Backwards From Tuesday

Sarah Shoemaker signing CHILDREN OF THE CATASTROPHE

We Had Launch! (Tuesday)

 

Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, is a traditionally quiet day Up North and was definitely a quiet day on Waukazoo Street (with the Mitten, the Garage, and the New Bohemian all closed for a little post-summer break), but we made up for the quiet day with a celebratory evening at the Leelanau Township Library with Sarah Shoemaker and her new novel, Children of the Catastrophe. 

 

The weather could not have been sweeter. Big, enthusiastic turnout was gratifying, to say the least. (Northport loves books!) Sales were gratifying, too, and Sarah was kept busy signing until the assembled multitude demanded that she speak, and then an appreciative audience listened to her reading from the novel and asked good questions afterward. 

Sarah reading to library guests

 

My neighbor Julie, who is also the new librarian in Northport, was there pitching in, as were several library friends (Northport is a true community) and Sarah’s visiting family. Sarah and I both neglected to mention, however, her husband’s photographs from Greece that have current pride of place on the walls dedicated to local artists, so if you’re in Northport be sure to stop in at the library and look at those. 

 

Kent Shoemaker's photographs of Greece

More

Other than selling books (which I do with fair competence after 29 years’ experience), my contribution in the form of cucumber mint lemonade was a total disaster. What on earth had gone wrong? After all the preparation work and assembly, I got home after the book launch to find the honey water sitting on the kitchen counter! Lemonade without sweetener is a challenge to the taste buds that I had not intended. Sorry, Sarah! Sorry, Northport! It would have been as good as it looked if I hadn’t left out that key ingredient! 

Refreshments table

Luckily for the crowd, Sarah’s Greek dessert buffet was delicious as well as beautiful.

 

A Labor Day of Labor (Monday)

 

Sunny Juliet in high-def!

Sunny Juliet had a workout Monday morning. It was her very first introductory attempt at agility work, and she took to it like an eagle to the air. (She’s no duck. Won’t even put a paw in the little wading pool I bought for her.) She is agile, smart, and supremely confident, so after a little initial skepticism over the tunnel, she handled the new equipment and experiences eagerly and easily. She also made a new dog friend – her first Michigan dog friend! – a border collie named Cookie, so maybe next week I’ll get photos of Cookie and Sunny working the equipment or enjoying their after-work play together, which they certainly did. All in all, it was a very successful morning, and I admit I was relieved. Mike, our instructor, was not surprised that Sunny did well. Though he had never met her, he knew SJ would be good at agility. I had just wondered if she would be too wild to focus, but she did a good job. Good girl!

 

Next I spent Monday afternoon with lemons and cucumbers and honey (and you already read above the sorry result, not of the preparation but of my forgetfulness) and outdoors throwing tennis balls and Frisbees for Sunny and more mowing of grass. (Note: Isn’t it amazing how fast grass can grow?)

 

 

Meandering Led to Memory Lane (Sunday)

 

Lake Michigan Road

As was the case this past spring, when I had not planned ahead of time to dare the road over the Chiricahua Mountains, all the way up to Onion Saddle and down again on the other side, with only my puppy as copilot, I didn’t plan what turned out to be last Sunday’s destination. Destination? Was it destined? The expedition began as a simple drive to Lake Leelanau to pick something up at NJ’s, then a slow cruise down along South Lake Leelanau and a stop in Cedar for ice cream (shared with SJ). After that, I thought I’d started for home but somehow found myself circling Little Traverse Lake from north to south (how did that happen?), and then, coming out on M-22 so close to Bohemian Road, destiny pulled me south again.  Bohemian Road (C.R. 669), Lake Michigan Road, second crossing of Shalda Creek, and down past Shell Lake to where the old two-track, growing over now with vegetation, winds through the meadow and back to the woods where the Artist’s house used to stand, all this territory now part of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.

 

across the old meadow

We made this trek last Labor Day, the Artist and Peasy and I. We walked all the way in, a long walk for David but worth it. It was the most beautiful day! We stopped at last in the quiet of the woods, where I photographed David sitting on a log, holding the rope (we had somehow left the house without a leash) that had Peasy at the other end (didn’t get Pea in the photograph – terrible lapse), but though I looked this year at various logs in the woods, I couldn’t be sure if any of them was the log. None seemed right. My heart was heavy.

Nature's cathedral -- and mine

David’s memories of his house in the woods went back years further than my own, as it was his summer studio and a place his children came on vacation for years, the girls burying their little tea set dishes over and over in a sand pit -- to dig up again and again years later in adulthood. I remember my first visit there, however, and I will always remember our Labor Day 2021 visit, as well as times in between. And probably this one with Sunny, too, will stay in memory. The thing is, the two-track is disappearing, but all the same plants are there – the brambles and bracken fern, horsetails and horsemint, goldenrod and asters. I do believe bracken fern, although not a true fern at all, is my favorite fern. [Update & correction: Bracken is a fern, it seems. Someone told me it wasn't, and I believed. Mistake.) It is ubiquitous in the poor soil of northern Michigan, and thus for me it is drenched in memories, as are the asters and the horsemint, and all the oaks and pines and other trees, both the old and the new young ones….

The pond looked low.

This old tree has been around a while.

 

Bracken in full sun ...

... and in dappled shade.

moss and 'shrooms

Reindeer moss -- a lichen -- amid the true mosses

It was a slow drive home, by an inland route. Near School Lake, I recalled a day one early winter when we stopped for about a hundred turkeys in the road. “About,” because it’s hard to count that many turkeys when they’re milling around. I have no picture of those turkeys, and it was years before Sunny was born, but I can almost see them there still, every time I come to that portion of road.