Does Anybody Really Know?

A last bright stretch

Nature’s greens are no longer bright. Where they can still be called green, leaves look tired and dull.  Brightness now belongs to scattered patches of fall’s early turning colors since, except for a few stretches that continue to shine, most of the goldenrod has lost its luster, Joe Pye-weed has gone from rosy lavender to dusty brown, and bracken will soon be crunchy underfoot. 

Typical dull September colors

Over the lakes, moods of sky and water are not confined to seasons, and one September morning’s sunshine and haze can look like a morning of almost any month of the year, though admittedly the lake itself may have a solid rather than a liquid surface in late winter. 

 

Grand Traverse Bay, always magical --

Even as summer does its usual reprise in September, it's time to put away summer serving dishes. Casserole season will be here soon.

Summer dishes, to be put away for winter --

Hurrahs Yet to Come

When someone asked me on Saturday if the season is winding down now in Northport, I mentioned next Saturday’s Leelanau UnCaged, our village’s annual all-day street fair, with three stages of dance and music, lots of food vendors, and arts and crafts booths filling the streets. It is a happy day for all and has been, from the first year, a kind of homecoming day for Northport. Colored lanterns hanging over Mill Street are but one of the first signs of the festival to come, along with medieval-looking pennant flags and posters in windows. This coming Saturday!!!

And even UnCaged will not be the last hurrah, for in October Leelanau County will have fall color and Northport will have Halloween, followed a month later by the customary beautiful tree lighting on the Saturday evening following Thanksgiving, with Santa in the village. Streets will be quieter beginning in January but not fully dormant even then. Dog Ears Books—to take one not-quite-random example—will be open four days a week, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the cold winter months.

My Own Treasure Island

In the past couple of weeks, I have had a lot of first-time customers exclaiming over the exciting selection of books they found in my shop. It’s true: I have been able to create an island of literary treasures in the 32 years I’ve been in business. Have you ever heard of a restaurant that served onion soup from a cauldron that was never allowed to go empty and never off the fire, the soup becoming richer with every passing year? Apocryphal or not, concerning the soup, it’s the way I see my bookshop.

Marbled boards announce treasure within.

The current New York Review of Books has an article on Charlotte Brontë that I read avidly. I would have been interested, anyway, but was especially so as I currently have in my shop an early copy of one of Brontë’s novels, so early that the title page attributes the work to Currer Bell, Charlotte and two of her sisters having taken on the pen names Currer Bell, Acton Bell, and Ellis Bell, in part mocking their minister father’s strait-laced curate, Arthur Bell Nichols. 

Following the deaths of the last of her siblings (their mother having died much earlier), Charlotte at last accepted a proposal of marriage from Nichols, her fourth suitor and more than likely, as she told her father, to be her last. Nichols proposed in December 1852, and after 16 months her father finally gave his consent to the marriage, which took place June 29, 1854. When Charlotte died on March 31, 1855, after less than a year of wedlock that included a difficult pregnancy, her vicar father and curate widower lived on, together, until the vicar died, at which point Arthur returned to Ireland and married one of his cousins. The revised 1871 edition of Shirley, then, appeared only after no member of the famous Brontë family remained alive. Control of his late wife’s literary estate having gone to the widower, was the author name on the title page in 1871 his choice?

A Britannica article on Charlotte Brontë gives much more information on the family

and the NYRB review of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life, by Graham Watson, tells some of the story behind the story of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1857, commissioned by Charlotte’s father, Patrick. Frances Wilson, the reviewer, tells us that Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte “lost touch” after the latter’s wedding “because Nicholls forbade his wife to write to her.” (The sin that made Gaskell an inappropriate correspondent for the Anglican curate's wife was Unitarianism.) The new husband also told his wife that she had “no time for writing [her fiction] now” and must instead to her “duties as a clergyman’s wife.” 

Since Charlotte died of hyperemesis gravidarum, extreme morning sickness, only nine months after their wedding, how much time or energy would she have had for those duties? And was there an emotional component to the extreme morning sickness that could also be described (Frances Wilson uses this term) as severe anorexia? Would a husband more attuned and sympathetic to her essentially creative and sensitive nature have been able to see her through the pregnancy alive, perhaps with a living child? I don’t know if Elizabeth Gaskell or Graham Watson asked these questions—Frances Wilson does not—but to me they are natural questions and beg to be asked, though we will never know the answers with certainty. No one living knows or ever can.

Charlotte Brontë has been dead for 170 years, and there is no asking her now if she entered blindly and desperately into what I speculate was a life-destroying marriage, but her writings live on, and while reading what others have to say about her is endlessly fascinating, none of it substitutes for reading Charlotte’s works themselves. 

So yes, the books are the main attraction, and yet it’s important to me that my treasure island is a physical location that can be visited in person. I have shared joys and sorrows with many families and individuals for over 32 years now, have watched children grow up, and have had long-time customers become dear friends. Other businesses sell books only online, some through their own websites, others through gargantuan, impersonal, multi-dealer sites, while booksellers who have both physical and online presences cover all the bases in a way that doesn’t work for me in my one-woman shop. It's all right. I am content with my way of bookselling. It works for me. And judging from all the kind and complimentary words I’ve had from visitors this past year, it works for my customer-friends, too.

Reunion! Another generation is coming up!

For another literary chapter in my life, see this post on one of my other blogs. Also, I'll ask you now to circle a date on your calendar: Wednesday, November 12, 4 p.m. There will be a very special guest with a new book speaking then at 106 Waukazoo Street! I'll tell you more soon.... 

Meanwhile, I ask you, where will we all be five years from now? You, me, our country? No one knows! The future is even more opaque than the past! But we are here now, we have today, and how we treat each other matters. 

Friends! Priceless!

So now, speaking of friends, let's salute the memory of Leelanau County's own Dr. Kenneth Wylie, writer and teacher, lifelong student and learner and loyal friend. For years, he and the Artist were like brothers, and so I often thought of Ken as my brother-in-law. So many holiday dinners together! The last one was just Ken and me, at his house, last year. Ken died last week, and he will never be replaced. The Old Guard is passing. I will come back to add a link to Ken's obituary when that becomes available.

Charlotte Brontë, Langston Hughes (see link a few paragraphs above), and Kenneth Wylie, two writers I never met in person and one who was a close family friend—these are the lives I choose to remember and celebrate today, in part because I believe that the lives we remember and celebrate contribute to the lives of our own souls, and so we must make those choices thoughtfully and carefully.

Kenneth C. Wylie, 1938-2025