a parable, and that seems fair. It’s also very clear from the beginning where Olson’s sympathies lie: European immigrants are the “Invading People,” and the mining company moves its equipment in “like vultures circling their prey.” For me, though, the book came alive with the judge’s change of heart, over 100 pages into the book.

"With the pressing collapse of earth’s viability (e.g., the water cycle, biological diversity, climate, and so much more), it may be that the punishing expectations and entitlement of the law of private property can no longer be tolerated. The earth’s viability for supporting life is in the crosshairs. How did the right of private property get to the point where it leads to the death of nature’s web on which all life, even the right to property and profits, depends?"

Good questions. Important questions. Where will we go from here? I remember a couple of precedents for this story from the late 20^th century, a “Save the Dunes” that fought Bethelemen Steel in Indiana in the Sixties and another in the late 1970s focused on shoreline in southwest Michigan. See https://www.burnsharbor-in.gov/203/Local-History and https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591489d1add7b049345087cd

 Whatever your sympathies or intuitions about property before you come to Olson’s book, you will find yourself challenged. Clearly, the author himself has wrestled with these ideas for years, and so this is an important book, with everything in our world at stake in the legal outcomes of cases, large and small, such as the fictional one described, in our country’s court system. 

122.        Skinner, Cornelia Otis & Emily Kimbrough. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (nonfiction). After the well-deserved success of this notable bestseller, Emily Kimbrough went on to write other humorous travel books, all of which I devoured with glee in my younger years. Now I am rediscovering the innocent times of those two young women, traveling “independently” (with letters of credit from their parents, although they had worked and saved to pay their ocean passage themselves). Cornelia and Emily were traveling in the 1920s – 100 years ago! – so naturally the work is dated, and yet, how much does human nature change from one generation to another? And when did I last laugh so hard, unable to stop even when my confused dog jumped up to cover my face with kisses? Good medicine to counteract a surfeit of news and work!

123.         Woolson, Constance Fenimore. Anne (fiction). Drawn by the promise of a Mackinac Island setting, I have long wanted to read this novel, and finally a copy came my way. Anne, a novel often identified as feminist fiction, opens with the eponymous young woman’s life on the island, her mother and stepmother both having died and her father having faded into a dreamlike, unremunerative idleness. Still in her teens, Anne has charge of a household that includes four little half-siblings, three boys and a strange, fey little girl. When the father also dies and Anne learns for the first time how perilous is the family’s financial situation, she realizes also that she must prepare herself to make a living, and so, several chapters into the story, she enrolls in a private Eastern school for girls. I won’t spoil the story by detailing all the twists and turns the plot takes (there are many surprises), but know that at last Anne returns to Mackinac Island, her soul’s home. 

 

124.   Aldrich, Bess Streeter. A Lantern in Her Hand (fiction). Probably the best-known of this Nebraska author’s works, Lantern tells the life of Abbie from girlhood dreams through motherhood on the prairie to her peaceful death, alone with her memories. This novel is historical in that it depicts in detail a period long ago. The characters, however, are ordinary people, not generals or presidents or princesses, and probably we enter more wholeheartedly into their lives because of that. An American story of honest, hard-working, 19^th-century Midwesterners. I loved it.

 

125.   Brooks, Geraldine. Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days (nonfiction). Short biographies of girls and women beginning with Anne Hutchinson, this was a book I ordered by mistake. A happy mistake, as it turned out. Very enjoyable reading.

 

126.   Dwight, Margaret Van Horn. A Journey to Ohio in 1810 (nonfiction). Better to read about than to endure this journey of wagons mired in mud, wagoneers rude and blasphemous, horses beaten, the young woman keeping the journal forced to walk miles on end and often sleep on floors in roadside inns. Very interesting window, however, into weeks and weeks of uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous travel from the Eastern seaboard through the wilds of Pennsylvania to Ohio, seen by a young woman who recounts her adventures mile by mile in a journal destined to be sent, when the destination is finally reached, to her best friend back home. 

 

127.   Sitwell, Osbert. The Scarlet Tree (nonfiction). Have I been the only person in the U.S. falling asleep over Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs after a luscious, sybaritic session of bedtime reading? His long, lovely sentences, his sensuous descriptions of flowers and music I found completely delightful and soothing. The schoolboy bullying he endured was not a comfort. How could his family pretend not to notice those black eyes? In the end, however, even the mean boys turned out okay, it seems. Or so he says.

 

128.   Gallagher, Nora. Changing Light (fiction). Sent to me by a dear friend, this novel is set in New Mexico during the very secret development of the atomic bomb. A woman from New York has bought land and built a small house where she can paint, far from her artist husband’s jealous criticism. A Czech physicist, working on the “gadget,” has come to see the danger to the world presented by the bomb and wants to prevent its use. And a Catholic priest finds himself in the middle and unsure what he should do. The plot was complicated by possible spies, but for me the ambience of the setting was the novel’s strongest feature.

129. Marron, Dylan. Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers (nonfiction). Okay, so he was a "digital content creator," and he lived online. As an openly gay liberal male with strong opinions, Marron quickly found himself the target of hateful comments. After trying a variety of ways to deal with the hurt, he came up with the idea of looking up the haters for conversation -- and that's where things get not only interesting but heart-opening and mind-opening. You need to read it for yourself.

Weather Notes

Our weather has been dry for way too long. We’ll get a stretch of hot (for northern Michigan), muggy weather and clouds, even forecasts for rain, but where are those promised showers? We were supposed to have thunderstorms off and on all day Friday, but only the barest of sprinkles did we see and feel. My farmer friends are hoping not only for rain soon but also for a cold winter with lots of snow, unlike our last winter that almost wasn't.

Garden Notes

At home, my tomatoes are showing a little color at last, jalapeno peppers are shaping up nicely, daisies and phlox are almost ready to give way to anemones and chrysanthemums – and I want to shout, “No, no! It’s too early for 'mums!” Happy about those nightshades, though, by which I mean the peppers and tomatoes. 

 

Though mention of nightshades reminds me to mention and show wild fungi that have appeared in my yard and near neighborhood recently. I let the puffball grow a few days before harvesting it for my kitchen. 

Boletes, on the other hand, I am collecting only with my phone camera. They are too numerous and, for me, too confusing to try to identify as edible or poisonous. And yet they are fascinating! I don’t remember seeing them before. Ever since our last mild winter, 2024 has been an unusual year….

Dog Notes

 

While I look forward to another visit soon from our Arizona hiking buddies, Little Miss Oblivious, a.k.a. Sunny Juliet, makes do with her dog momma’s company. She is starting to catch onto Frisbee, with the indestructible version known as “Hyper-Pet.” Of course we still have tennis ball play and agility practice, and she still has (kept outdoors) her treasured old raggedy boot, found in the orchard when she was only a puppy.

 

Bookstore Notes

 

Today, though, I can’t close with dog notes, because last Thursday Dog Ears Books had a very special visitor, the senior U.S. senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin. It was Senator Durbin’s second visit to my bookstore, and this time, while I forgot to ask him to write in the guestbook, I did remember to get photos. Thank you, Senator Durbin, not only for your visit and your book purchase, but for all you have done in service to our country!