That Was Then, This Is Now

 A Bit of Bookstore History (Northport)

 

The little shed in the photo above once stood on Waukazoo Street. Long gone now, it was the original Dog Ears Books in 1993. By 2008, the year the photograph was taken, so much vegetation had grown over the entrance that the shed had the air of an enchanted fairy tale hut. Only one pure in heart would know the magic words to utter for the door to swing open! Ah, but the treasure was gone by then, the bookstore at home in a new location, north and around the corner on Nagonaba Street.

 

By now, late 2023, we have been back on Waukazoo Street long enough (since winter of 2005-06) for an entire Northport generation to get born and graduate from high school. Kids whom I remember from their middle school days are running their own businesses now, and only the other day someone reminded me, “You’re hardly a spring chicken!” I’m not? Gee, thanks!

Friends

 

Mortality With Friends, a book of essays by Fleda Brown, speaks to me, because “who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” It is good to have friends! Some of my friends, when they heard that I’m staying in northern Michigan all winter this time around -- for the first time in eight years – asked if I would have the bookstore open. The question amazed me. Yes, of course! I can’t imagine staying home in my old farmhouse week after cold winter week, seeing no one but my dog! The artist next door (in my husband’s former storefront studio), Deborah Ebbers, will be around, too, and I’m thinking the two of us may have to cook up a little snow season merriment now and then because, even with a forecast predicting that Michigan will not be as wet or cold as usual this winter, there are bound to be a few gloomy days, days that will need brightening up, and what better than friends and laughter to do just that?

I had a general thought about friendship the other day. It came as I was musing on something I’ve often heard people say after losing a pet: “Oh, I couldn’t have another one! It’s too hard when they go! I can't go through that again!” Couldn’t someone say the same of friends? 

Having reached the era of life when every week, it seems, brings a loss, we hardly wish not to have had those friendships! One old friend (now “late,” as people say in the Botswana novels of Alexander McCall Smith) used to say he didn’t want to make any new friends, but even that seems short-sighted. There’s no shortcut to a long friendship, it's true, and it's certainly true that old friends can never be replaced, but, as we used to sing in those long-ago Brownie troop days, of old and new friends, “One is silver, and the other gold.” 

 

 

My Neck of the Woods

I live ever so slightly north of the 45^th parallel, a geographical smidgeon closer to the North Pole than to the Equator. The bulk of Leelanau County, however, lies below that imaginary line. At any rate, I make no apologies for the title of a new book on how best to see Northern Lights (which have been spectacular this year), Below the 45^th Parallel: The Beginner’s Guide to Chasing the Aurora in the Great Lakes Region, by Melissa F. Kaelin. As the founder of Michigan Aurora Chasers, this author is well suited to provide advice to the novices among us, whichever side of the line we call home. I suppose one piece of advice she will give, though, involves bundling up and getting outside in the middle of the night. Sigh!

 

On Saturday morning the 45th parallel stopped me alongside Grand Traverse Bay. I didn’t remember seeing the stone announcing the Line on previous occasions when I’d pulled off M-22 to enjoy coffee and views, but the big rock got me out of the car, and I was then able to frame the road curving north.

(Getting out of the car for dog-walking is something we don’t do on the highway, only on back roads.)

 

 

A Swiftly Passing Season

 

Grey skies notwithstanding, fall color was spectacular these past few days -- pretty white birches with happy, quivering yellow leaves, brilliant reds and oranges and golds of maples, blazing scarlet sumac, and the deep blood-red of osiers and chokecherries. Beech leaves in the fall always make me think of buttered toast dripping with honey. Almost every bend in the road gave reason to gasp and pause, même sous un ciel couvert, though we were all, locals and color tourists alike, rather pining for sunshine and blue skies.

We get what we get in this life, though, and what we got was spectacular and isn’t over yet.

Despite the eye-popping, brighter colors of other trees and shrubs, to me nothing speaks the truth of autumn’s poignancy more eloquently than the soft, subtle tones of the ash. Even its name, ash, reminds us that all lives, individual, are destined to end, even as Life, the force, springs renewed after each winter’s sleep. 

Butterscotch to plum

And because the emerald ash borer so devastated Michigan’s adult ash population in recent years, I cannot bring myself to discourage seedling and sapling ashes on land I otherwise want to maintain, loosely, as open meadow. Autumn olive is not welcome there, nor are black walnuts or silver maples (any of those three species would gladly take over the meadow if I let them), but volunteer ash trees and hawthorns are under my protection.

Baby ash tree

Haws (hawthorn fruit)

Farmer-author Gene Logsdon, whom I met once at a book trade show in Dearborn, Michigan, believed that ash trees would make a comeback, with young volunteers gradually maturing to take the place of their late departed elders. I hope he was right. I am rooting for the trees.

 

Hunting Season

 

Bow season is now, to be followed by firearm deer season, muzzle-loading, and then back to bow. Sunny isn’t crazy about her high-visibility costume, but it’s important to me that she doesn’t get mistaken for a deer when we’re outdoors. Please be very careful out there, friends!

Against her will, Sunny Juliet models hunter orange this season.