A Little Near-Home Vacation

Summer -- time for work, as well as for play

This is an away-from-the-bookstore post, because Bruce took the helm on Thursday, giving me a day off. Now every woman knows (sigh!) that “day off” means time to catch up on housework, right? And in summer, if it isn’t raining on the day off, that day is also a time to mow grass. Add in laundry, processing a big book order (because having a business doesn’t mean only working when on-site), secretarial duties for artist husband, and the usual daily errands, and somehow the day speeds by. That's not a complaint. It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed every minute of it. But as late afternoon approached, I was not in the mood to think about dinner yet again.

Grey skies and threat of rain cleared off, making a lovely evening for a drive, and my suggestion for dinner out was met with approval. Since my usual day takes me north, south is the natural direction I turn for a mini-vacation. Aren't these fields a beautiful sight?

Still farther south, we stopped to visit horses, because, as Alice Walker so famously put it in her poem, “Horses Make the Landscape Look More Beautiful.” Even a fence cannot obscure their grace.

These two-year-olds (I’m pretty sure these are last spring’s yearlings I recognize) were livelier than we’ve ever seen them, charging around their pasture like wild mustangs, only to pull up short at the fence, wheel around, and run another circuit around a nearby shed. While they were running, I couldn’t even think about my camera: it was enough simply to watch them move, poetry in motion. (If horses had any idea how beautiful they are, they would be insufferable.) Here is one of my favorites, a dusty grey with a flirty little tail, maybe older than the others.

It was delicious to watch them trot and canter and wheel in great arcing circles, like a school of fish or a flock of birds in the sky but so much more thrilling than fish or birds to a bookseller with a thwarted cowgirl's heart. 

After supper down in the southern inland part of the county, we came back north along the shore of south Lake Leelanau, slowing down on the stretch of road where I always look for the sandhill cranes. And there! My cup runneth over!

We were away from home less than three hours, but it felt like a vacation to me. And when we got home, the moon -- oh, my!

Not quite full, but I like its rough, unfinished edge