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.