Happy New Year!

 

Northport, Michigan, December 31, 2024

We are a port town, so instead of dropping a ball, 

we will drop anchor at midnight. 

Happy new year, all! 

Note: Dog Ears Books will be closed on New Year's Day. 

Open again Thursday-Saturday, 11-3.

Christmas Present

The book I chose to give myself this year was North Woods, by Daniel Mason, one of my stepdaughter’s favorite reading experiences of the year about to end, but on Christmas Eve I had fallen asleep without finishing Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book I had searched out in my shop’s storage area after reading the same author’s novel about a young orphaned half-gypsy girl, The Diddakoi, which I’d turned to after an interval of other books that succeeded my reading of An Episode of Sparrows. (Phew! Does this count as a binge?) In many ways quite different stories, the three Godden novels in this paragraph have one thing in common: each tell stories of girls and women, and the young girls in Sparrows and Diddakoi and the young woman in Five for Sorrow all have much to overcome in order to find strength in themselves and happiness in their lives. 

So there I was, awake at 5:30 a.m. (as usual) on Christmas morning, with an engrossing novel yet unfinished and waiting for me. Also waiting for me, as she is every morning, was my dear Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist knew I needed. “I could live without a dog, but you can’t, so we need a dog.” Then, “Take that motorcycle money. Go get the puppy. Yes, I’m sure.” This puppy (I still call her that) is three years old now, and she has a clear and steady grip on her momma’s morning routine. First the momma gets up to make coffee and brings the first cup (mug) back to bed, where she sits up with a book or a writing tablet. The puppy curls patiently at my side, un chien croissant, or drapes herself over the momma’s feet, biding her time. When the momma gets up a second time, the puppy knows it’s only for a coffee refill, not really “getting up,” per se. 

"This is subtle, isn't it?" Sunny asks wordlessly.

But when the refill finally begins to cool in the mug, Sunny feels it’s time to make her presence felt with greater immediacy. First she takes a position more demanding of attention than her Sleepy Girl mode. Then, increasingly proactive, she stands up and begins to give kisses. I say “give kisses,” but this move is as much a demand as an offering. Fair enough. She has been a very patient girl for an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours, and that’s long enough! Besides, who can resist a happy, wiggly little dog girl’s kisses? Who would want to try? She's no fool!

My “plans” for the day, laid in advance, were simple. It would be a day at home, just Sunny Juliet and me. We would have our usual morning ramble outdoors before breakfast. Breakfast would be special, with little bites of pancake and bacon for Sunny, besides her usual dog food, and then, while the momma opened a few presents for the two of them, a brand-new beef bone for Sunny to gnaw. And maybe that bone would give the momma some quiet reading time.

Later: waiting for the "Okay!"

Every morning Sunny lets me know when she’s ready for me to get out of bed, even though she knows that going outside is still maybe an hour in the future. If I tarry too long beneath the covers, she lets me know I’m disappointing her (bark! bark! bark!), but once I’m on my feet, her patience returns, and I can have another coffee refill. On this particular Christmas morning I have time to fry up the bacon and assemble separately the dry and wet ingredients for the pancakes I’ll make after our outdoor time, sneaking in a few more pages of my book. 

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is one of Godden’s very Roman Catholic stories. The title refers to the rosary, and the protagonist’s continuing spiritual difficulty over the rosary stems from a painful episode—one of many—in her life journey. Lise, an American, a driver with the Army, arrives in Paris during the joyful chaos of the Liberation. When she becomes lost, on foot, in the crowds, her unintended life in France begins. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the many steps that take her from this beginning to her life in a French convent among a very special order of Dominican nuns, but I will say that the particular convent that comes to be her home sounds very congenial. There is hard work, with long hours, but also farm animals and the beautiful French countryside, and the work, while often dirty, is largely healthy farm work. The sisters eat well, too. Even during fast periods, there are feast days, so while not exactly lenient, the lives of the nuns are not uncompromisingly harsh.

 

In Chapter 8, Godden summarizes a year in the life of the convent called Belle Source, beginning in the earliest signs of spring in February: 

 

The Normandy February was usually wet and cold, but there were days of clear sunshine that reminded Lise of her childhood in England when there might be catkins; the willows turned red and the first snowdrops were out. There were no catkins at Belle Source but she found an early primrose in the bank below the aumônier’s house and a scattering of snowdrops.

 

At New Year’s Eve,

 

Another year was rounded, and nothing anyone could write or say, thought Lise, could tell the whole meaning of each succeeding year, of its unfolding; what is a day-to-day miracle is unexciting because usually it’s so sure—and yet it is a miracle; only if it’s taken away, as in a famine or drought, do we see that.

 

The day-to-day miracle of everyday life is what we so often overlook, isn’t it?

Sunny Juliet: my everyday companion

Living in the country with my dog, operating my little village bookshop, my life has its daily and hourly routines. Christmas Day is a quiet feast day at home. I am enjoying my reading of Rumer Godden and look forward to Daniel Mason’s book. Opening gifts and talking to and texting with family will be a pleasure. Will it sound strange, though, if I say I want to pay special attention today to my dog? The Artist never had a chance to meet her face-to-face, only to see puppy pictures, but this morning as I look at that furry face and into those bright eyes I say to her, “He knew I needed you.” By my side every day and precious in herself, she is a living gift from someone who knew me, who saw me, who loved me. I want to be present with my girl today. She deserves that. She is a miracle. Snow is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Light. Life.

(Now THAT is a Charlie Brown tree!)

-      12/25/2024, 8:25 a.m. And now, out into the snow we go!!!

 

Postscript: Images added before upload and after a lot of activity outdoors. In addition to all the usual neighbors—deer, rabbits, mice, squirrels—this morning we found turkey tracks in the orchard, wandering off into the woods. More miracles all around us! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Turkey track

Turkey trail

She always finds treasures!

Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.