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 so 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 the days before 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 squalls 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 her domestic life 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 relying 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.

Changing Moods of Northern Michigan

One rainy morning on Waukazoo Street

 

The season is dragging its feet, but the rocket took off.

Spring break? I didn’t take one. A lingering cough and less-than-optimal driving weather put the kibosh on travel plans. There were a few highlights in the week, however, including birthday dinner at a friend’s house, where we watched the launch of Artemis II together. 

Moon launch! Following the crew of Artemis II these past few days has been good medicine for me, a cheery antidote to the insanity of you-know-who and you-know-what.

As a devoted earthling who has never had the slightest desire to travel in outer space, I’ve never been a big fan of the space program, but Wednesday evening’s launch warmed my heart. Here’s what I loved most about it: Everyone involved was calm, competent, skilled, intelligent, knowledgeable, dedicated, modest, and grateful to be part of a team effort years in the making. What a breath of fresh air in today’s world! And one of the four astronauts, 47-year-old Christina Koch, is from Michigan! 

Thanks to the Artemis II mission, we have already learned to call the side of the moon facing away from earth the “far" side, rather than the “dark” side. Makes me think of Gary Larson’s cartoons. Here are some Larson takes on space travel.

Much, much closer to home than 250,000 miles, spring plants whose flowering was set back by two feet of March snow are preparing once again for their postponed season opening. Winter aconites, snowdrops, and hellebore seem as eager to blossom as I am to see the blossoms. Even buds of small branches torn from big trees—little detached limbs!—want to participate.

Reminders of my friend Chris, who gave me the first ones

Need to plant more of these in the fall

Still crumpled from their sleep under the snow

Life force!

Participating in democracy is heartwarming.

The March 28 “No Kings” gatherings across the country were once again peaceful and full of joy. Recovering from one of my life’s worst colds, I didn’t think I could handle a big Traverse City crowd but made a sign and went to join demonstrators in Suttons Bay. The thought I had that morning was that I was not only demonstrating for those whose views I share but for all Americans, not only for my own future and that of my children and grandchildren but for the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of all Americans to the seventh generation—at least! 

It was good to see demonstrators carrying American flags. We were out there on a chilly morning because we love our country!

I wanted a larger, clearer sign on March 28 than the one I’d held earlier in Northport when I joined “the stalwarts” (as I call them) for a couple Thursdays on the corner south of my bookstore. My solution was to take a large trifold pasteboard I’d put together for the Artist’s memorial gathering in Leland and tape it closed, using what had been the back of the trifold for the front of my sign. No one else knew, but I liked knowing that the Artist and my family and friends were with me inside that sign.

My reading is random, as usual.

“On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also, I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

- Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)

Barker’s historical novel, Regeneration, takes place during World War I and opens with poet Siegfried Sassoon's letter protesting the war’s continuance. Taken to be suffering from shell shock, he is sent to a hospital for treatment rather than being court-martialed, and in the hospital he, the historical character, and we, the readers, meet other soldiers sent home from the front and gradually learn their stories. One of the others is young Wilfred Owen, another English poet, killed when he returned to action, age 25, a week before the war's end. (Sassoon lived through the war and died at the age of 80.) The character whose thoughts we follow most intimately is the doctor in charge of Sassoon’s case. 

But it was that letter on the first page of the novel that grabbed my attention like a fire engine siren, with the phrases “callous complacence,” “agonies which they do not share,” and “have not sufficient imagination to realize.” Isn’t that the case with the present war begun by our own country? Except that the sufferers today are, for the most part, not our country's military but civilians (including children) of the country our president wants to bomb “back to the Stone Age.”

***

Shifting gears here--On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes, edited by Michael Welch, is a  collection of nonfiction and poetry by 33 different writers living in the U.S. and Canada on one or another of the Great Lakes. The publishing house, Belt Publishing, is new to me, and none of the writers in the book had names I recognized. An interview on Interlochen Public Radio with one of the writers (Sara Maurer, “What Are Yoopers Without Winter?”) brought the volume to my attention and led me to order it, and I am so grateful to IPR for the connection! I’ve been skipping around in the volume, opening at random and reading wherever the book opens, and everything I’ve read has been excellent. Not just good but excellent, and I am eager to get this book into my bookstore customers’ hands.

Slowly, the season to come is taking shape.

Dog Ears Books will celebrate Indie Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 25, with a poetry reading by Fleda Brown at noon. This will be Fleda's fourth appearance in Northport, so it's safe to say there is mutual affection. Mark your calendar now!

May will be a quiet month, without any special events, as I have several special events in my personal life that month. 

On Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m., our bookstore guest will be Robert Downes, doing a slide show presentation on the arrival of Europeans in North America and what that meant for indigenous cultures, along with a signing of his new book, Sun Dog: A Novel of Native America. 

***

Scenes & Thoughts From Life & Lit

"Can we play ball?"

 

This is what spring looks like. 

 

At least, it is what the month of March so often looks like here in northern Michigan, as the calendar announces spring in the midst of continued snow and ice. 

 

But a thaw brings its own troubles. Frozen mud ruts are jarring, but a slithery mud wallow can be much more difficult to navigate. And do we want the 70-degree temperatures in March that family in Minnesota and Illinois had recently? I should say not! Heaven forbid the “darling buds of May” be tempted to open any earlier and risk a killing frost!

Future Mudbath Here

Meanwhile, living in a book –

 

Published in 1859, the action of George Eliot's Adam Bede takes place in 1799 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, but world-historic events are not the author’s concern. We are told the time only because the narrator insists that “all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago,” and so, she says, we should not be surprised that Adam exhibits a touch of peasant superstition along with his keen intelligence or that “Hetty’s sphere of comparison was not large.” The novel's world is a circumscribed rural world of a bygone past but also includes the inner, infinitely complex worlds of the people who lived there in that time.

 

Reading Eliot's classic novel in the 21^st century, it is difficult to view it, as many did in 1859, as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Seduction, pregnancy, and infanticide do occur in the story, but hardly in “lewd” language. Of the seduction, we see only kisses and an arm around a waist, while the infant is more abandoned than murdered—criminal, yes, but neither violently nor without feeling—and between the seduction and the abandonment, the terrified flight of a young woman never before on her own in the world has her pregnancy named to us by the author only, circumspectly, as her “hidden dread.” There are no graphic scenes or language.

Winter continues.
Seasonal road season is not here yet.

Shocking readers was not George Eliot’s aim. Rather, she encouraged the enlargement of sympathy for our fellow creatures.

 

The story takes place at the turn of a century over 300 years ago. We see the faces of George Eliot’s characters as their own friends and families see them, and at the same time we feel the beating of their hearts as if those hearts were our own. Hopes, illusions, doubts and all the rest of the changing weather that passes through their souls we experience along with them as, along with what we see, there is what the author allows us to feel, which is more than we might for our own neighbors and friends whose hearts are hidden from us. As the omniscient narrator tells a story so universal that it might have taken place at any time in human history, we are introduced not only to people as they appear to each other but also to the inner lives of each. We see clearly the querulous, jealous mother-love of Lisbeth Bede, the near-worship of young Seth for his brother Adam, Adam’s hard and unforgiving judgment of those who lack his devotion to work, Hetty’s inability to feel sympathy for anyone’s feelings other than her own, and Dinah’s gentle saintliness that asks nothing for herself—and if Lisbeth and Seth and Adam, Hetty and Dinah were our neighbors we might stop with what we see and judge them by a single standard, much as does the voluble Mrs. Poyser, with her rock-ribbed sense that her view of things was the only right view. But granted access to their inner doubts, fears, and hopes, we share (if we are sympathetic readers) in the author’s sympathy for them all.

Weak sun trying its best to shine --

A friend and I were texting one recent morning about writers able to move readers to such sympathy. As I have long said of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you might be unable, in real life, to tolerate sitting next to one of her characters on a long bus ride, but thanks to her insights into that character’s experiences and the marks it has left on the soul, a reader understands the why behind, for example, someone’s maddening anger or overwrought sensibility. By contrast, no subtlety or great knowledge of hearts is required to create a fictional hero or villain, only the willingness to play God and divide the human race into the saved and the damned. “An author needs a vision of human nature and unusual writing skill to produce characters that truly reflect reality,” my friend noted. 

Vision, skill—I would add that it takes generosity of spirit on the part of the writer, a largeness of soul. And a reader willing to open her own heart and mind to the vision of such a writer cannot help but feel increased sympathy for mankind in general.

 

How can it be that I never read this novel before? To think that I might have missed it entirely! It will be part of my mission as a bookseller to urge its reading to others, though I realize that not all readers will find it as compelling as I did because Adam Bede presents a couple of possible stumbling blocks for 21^st-century readers. 

First, there is the dialect. Repetition and context aid in translation, however, and a reader quickly realizes that ‘mun’ stands for ‘must,’ ‘war’ for ‘were,’ and ‘nor’ for ‘than.’ Also, the dialect is stronger in some characters’ speech than in others and occurs not at all in the exposition, so screw up your courage and dive in!

 

A more general stumbling block for many would be the novel’s opening pace. The story begins slowly and builds slowly. We see country people at their work and at their worship, the author in no hurry to cut to the action, her paragraphs long and dense with description. While impatience on the part of a reader will be ill rewarded, I can promise that once things begin to happen there are plenty of sudden scene changes and increasing drama.

Ice moving out of Omena Bay at last!

With eyes on the forecast –

 

I’m back in my bookshop today, for the first time since—was it really Thursday, March 12? Almost two weeks ago?! That’s what the double whammy of a couple feet of snow plus a debilitating cold will do to the most determined and intrepid bookseller. But she is back among the living, friends, and happy to be here for you once more.

Somewhere in the future will be more blue skies.

Without the blue snow!

And now? Will I take spring break next week along with everyone else in Northport, the public school and our hardworking friends at New Bohemian Café? Is there a road trip in my near future? Or will I stay put and be a destination for someone else? Much depends on the weather, my friends, as is so often the case in our extraliterary lives, but I am here this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for sure, March 25-27, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., so stop by if the spirit moves you. 

And someday soon Sunny will be rolling in clover!

Where I've Been Lately

I’ve been under the weather.

It’s hard to keep the days straight, but a week ago Saturday I expected to be in my shop and then could not get there because I had no plow-out at home until evening. I made a brief foray out into the world on Sunday before Monday dumped two feet of new snow. 

On Tuesday evening farmer/plow guy came with big tractor and monster snow blower, which allowed me to get out Wednesday to collect mail, purchase OTC relief for a nasty cold, and renew the license plate tab for my car, but since then I’ve stayed home, lying low, sleeping as much as possible. My laptop notified me that I spent 40% less time online in the past week than the week before. Duh! I'm sick! Leave me alone!

Here are a couple things I learned, hunches I followed up with online searches when finally I had the energy to pursue information again. If these tidbits keep one or two of my blog readers from being caught off-guard, it will be worth my mentioning them.

(1) A simple illness like a bad cold can bring on, trigger—mimic, if you prefer—depression. The scientific explanation has to do with cytokines and the body’s immune response, and my science nerd friends will want to follow up on the research in this area. For me, confirmation of my hunch was all-important to “bouncing back” (which I am doing in super-slow-motion), because at my lowest ebb I had no energy at all: no energy to care, to feel grateful, to feel hopeful, no energy to feel. And not feeling, not caring for or about anything but my own misery was worse than the misery itself. Everything dear and important seemed pointless. Life itself. Why go on?

Then on Saturday, the morning after the worst day, I woke up feeling, if not exactly “better,” at least not as completely terrible, and I cannot exaggerate the effect of that slight improvement. It was a re-entry into life! Still sick, coughing, and low on energy but able once again to smile when my phone's ping! announced a text from my special someone. Love was not an illusion, a sick joke played on me by a malevolent universe, and I was not dead to its wonder! I was reborn! Hallelujah!

(2) Coughing can cause [more] coughing. This was another hunch I had that proved out, and it’s a good reason to treat the symptom, in order to break the vicious cycle. 

I was still able to read — sometimes — off and on. 

At my worst, it was much more off than on, sleep too demanding to be denied. I would often wake from hours of sleep only to drag myself through a page or two before giving up, exhausted, to pull the covers over my head again. In better hours, though, the force of the story would pull me in and along, giving me as much of a reprieve from self-pity as I could hope to achieve. (Because self-pity was the absolutely most disgusting aspect of the whole thing!)

The Lincoln Reader, edited by Paul M. Angle, published in 1947, was one of that year's Book-of-the-Month Club selections. BOMC News, in announcing the choice, declared that while Angle’s book would have been impossible without all the previous books written about Lincoln (it borrows from many of them), it duplicated none of them. Angle’s selections are grouped according to the chronology of the subject’s life, beginning with “Kentucky Childhood” and proceeding through “Youth in Indiana,” “New Salem,” etc., all the way through Lincoln’s careers in law and politics, his presidency and the Civil War, to “Death—and a People’s Grief.” Let me quote from the BOMC News flier that accompanied the volume: 

[The book] is based on all the great biographies…. It draws from the intimate narratives of Nicolay and Hay, and from the priceless reminiscences of Herndon. It gets color and variety from the homely remarks of his contemporaries, many of them little known. It uses the newspaper reports of the political battles…. It includes off-the-record stories by a great many men and women who knew more than they would tell when Lincoln was alive. 

There are also sections in Lincoln’s own words, whether speeches given or letters written.

BOMC notes of distinguished Lincoln scholar Paul Angle that he “shepherds this flock of witnesses, and cuts them in and out like sheep in a moving picture…,” and as we proceed through the chapters we meet Lincoln from a variety of perspectives, both sympathetic and critical; from a distance, on state occasions, as well as in personal surroundings, alone or with his intimates, and the overall effect is that of living alongside him, in his times, from the first to last page of the book. 

Has there ever been a more American president than this gangly, rawboned, self-educated “Westerner”? For Kentucky and what we now call the Midwest were the West then (Michigan and beyond the Northwest), the country as raw as the man—not only the frontier but the capitol itself, Washington. This is how a member of the House of Representatives, Albert G. Biddle of Ohio’s Western Reserve, described the capitol when Lincoln arrived there in 1861:

 It was then as unattractive, straggling, sodden a town, wandering up and down the left bank of the yellow Potomac, as fancy can sketch. Pennsylvania Avenue, twelve rods wide, stretched drearily over the mile between the unfinished Capitol and the unfinished Treasury building on Fifteenth Street…. Illy paved with cobblestones, it was the only paved street of the town. The other streets, ... were long stretches of mud or deserts of dust and sand…. Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter. Each house had an open drain from its rear, out across the sidewalk. 

Squalid as were his surroundings, however, and informal as his manners could sometimes be, Lincoln’s presidential statements, within Cabinet meetings or to the public at large, were marked by thoughtfulness, principle, and dignity. His entire first term of office was passed in wartime, the first shots at Fort Sumter fired on April 12, scant weeks following the new president’s March 4, 1861, inauguration. Lincoln sought and carefully weighed advice from his Cabinet and his generals. He never thought he knew more than anyone else but accepted the fact that the ultimate decisions granted him in the Constitution were his responsibility. 

During his first inaugural address, Lincoln appealed to Americans’ sense of shared history and contiguous land, reminding them, “We are not enemies, but friends.” Then, perhaps more practically, “We must not be enemies.” On March 4, 1865, the war all but concluded (Lee would surrender to Grant on April 9) and his re-election accomplished, Lincoln’s inaugural address acknowledged the price suffered by four years of bloody conflict, a longer, greater, and more awful war than either side had anticipated. His final words that day are justly famous:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

Angle’s book, in giving me a fuller picture of Lincoln the man than I ever had before, also gave me a much clearer realization of his greatness.

And now, as I slowly come back to my own ever-so-modest role in the human race, still resting a lot between short bursts of housework (not really “bursts” at my current speed, to be honest), having so enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, I am reading another novel by George Eliot, Adam Bede. At the beginning of Book Two, the author addresses her readers directly to explain her reasons for choosing the characters she does. That they are not mythic heroes or villains, she readily acknowledges, but if she chose to present only such unrealistic figures, making it obvious where readers should admire and approve and where they should condemn and hate,

[W]hat will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry?—with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor?—with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing?—with your neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence?—nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes?

She continues, without breaking her paragraph as I have done here:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are, …and it is these people—amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

Content to tell her “simple story,” the author tells us, she dreads nothing but falsity, noting that “things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome” and that she would rather reconcile us to love each other despite our faults and flaws than to be indifferent or coldly prejudiced against one another. Another author would have portrayed the character Hetty, for example, very differently. Eliot’s portrait is kindly and leads us to be more generous in our estimation:

…Hetty’s was a spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence—the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog.

Yes, I think George Eliot may become one of my favorite writers.

Someone has been a spectacularly good girl!

You know who I’m talking about! Sunny Juliet has been an angel dog for her momma this past dreadful week! Who walks my dog for me while I’m sick? She walks herself! I bundle up in my barn coat and sit in the porch doorway while Sunny goes out and tends to her business. She may do a little wandering around the yard and exploring, but there have been no long walkabouts: no, she has stuck close to the house and has come back without calling, sometimes so quickly that I order her back to “Run around! Run, run, run!” before we go back indoors together. I could not have asked for an easier, more compliant, easy-going companion than Sunny has been during what has to have been an incredibly boring stretch of days for her. Good dog! I am so proud of her and grateful for her presence! 

Grateful, too, for all the offers of assistance and get-well wishes by text and other means that have come my way. Thank you all for your caring concern! It means the world to me.

Spring in Warwickshire, Winter Continues in Leelanau

March 20, 2025: snow

March 31, 2025: ice

Is this March all that completely different from the Marches of other years? I look back at photographs on my phone from March 2025 and see snow and ice, snow and ice. If the snow was not as deep last year, the ice was more damaging that what we have had this year—so far! Some say with Shakespeare that April is the cruelest month. I say March is crueler— more a steady, harsh prolongation of winter than a teasing alternation of winter and spring.

May 14, 2025: pear blossoms

Spring! Will we really be granted another? Will we see May blossoms again if we only hang in there patiently? Surely, yes! And every hour of beautiful May will be filled not only with that hour’s beauty but also with memories of former springs, memory deepening perception to swell each moment to overflowing.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

William Allen Neilson, who edited the Harvard Classics edition of The Mill on the Floss, calls the novel “substantially true [to the author’s life] though intentionally altered in details,” as George Eliot took her own girlhood as a model for that of her heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and the terrain of Warwickshire in the English Midlands as the inspiration for Maggie’s beloved home country. That much is hardly surprising, is it? Neilson notes that Dickens did the same in David Copperfield and Thackeray in Pendennis. Never having been an English major, I know of great literature and writers only what I have read and so was taken by surprise to learn that Mary Ann Evans (as she was born), in addition to writing novels, was first assistant editor of the Westminster Review in London and at the same time translated Essence of Christianity, by the German philosopher Feuerbach into English! Translated Feuerbach? Really?

Another surprise awaited me in the novel itself. Nothing I ever heard of George Eliot had led me to expect humor in her writing. And yet, why be surprised? Thackery’s satirical portrayals of church and society, as well as the unforgettably broad characters of Charles Dickens, surely delighted their authors in the hours of their creation, so why should George Eliot, in the same literary-historical period, not do her own skewering of pretense and eccentricity? Early on in the story, Eliot gives us a conversation between the parents of young Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The husband is more or less thinking aloud, meditating on further schooling for their son, Tom, hardly expecting thoughtful contributions from the wife he chose because she was not quick-witted enough to challenge him with ideas of her own, so he is not at all taken aback when plump, pretty, blond, shallow-minded Mrs. Tulliver replies only to what she hears and understands, rather than to what her husband says.

“But,” continued Mr. Tulliver after a pause, “what I’m a bit afraid on is, as Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish. He takes after your family, Betsy.”

“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs. Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s way, and my father’s before him.”

Besides lyrical descriptions of natural beauty and sharply satirical portraits of human beings in relationships, the author makes the occasional general observation on humanity. Here is one that struck me forcibly today, as violence unleashed around the world triggers repercussions nearer home:

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Men, women, and children, we understand George Eliot to be saying, as Tom and Maggie suffer their father’s bankruptcy, as well as the primary blame their mother’s family places squarely on their father and secondarily on their mother for having married him. (So in today’s reckless, ill-considered war, undertaken principally by two dictatorial heads of state, repercussions are being felt around the world. Will unmerited pain or “justice” will be greater in the end? What are the odds?)

Even as the girl Maggie’s repeated bursting into tears annoyed me, I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss much more than I had expected I would and put off reaching the final pages by setting the book aside over and over again. 

Thursday I got to my bookshop for the scheduled four hours (as I had on Wednesday, also), entertaining a total of two drop-in visitors in all that time (a quieter day than even Wednesday had been), and then the forecast for Friday was so dire that I planned a snow day, along with all the schools in Leelanau County, and made a lazy day of it at home, with a lot of reading and the reorganization of one cupboard. The forecast for Saturday was sunshine, however, and I planned to get back to my shop. 

Friday sun and shadows

So much for plans! My driveway wasn’t plowed until 5:30 p.m.! Sorry I couldn't get my shop open for a sunny Saturday!

Which brings me to Sunday, my usual at-home day, with a near-blizzard raging outside my blessedly warm farmhouse. I say “near-blizzard” advisedly, having been instructed that ‘blizzard’ is a very precise category of storm. So far our winds are only 23-25 mph, not the 35 mph that they would need to be for blizzard designation. In addition, we would need not just blowing snow but whiteout conditions for three hours. So today’s snowstorm is not a blizzard, but if it dumps two feet of snow, a lot of us may be snowed in for another couple of days. One can be snowbound without a blizzard.

Sunday morning

Does Sunny like the snow? She is eager to go outdoors, happy to run around the yard and "make snow angels" (in her own way—you wouldn’t recognize them as such—I think she’s only scratching her back), but there’s not much reluctance on her part when her momma tells her it’s time to go inside again. 

"Ready for breakfast, Momma!"

Sunny and I came indoors for breakfast about 9 o'clock. By 4 p.m. the walk I had cleared in the morning was buried eight inches deep in new snow. Sunny was floundering in it, up to her belly. And it was still coming down....

I hope my snowbound friends have plenty of books to get them through these days!