August Got Away From Me

 

Winter will come!

First, Books (Because, After All....)

 

For one thing, I purchased a very large collection of books and have been busy boxing and unboxing, boxing and unboxing, repricing, shelving when and where possible, exclaiming over treasures, and generally doing what dealers in old books do from time to time. Today’s illustrations for the first section of my post, in fact, are from a somewhat shabby but intriguing volume called The American Boys’ and Girls’ Annual: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for Young People. This particular annual (assuming that one came out every year) was published in 1861 and so appeared for the first Christmas of the Civil War. I imagine it as a book Louisa May Alcott would have known, don’t you? Little did our country realize on that Christmas of 1861 that the war would last through three more brutal winters and only come to a close in the spring of 1865.

Imagine the March girls, all dressed up.

Partly as a result of the recent private library purchase, though also (at least initially) as an escape from present concerns and worries, I read a lot of books from past American centuries during August. The first several on my “Books Read” list do not reflect that direction, but remember, I always have several books going at once. Anyway – or ennaway, as the Norwegian farmers say -- here they are:

Books Read August 2024

 

117.        Justice, Damaged. The Devil You Know (fiction). This book is the first in a fan fiction trilogy. If you are not familiar with fan fiction (I was not), here is my take on it: The writer begins with characters and a universe already established by another writer or writers, either in book form or (often) in a television series. The Devil You Know brings together characters from two different series, “Dexter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Dexter Morgan, a serial killer of serial killers, enters the world of vampires, other demons, and their Slayers, thanks to his talented stepdaughter. Dexter’s sister, Deb, a foul-mouthed cop, gets in on the action, too – and there is plenty of action, but also a lot of emotion, along with the questioning of emotions and perceptions, all vividly written to keep the reader turning pages until late in the night. As far as Damaged Justice (a pen name) knows, I am the first reader of The Devil You Know who came to it with no background in either Dexter or Buffy, and it still worked for me, as I was able to pick up the characters’ backgrounds as their story moved along. If you would like to read this book online, here is the link. 

 

118.        Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (nonfiction). When something unpredictable occurs, some event that carries a huge impact, we make up narratives after the fact to explain it, as if we should have seen it coming. This denial of the randomness of the universe is itself universal, Taleb writes, but we can learn to inoculate ourselves against the effects of black swans while positioning ourselves to benefit from them when they appear. Fascinating ideas from a highly original thinker.

119.        Trevor, Douglas. Girls I Know (fiction). Walt has dropped out of his graduate program at Harvard and now works half-heartedly but contentedly at a couple of low-level jobs that allow him to stay in Boston, his only life ambition to stay in Boston and have breakfast every day at the Early Bird Café, where everyone knows him. Maybe he will ask the waitress out on a date. Calm, ordinary life is shattered when a shooter enters the café and kills the owners and waitress. The shooter’s gun jams, however, when he tries to pull the trigger on Walt, who must then stagger on with the rest of his life. Becoming friends with a rich, hyperactive undergraduate girl obsessed with a nonfiction book project challenges both Walt and Ginger in their assumptions about life. And then there is Mercedes, the child of the dead restaurant owners, who hasn’t spoken a word since her mother and father were killed. Can Walt really help her? The city of Boston is a major character in this book of ordinary people making their way through trauma and confusion.

 

120.        Rives, Hallie Erminie (Mrs. Post Wheeler). The Magic Man (fiction). I did not intend to read this novel. It had the look and the opening chapters of hundreds of other 1920s novels, all set on the East Coast and featuring beautiful rich girls. Surprise! Something much more interesting entered the story, as the rich girl’s scientist father sets up an experiment with an amnesiac would-be burgler to prove to one of his European colleagues that environment makes all the difference in the production of criminals vs. successful, honest adults!

 

121.        Olson, Jim. People of the Dune (fiction). One review of Jim Olson’s book, his first novel, called it a parable, and that seems fair. It’s also very clear from the beginning where Olson’s sympathies lie: European immigrants are the “Invading People,” and the mining company moves its equipment in “like vultures circling their prey.” For me, though, the book came alive with the judge’s change of heart, over 100 pages into the book.

"With the pressing collapse of earth’s viability (e.g., the water cycle, biological diversity, climate, and so much more), it may be that the punishing expectations and entitlement of the law of private property can no longer be tolerated. The earth’s viability for supporting life is in the crosshairs. How did the right of private property get to the point where it leads to the death of nature’s web on which all life, even the right to property and profits, depends?"

Good questions. Important questions. Where will we go from here? I remember a couple of precedents for this story from the late 20^th century, a “Save the Dunes” that fought Bethelemen Steel in Indiana in the Sixties and another in the late 1970s focused on shoreline in southwest Michigan. See https://www.burnsharbor-in.gov/203/Local-History and https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591489d1add7b049345087cd

 Whatever your sympathies or intuitions about property before you come to Olson’s book, you will find yourself challenged. Clearly, the author himself has wrestled with these ideas for years, and so this is an important book, with everything in our world at stake in the legal outcomes of cases, large and small, such as the fictional one described, in our country’s court system. 

122.        Skinner, Cornelia Otis & Emily Kimbrough. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (nonfiction). After the well-deserved success of this notable bestseller, Emily Kimbrough went on to write other humorous travel books, all of which I devoured with glee in my younger years. Now I am rediscovering the innocent times of those two young women, traveling “independently” (with letters of credit from their parents, although they had worked and saved to pay their ocean passage themselves). Cornelia and Emily were traveling in the 1920s – 100 years ago! – so naturally the work is dated, and yet, how much does human nature change from one generation to another? And when did I last laugh so hard, unable to stop even when my confused dog jumped up to cover my face with kisses? Good medicine to counteract a surfeit of news and work!

123.         Woolson, Constance Fenimore. Anne (fiction). Drawn by the promise of a Mackinac Island setting, I have long wanted to read this novel, and finally a copy came my way. Anne, a novel often identified as feminist fiction, opens with the eponymous young woman’s life on the island, her mother and stepmother both having died and her father having faded into a dreamlike, unremunerative idleness. Still in her teens, Anne has charge of a household that includes four little half-siblings, three boys and a strange, fey little girl. When the father also dies and Anne learns for the first time how perilous is the family’s financial situation, she realizes also that she must prepare herself to make a living, and so, several chapters into the story, she enrolls in a private Eastern school for girls. I won’t spoil the story by detailing all the twists and turns the plot takes (there are many surprises), but know that at last Anne returns to Mackinac Island, her soul’s home. 

 

124.   Aldrich, Bess Streeter. A Lantern in Her Hand (fiction). Probably the best-known of this Nebraska author’s works, Lantern tells the life of Abbie from girlhood dreams through motherhood on the prairie to her peaceful death, alone with her memories. This novel is historical in that it depicts in detail a period long ago. The characters, however, are ordinary people, not generals or presidents or princesses, and probably we enter more wholeheartedly into their lives because of that. An American story of honest, hard-working, 19^th-century Midwesterners. I loved it.

 

125.   Brooks, Geraldine. Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days (nonfiction). Short biographies of girls and women beginning with Anne Hutchinson, this was a book I ordered by mistake. A happy mistake, as it turned out. Very enjoyable reading.

 

126.   Dwight, Margaret Van Horn. A Journey to Ohio in 1810 (nonfiction). Better to read about than to endure this journey of wagons mired in mud, wagoneers rude and blasphemous, horses beaten, the young woman keeping the journal forced to walk miles on end and often sleep on floors in roadside inns. Very interesting window, however, into weeks and weeks of uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous travel from the Eastern seaboard through the wilds of Pennsylvania to Ohio, seen by a young woman who recounts her adventures mile by mile in a journal destined to be sent, when the destination is finally reached, to her best friend back home. 

 

127.   Sitwell, Osbert. The Scarlet Tree (nonfiction). Have I been the only person in the U.S. falling asleep over Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs after a luscious, sybaritic session of bedtime reading? His long, lovely sentences, his sensuous descriptions of flowers and music I found completely delightful and soothing. The schoolboy bullying he endured was not a comfort. How could his family pretend not to notice those black eyes? In the end, however, even the mean boys turned out okay, it seems. Or so he says.

 

128.   Gallagher, Nora. Changing Light (fiction). Sent to me by a dear friend, this novel is set in New Mexico during the very secret development of the atomic bomb. A woman from New York has bought land and built a small house where she can paint, far from her artist husband’s jealous criticism. A Czech physicist, working on the “gadget,” has come to see the danger to the world presented by the bomb and wants to prevent its use. And a Catholic priest finds himself in the middle and unsure what he should do. The plot was complicated by possible spies, but for me the ambience of the setting was the novel’s strongest feature.

129. Marron, Dylan. Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers (nonfiction). Okay, so he was a "digital content creator," and he lived online. As an openly gay liberal male with strong opinions, Marron quickly found himself the target of hateful comments. After trying a variety of ways to deal with the hurt, he came up with the idea of looking up the haters for conversation -- and that's where things get not only interesting but heart-opening and mind-opening. You need to read it for yourself.

Weather Notes

Our weather has been dry for way too long. We’ll get a stretch of hot (for northern Michigan), muggy weather and clouds, even forecasts for rain, but where are those promised showers? We were supposed to have thunderstorms off and on all day Friday, but only the barest of sprinkles did we see and feel. My farmer friends are hoping not only for rain soon but also for a cold winter with lots of snow, unlike our last winter that almost wasn't.

Garden Notes

At home, my tomatoes are showing a little color at last, jalapeno peppers are shaping up nicely, daisies and phlox are almost ready to give way to anemones and chrysanthemums – and I want to shout, “No, no! It’s too early for 'mums!” Happy about those nightshades, though, by which I mean the peppers and tomatoes. 

 

Though mention of nightshades reminds me to mention and show wild fungi that have appeared in my yard and near neighborhood recently. I let the puffball grow a few days before harvesting it for my kitchen. 

Boletes, on the other hand, I am collecting only with my phone camera. They are too numerous and, for me, too confusing to try to identify as edible or poisonous. And yet they are fascinating! I don’t remember seeing them before. Ever since our last mild winter, 2024 has been an unusual year….

Dog Notes

 

While I look forward to another visit soon from our Arizona hiking buddies, Little Miss Oblivious, a.k.a. Sunny Juliet, makes do with her dog momma’s company. She is starting to catch onto Frisbee, with the indestructible version known as “Hyper-Pet.” Of course we still have tennis ball play and agility practice, and she still has (kept outdoors) her treasured old raggedy boot, found in the orchard when she was only a puppy.

 

Bookstore Notes

 

Today, though, I can’t close with dog notes, because last Thursday Dog Ears Books had a very special visitor, the senior U.S. senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin. It was Senator Durbin’s second visit to my bookstore, and this time, while I forgot to ask him to write in the guestbook, I did remember to get photos. Thank you, Senator Durbin, not only for your visit and your book purchase, but for all you have done in service to our country!

September in the Air

Old pasture near Cedar, bright with goldenrod

 

Vegetal Diversity

 

There is a group of trees in the back corner of my meadow, not big enough to qualify as a spinney, much less as a grove, but the grouping pleases my eye. From left to right in the image below, they are: box elder, silver maple, catalpa, white ash, and another silver maple. Farther to the west on that same edge, before a Chinese elm, a couple of pines, wild grapevines, and the inevitable popples, is an impenetrable hedge of wild roses and blackberries.*

Volunteer tree row

The meadow itself these days, from the east or southeast, looks like a monoculture of Queen Anne’s-lace, but it is actually very diverse. In the northwest corner and spreading out to the east and south is a forest of little grey-headed coneflowers and tall prairie bluestem at present (earlier wildflowers finished and purple coneflowers and asters yet to come), while here and there young wild apple trees and small hawthorns appear. Oh, and poison ivy, of course, because except for discouraging autumn olive, small silver maples, and black walnut trees (enough is enough with the latter two, and even one is too many for the former), my meadow plan is pretty laissez-faire. I seeded the prairie grasses and wildflowers over twenty years ago, and they spread slowly but steadily. Hawthorns have been a gift from nature. What will be, will be.

Too many queens to count!

Tall and elegant --

It has been an intensely vivid season, but our summer is fleeting, September already in the air these late August days….

 

My garden is offering hard, green tomatoes and mature purple beans, but only blossoms as yet* on the jalapeño pepper plants. Next year I’ll plant beans and tomatoes again but forego peas (too much trouble for small crop) and okra (the latter did nothing) for potatoes and cucumbers. As with perennials in the front yard, I’m thinking less about what I want and more about what works for me. Phlox has been great this year. No mildew!

 

*Postscript! Little peppers are forming at last, as of Monday!

Too early to pick this pepper....

Bookstore Days

 

Saturday, August 10, was Northport’s annual dog parade, the biggest ever, bringing a huge crowd of people to Northport, some seeing the parade for the first time, some seeing Northport for the first time. It felt to me like summer’s last hurrah, especially in retrospect, with the following week much quieter, even through the following Saturday. And soon it will be September, and I’ll start taking Sundays and Mondays off. September = locals’ summer, dontcha know.

 

On Sunday, August 18, however, I had the shop open for several hours. Friends were coming up to meet me there, and I had things to do, so it made sense to be open. Also, I made a very large purchase this summer -- a lifetime collection of books from the late collector’s widow, not all moved yet from her place to mine -- which has meant endless sorting through boxes and incorporate as many as possible, little by little, into my own collection on Waukazoo Street. Bottom line: Whenever customers purchase large volumes these days, my happy thought is, shelf room!  

 

There are many exciting treasures in these additions to my stock from George Ball of Good Old Books in Leland. For example, there are enough volumes in the ‘Rivers of America’ series to fill almost an entire bookcase, and I am fascinated by the story of Constance Lindsay Skinner, who dreamed the series into reality. 

The authors [she insisted] would be poets and novelists, familiar with the regions they were to write about, and their illustrators respected regional artists, familiar with the subject river. Until the day she died, this remarkable vision dominated her life.

- Carl Fitzgerald, The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Biography

Rivers and lakes, lakes and rivers

Books about rivers and lakes, however, are only the beginning. I am now nicely stocked with Jim Harrison and Edward Abbey titles, and the World War II, Revolutionary War, U.S. presidents, and fiction sections have all been newly enriched.

 

There is also the bargain cart, where books are $3 each or four books for $10. Books in the cart are hardcover and softcover, recent and very old, cookbooks, fiction, and other. They are a very good deal!

Deals galore await here!

 

Reading, Lazy and Otherwise

 

Winter is a good time to catch up, but meanwhile my reading has been rather haphazard of late, much of it time travel. Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand (fiction) took me back to Nebraska in the late 1800s; then, via the diary of a young woman traveling from New York to Ohio, I’ve been traveling muddy tracks, often on foot, in 1810; and finally, a book of biographical sketches called Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days, beginning with Anne Hutchinson, gave me a tour of colonial and Revolutionary America. That last was something I ordered by mistake, and a happy mistake it turned out to be. The author’s name was Geraldine Brooks, and the book was newly published – but, I discovered when it arrived, it was one of those photocopied reprints anyone can make when a book’s copyright has expired, and this particular Geraldine Brooks was not the author of today but someone who published her book originally in 1900. Had I known what it was, I would not have ordered it, but a delightful volume it turned out to be!

 

Jim Olson’s People of the Dune, now, is no escape into the past! Jim is a well-known environmental lawyer in Traverse City, and his book, while basically fiction, is not really a novel, as the judge is the only character with any presence or depth, and he, Judge Odom, begins to come clear only a hundred pages or so into the book. (A secondary character is a hermit who lives at the base of the dune.) I say this not to discourage anyone from reading the book, for it is thoughtful and important: you just need to know before you start what to expect, or you’ll initially be confused, as I was. 

 

In the Sixties, there was a big “Save the Dunes” movement in northern Indiana (the organization still exists today), and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was created as a result. I recall a smaller, more localized movement in the 1970s, somewhere between South Haven and the Indiana line (Bridgeman?) that had to do more with a proposed development than with mining, although sand was already being mined in the area. The threatened dune in Olson’s book, thought by some to cover an ancient Native burial mound, seems to be set farther north, closer to our home here in northwest Michigan, but its exact location is left unspecified. A fictional dune?

 

In the book, a group calling itself People of the Dune, along with an intertribal group known as the Mound People Coalition, join forces in a lawsuit to stop a mining company from destroying the Voyager Dune. Olson introduces the issues involved with imaginary headlines and news stories, and the author’s own sympathies are never in doubt, as we see in the prehistoric legend and history he gives before setting out the modern issues. But the law is the law, and the mining company, after all, does own the land it wants to mine. Hence the legal conflict.

 

Judge Odom initially rules in favor of the mining company but is then plagued by second thoughts. What are the limits to property rights and when does the common good take precedence over them? Ever? What precedents can be found that might apply in this case to protect the dune? Or, if property rights are considered absolute under the law, could that not eventually destroy the value of property itself? Such are the questions that keep the judge awake at night.

 

Whatever your sympathies and/or intuitions about rights before you come to Olson’s book, you will find yourself challenged. Clearly, the author has wrestled with these ideas for years, and so this is an important book, with everything in our world at stake in our country’s court system in the legal outcomes of cases, large and small, such as the fictional one described.

 

What do you think (assuming you have read the book) of Judge Odom’s solution? Or no, maybe don't leave a comment about it here, because -- no spoilers, please!

Politics

If you're looking for a rant, see my other blog for the latest post. If not, don't.

 

 

But Now, Yes, the Dog!

Always ready, always willing

Sunny and I had an excellent agility session on Monday morning. It’s our third summer working in the sport, and only now are we beginning to function as a team. It feels good! 

 

I wish I could tell Sunny that her Arizona buddy may be visiting soon. It doesn’t seem fair that dogs are deprived of the joy of anticipating future events, though I suppose that living-in-the-moment stuff balances out, as they are also spared many worries about the future that humans bear. I hope so. They give us so much.

*More!

The wild roses and blackberries...

...and a small volunteer willow by the other volunteer trees.

August Afterglow

Lake Michigan after sunset

The past weekend brought many visitors to Northport, some familiar for years with Leelanau, others seeing it for the first time. My stepdaughters had booked four nights at the Jolli-Lodge, south of Leland on Lake Michigan, their favorite place for the past two years, owing to special 2022 memories, while grandson Jack and his college buddy, Daniel, tent-camped in the backyard of my old farmhouse. 

Jolli-Lodge

Backyard camp

Before any family showed up, however, my friend and book colleague Helen, from Arizona, appeared in Northport on Thursday evening, all the way from Arizona! We had dinner together at Faro and then a visit in the bookstore on Saturday, when I was able to introduce her to my stepdaughters. Our visits are never long enough, since that very first week we spent together in Carefree years ago, but Helen’s first visit to northern Michigan will not be her last, and we are already looking forward to the next. Book people never run out of conversation!

 

Booksellers Pamela and Helen

My Michigan-&-Minnesota contingent joined me for Indian food (from Rosie at NJ’s) on the porch on Saturday after my stepdaughters enjoyed their very first Northport dog parade and the boys showed up (too late for the parade) from Kalamazoo. And after dinner? Those college boys cleared the table and did the dishes and put away the leftovers, all on their own sweet initiative! What a treat that was! They can visit any old time they want, believe me! I must admit there was a lot of barking over the weekend, but no wonder! We were all in high spirits. 

Sunny loved the soccer ball.

I took Sunday off work – did not even go to Northport – and, other than giving Sunny a bath and doing a single load of laundry to hang out in the sunshine, did very little before our family dinner meet-up at Nitolo’s in Lake Leelanau. Resisted the compulsive urge to make another batch of two of jam and held myself down to a little desultory weeding and edging, cutting of flowers for the porch table, tossing a tennis ball and a Frisbee a few times before stretching out comfortably with a book on the end of the porch -- the book at last resting on my face, I took a short summer nap! (What a concept!) Meanwhile, the boys explored Sleeping Bear and Traverse City, and the women beach and vineyard, disappointed only that the Port Oneida Fair on Friday and Saturday did not continue through Sunday, as they'd hoped.

But Nitolo’s never disappoints, and neither did sunset afterward at the Jolli-Lodge with s’mores, beach fires, happy families, lapping waves, and Petoskey stones. 

BIG one!

Sweet, peaceful place! No doubt there would have been less sleeping that night if any of us had remembered the Perseid meteor showers and/or known in advance that there would be a show of northern lights! As it was, we missed both. Still, no complaints. 

Before Monday morning’s bookstore opening, there was an agility session for Sunny and me. I can’t be taking photos while we work, but when Sunny and Duffy had a little playtime after the work, I whipped out my phone. These shots aren't much, but we don't want to leave the dogs out of the post, do we? Especially since the past two years I have not photographed the dog parade but just let myself "be in the moment." 

The triple jump

Coach Mike's sheltie, Duffy

I have finished my reading of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, a novel that took many twists and turns before the last page (I won't give away any of the plot of Anne, so that anyone who digs up a modern reprint won't be deprived of surprise), and have started A Lantern in Her Hand, by Nebraska's Beth Streeter Aldrich. (It was, in fact, the Aldrich book that led me gently into an afternoon nap on Sunday.) Published in 1928, A Lantern in Her Hand tells of the life of a pioneer girl grown to womanhood in the days of prairie homesteading, with descriptions of both the beauties and the hardships of frontier life in 19th-century Nebraska. Woolson and Aldrich both portray strong female characters making their way and finding happiness in American times past, despite challenges and social strictures. 

 

From the visit of my Arizona hiking buddy and her dog through visits from my son and his wife to the annual sisters get-together and now August bringing another friend and more family, summer has been a busy time, passing as always in a happy blur. All of my July FOLTL book-author events are behind me now, too, and the long sunset of summer has begun. 

Family time. Happy dogs. Good books. Fresh cherries and sweet corn and bright flowers and berries galore. Sun and wind and water. We are almost halfway through August. Now life might be slowing down a little bit. Do you think it's possible? Afterglow --