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!

Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

A few books, a few words

 

"What's with all this reading, anyway?"

Earth may be blown to smithereens (one of my mother’s oddball words) any day now, but until that happens I continue to go to my bookshop, continue to communicate with friends with phone calls, texts, emails, letters, and in-person conversations, go for walks with my dog, and yes, I am still reading. Here is the list of the books I’ve read since the beginning of the year. There are not as many as usual for over two months into 2026’s twelve, but here they are:

1. Binet, Laurent. Perspective(s) (fiction, 2023)

2. Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (nonfiction, 2022)

3. Letts, Elizabeth. The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis (nonfiction, 2016)

4. Giffels, David. Barnstorming Ohio to Understand America (nonfiction, 2020)

5. Field, Isobel. This Life I’ve Loved (nonfiction, 1937)

6. Stevenson, Robert Louis. An Inland Voyage (nonfiction, 1878)

7. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Crossing the Plains (nonfiction)

8. Sixsmith, Martin. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (nonfiction, 2009)

9. Morris, Heather. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (fiction, 2018)

10. Hill, Justin. The Drink and Dream Teahouse (fiction, 2002)

11. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (fiction, 1948)

12. Buchan, Elizabeth. Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (fiction, 2002)

13. Power-Greene, Ousmane K. The Confessions of Matthew Strong (fiction, 2022)

14. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Scotch (nonfiction, 1964)

15. Paul, Elliot. Linden on the Saugus Branch (nonfiction, 1947)

16. MacDonald, Ross. Sleeping Beauty (fiction, 1973)

17. MacDonald, Ross. The Name is Archer (fiction, 1946-1983)

Make what you will of my Books Read 2026 list so far. Ask questions if you have them. I can tell you that I am currently reading Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree at bedtime; with dinner, a book about trees written for artists (forget title and author name; the book is at home, and I am not); began The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jim Robbins, sitting in my car by the side of an icebound inland lake; and have a George Elliot novel, The Mill on the Floss in the wings, ready to follow Thomas Hardy.

Sometimes I find it hard to justify (to myself) the hours I spend reading books while the country and the world fall apart; however, giving up the hope of making certain others care about what breaks my heart, I am now spending less time online, having realized at long last that sharing and forwarding stories to people who either deleted my messages without reading them or maybe even blocked me and never saw the messages at all was a lost cause. As long as they continue circling their golden calf and cheering him as their savior (incomprehensible!), they will be unable to take in messages that conflict with their "true belief.” (Here's another.) Time to re-read Eric Hoffer?

I won’t deny, either, that much of my reading is escape (just look at the dates of some of those novels and memoirs and travel books), but who wouldn’t want to escape from a present in which one’s own beloved country bombs a children’s elementary school in another country, kills over a hundred schoolgirls, and our “leaders” express not a single word of regret? Everything else—all the threats to voting rights, violations of the Constitution, outright lies left and right, incompetence and corruption—all of it pales for me in the light of those dead schoolgirls. Will Iran be better off now that the Ayatollah is gone? Those little girls, dead, are not better off. You think opposing abortion regardless of circumstances means you reverence life, and yet you say nothing in opposition to these murders? And because I am an American, these murders were done in my name, also! For shame, America! For shame!

Beautiful earth! Beautiful trees and mountains, lakes and rivers, hills and prairies alive with life! Potentially beautiful human animals with your lacerated hearts and stumblings and gettings-up-again and attempts to love one another! Open your eyes!

Beautiful Michigan!

Bookstores, Libraries, Paperbacks, and Hope

Bookstores and Libraries Together

I have written more than once on this blog about how I see booksellers and librarians as colleagues, not competitors. Today I want to take a different angle and look at the places themselves and how they operate in our communities. Again, I don’t see it as a competition. Both, in my view, fulfill essential functions, some but not all of which overlap—which is why both are essential. 

 

Both bookstores and libraries provide books to the reading public, hold author events (often collaboratively), and offer breathing space away from life’s hustle and bustle. A bookseller, like a librarian, is happy to answer questions and to make recommendations (although I am not the swiftest when asked on the spot for a recommendation). Our missions and our realities overlap.

Bookstore event

Library event

Coming back to add something about audiobooks. Library patrons (anyone with a library card) can order audio books through Libby. I believe those are free to borrow. Bookstore customer-friends can buy audio books through Libro.fm and choose a specific participating indie bookstore’s portal, e.g., Dog Ears Books.

A library’s advantages over those of a bookstore are probably obvious. As a local tax-supported institution, a library can loan its books out with no charge. People who worry about accumulating books need have no concerns on that score, either: they simply read borrowed books and return them. In Michigan, moreover, if a local library doesn’t have a particular book a patron wants, the book can be borrowed from another library in the state, and in Leelanau County our township libraries provide many other township contacts and services besides books.

Julie, our lovely librarian in Northport

It may be harder to see at first glance what a bookstore can offer that a library cannot, and a shop specializing in used and rare books will obviously be different from one stocking and selling new books exclusively, but I do see a few ways that my business has an edge over publicly funded libraries, and maybe—I’m not sure here; what do you think?—a lot of it boils down to eccentricity.

 

I don’t have to answer to a boss or a board of directors or local officials or even, except to the extent that my business must be profitable to remain in existence, public demand, which means I can give shelf room to authors whose popularity peaked 100 years ago (they are here to be rediscovered by younger generations), to books in foreign languages (despite Americans’ resolute devotion to monolinguism, as if there were something unpatriotic in knowing anything other than Yankee English), and to beautifully bound classics (for readers who like to see volumes permanently available to them on their home shelves and not just ephemeral words on the screen of an electronic device). Being “my own boss” allows me to curate a collection in line with my personal values, taking a long view on what’s worth reading, rather than having to de-acquisition books that popular culture considers past their shelf life. 

One of the few librarians I found difficult (he was not trained as a librarian, I should make clear) once justified putting a major philosophy classic and a major literary classic in the books-for-sale section on the grounds that “they’re just old books.” Yes, they were, and important ones, too. And to be fair, I have to say that the librarian in question needed shelf room for books his local public wanted to read. His was not a research library. Whereas, if I think a book has value (in the broad sense, not the narrow monetary sense), I can keep it on the shelf year after year, waiting for the person who recognizes its importance.

There’s more. Having grown up in the era of the nuclear arms race, I always tend to think apocalyptically, and so I can’t help wondering sometimes if e-books don’t constitute a danger to printed books. I am not thinking about sales figures but about the continued existence and availability of important works into the future. Think about the way that digital storage formats change over time. Quickly! Add to that the possibility that digital texts can be altered before delivery. I see part of my mission as preservation. 

 

If the Internet vanished tomorrow, do you have a good dictionary in your home? A copy of the U.S. Constitution? A book of maps? Plays, poems, novels? I started to use the names of playwrights and poets and novelists in that last question but then deleted them, as there is no way to list all whose work deserves to be preserved. 

So when I put on my shop door the sticker reading “Bookstores Save Democracy,” I mean no disrespect to libraries, which also serve to save democracy. Our missions are completely compatible.

 

Disappearance of MMPs

A comment on a recent post asked me if the coming elimination of paperback books by publishers would have an impact on my business. What’s happening is that so-called “mass market paperbacks,” the kind I refer to as “grocery store books,” are being phased out, not the better bound “trade” paperbacks. Trade paperbacks (which are much easier to hold open and read and may take the place of hardcover books as first releases, as they are much less expensive) will continue to be published. 

 

Robert Gray wrote on “Shelf Awareness” this Thursday that he had a “curious double response” to the news that new mass market paperbacks would no longer be published. Years ago their affordability seduced him, and yet he could not remember the last time he had bought one. 

 

I remember when a new bookstore came to the town where I grew up. It was on the main downtown street, all the books were new, colorful paperbacks, and all hovered around a price of 35 cents. My first purchase was a red (I remember the cover) 35-cent paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye. A few years later, when I purchased at the university bookstore a paperback copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, it was a larger format and carried a whopping price of $2.95. That book, with tape-reinforced spine, is still in my possession 60 years later.

One problem with cheap paperback books, other than cheap paper, was that their glued binding did not hold up well over time, which accounts for the prices of collectible paperback books with original covers intact, the illustrated cover often accounting for most of the value of the book.

Hope: Life’s One Essential? 

I was told there are only three essentials in life: someone to love, someone to be loved by, and hope for the future. I have been mulling over that wisdom and have provisionally concluded (willing to listen to arguments) that hope is the most essential. Because, think about it: if you love and are loved but have no hope for the future, won’t you be tempted to follow the example of Stefan Zweig and his second wife, who committed suicide together? Yet even alone, even downright miserable, if you have hope for the future, that hope can include the possibility of finding someone to love. --But then (I go on to reflect), love, once known, never really vanishes, does it? To have a future, however, demands that we hold onto hope.

But what do you think? Or should I ask, how do you feel?

 

 

Note to customers: I have restocked Blood Brothers, by Elias Chacour, with David Hazard. Talk about hope! Wow!

Spring WILL come again!

Going Places

Choosing a book is like choosing a road.

Going Places In Fiction

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all.

- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction” 

 

I want to pause here after this sentence, written by Eudora Welty in an essay called “Place in Fiction,” because I want to call your attention to the first thirteen words: “Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb….” This essay of Welty’s, which I encountered in a collection entitled The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, was originally published in 1957. The 1950s are generally portrayed as a time of calm prosperity in America, and yet Eudora Welty, a writer from Mississippi, would have had a front row seat from which to observe battles over school desegregation, 

yet another reminder that there is no short, simple answer to the question of what the Fifties were “like,” those years (as was true of the Sixties and any other era in the life of our country) having been different for different people in different parts of the country with different skin color or economic status. How much “mutual understanding” was there between the races, between regions of the United States in the 1950s? 

But let us return to Welty’s discussion of place in fiction: 

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth.

 

Fiction, Welty writes in the middle of the following paragraph, “is properly at work on the here and now.” Even a historical novel must transport us to “the past made here and now,” and that is because for us to enter the world of the novel “we have to be there.” And so it is that “fiction is all bound up in the local.” 

 

A few of my friends become impatient with descriptive passages in fiction. They want action and accept dialogue only insofar as it advances plot. Not me. For me, whether in a short story or a memoir, classic novel or murder mystery, I take pleasure in the time an author takes to draw me into the locale of the story. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country begins with a lyrical passage:

 

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carrisbrooke, and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys in Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea….

- Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

 

Immediately we are in a specific place. Then, downhill from the grassy hills, he takes us to a different specific place.

 

The path is dropping into the red land of Ndotsheni. It is a wasted land, a land of old men and women and children, but it is home. The maize hardly grows to the height of a man, but it is home.

 

--It is dry here, umfundisi. We cry for rain.

 

--I have heard it, my friend.

 

--Our mealies are nearly finished umfundisi. It is known to Tixo alone what we shall eat.

 

The path grows more level, it goes by the little stream that runs by the church. Kumalo stops to listen to it, but there is nothing to hear.

 

The stream, dry for a month, does not run, and the women must walk to the river every day for water.

 

Kumalo is the individual through whose eyes we see his home, and when he makes the long journey to Johannesburg to search for his son and his sister, we hear the noise of the city through his ears and feel his confusion and fear. It is Kumalo’s truth, at home with his wife and in his meetings with other individuals in Johannesburg, that the novel allows us to see. 

It can take you somewhere you've never been before.

...For Book Reviews

 

Big news in the book world is the demise of The Washington Post’s “Book World” section, with its small number of fulltime reviewers and an ever-changing cast of guest reviewers. Was it reviewer Ron Charles who commented on NPR that there are now fewer fulltime book reviewers in the U.S. than the number of people who have walked on the moon? Whether fact or hyperbole, you get the point. As the number of newspapers shrinks, fewer and fewer of the surviving papers give any space at all to newly released books. Bestselling, big-name authors have the money of their publishing houses behind them because sales of their books keep the publishers alive, but what of small publishers, new authors, books that don’t fit neatly into a genre or niche with a loud and loyal fan base?

My customers and I trade recommendations.

Where do you learn about new books? I read reviews in the New York Review of Books (an article there persuaded me to read, at last, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove) and local publications, listen to reviews and interviews on NPR, read my daily “Shelf Awareness” newsletter, and make notes of books and authors recommended to me by my friends and bookshop customers and authors (overlapping categories). 

I look over the new arrivals at our local library. Also, as a dealer in used and rare books, as well as a reader of the old, I often follow up clues, learning of an author or a title in something I’m reading and then searching out the writers or work mentioned, which is what led me to Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. 

 

 

...In Books and Memory

 

Armchair travel! How I love it! Four decades or so ago, I was obsessed with the Arctic and sought out everything I could find about that part of the globe, particularly books written by women, such as Arctic Mood, by Eva Alvey Richards; Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter; and Spring on an Arctic Island, by Katharine Scherman. There is a wealth of armchair travel available in fiction, too, and I have loved visiting on pages of books lands I will never see in person. Thanks to reading, I have also “owned” horses!

I thought of them fondly as mine.

My memory travels are made possible by daydreams, old journals, photo albums, even by digital images stored on my phone. Looking this morning at images from three years ago in Arizona, I thought for the first time that, odd as it may sound at first, Arizona gave me something of what I longed for in my Arctic dreams—a challenging environment. The Arctic would have given me the challenge of cold and treelessness. Cochise County challenged me with relentless sun, with dry, thin air (thinner with every hundred feet of altitude), primitive roads beneath my tires, and loose, unstable gravel and rock underfoot. There were times when my endurance was tested.

Solo destination was more challenging than photo portrays.

While my yearning for the Arctic has evaporated with age, I am sometimes “homesick” for the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains, and reliving hikes with friends and dogs is a pleasure I feed by (besides my own writing and photographs) reading books set in the area, such as stories of Cochise and the Chiricahua Apaches, as well as J.A. Jance’s Sheriff Joanna Brady series. 

 

“Were you homesick for Michigan when you were in Arizona?” a friend asked. “No,” I said, “I didn’t have to be, because I knew I would be back.” Every winter in Arizona, on the other hand, was a gift I knew might not be repeated, and indeed my last winter in the ghost town was 2022-23, but I remain grateful to have had my time there and for the friends I made.

 

 

...At Home in Michigan!

 

“We live in a beautiful place,” the Artist used to say often, and since he’s been gone I’ve made that remark frequently to Sunny Juliet, as my dog rides shotgun with me in Leelanau County.

With dog on Michigan back road -- heaven!

Michigan’s two green peninsulas, their lakes, rivers, creeks, fields and hills, sandy beaches and rocky shores—my family fell in love with Michigan when we came camping in a heavy old canvas umbrella tent, back when I was 12 years old, and it has been my great good fortune to call Michigan home for decades since. 

What do you look for in a companion? Common values, interests, background? Sharing a love for Michigan, both the familiar places and those not yet explored, is essential to me. Then, please, let him be a woodsman. Well, okay then!