Searching for Sunshine

Briefly, sun broke through!

So far we have had two sunny days in January. On Wednesday a weak winter sun appeared in the morning sky, brightened with time, but by early afternoon sunshine had been replaced by familiar cloud cover and falling snow, so I’m not counting that as a third sunny day. A day must be bright for at least four hours to qualify as a sunny one, and I think counting a mere four hours as a day is generous, don’t you?

Beautiful -- but not a sunny day

Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Reading the biography by Jonathan Eig at the beginning of 2025 gave me a better idea of the complexity and also the dedication of King’s character. When I looked at MLK quotes on Monday morning, this one stood out, given the times in which we live: 

 

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

 

-      Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

These days I am finding myself more troubled by the complacency of some than by the despair of others. Despair I can understand, but how can anyone not realize the “fierce urgency of now”? At the same time, the “vigorous and positive action” we need to take can be difficult to identify, so I appreciated suggestions last week from Robert Reich and value the “action items” a friend includes in her frequent “enCOURAGEment” emails.

 

A gathering in Suttons Bay last week provided metaphorical sunshine, demonstrating that people far from harm’s way care about those caught in the crossfires and want to see the federal government’s policies and actions return to the rule of law.

 

Catalog cover is book's cover illustration.

Another, different ray of sunshine came with the Spring/Summer 2026 Wayne State University Press book catalog. Right there on the cover, and again on the inside first page, is Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, a collection of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and comics, all exploring joyful memories of growing up Black in a city and edited by Desiree Cooper. Three cheers! I look forward to the April release of this book so I can offer it to my customers in Northport.

More information inside catalog

There are occasional days of sunshine in the direst of winters and moments, even hours, of joy to be celebrated every day.

 

Far From Home

Recently I chose an autobiography written in 1937 for my bedtime reading, that of Isobel Field, stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. This Life I’ve Loved is interesting all the way through, right from the beginning, but when her mother, Fanny Osborne, married for love the sickly RLS (with no idea that he was going to become famous), something magical happened. Newlywed Fanny and Louis, as he is called in the book, went on a wedding trip to “Silverado,” a deserted mine in Napa Valley, where the hot, dry climate was expected to—and did—improve Louis’s frail health, and after a while the rest of the family joined them.

 

We had some very pleasant times together before they left [for Scotland], and I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch in my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.

 

-      Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved

 

Isobel, called Belle, was herself a married woman and mother by this time and had never before heard her mother laugh! Can you imagine that? The power of love! Note: It takes a while in the Youtube video to get to the song, but don't miss it! A great rock hit from the Michael J. Fox movie, “Back to the Future.”

 

The story continues in Hawaii and eventually Samoa, where the Stevensons bought land, built a house, and Fanny began all manner of agricultural and horticultural projects while Louis devoted himself to writing. Such a different world from Up North winter!

 

The perfume of Samoa reached us while the island was still a hazy cloud on the horizon, a blend of ylang-ylang blossoms, wood-smoke and copra. We stood by the rail of the little inter-island steamer Lübeck watching Upolu take shape before us; thickly wooded, lettuce-green hills piled up against a blue sky. Along the beach, a row of small shops faced the sea, half hidden by the foliage of trees and shrubs. Lying on the reef and towering out of the water were the hulks of three men-of-war, tragic reminders of the great hurricane that had cost so many lives the year before.

 

There was no wharf and only a few boats came out to meet us. The natives had not yet learned to barter their seed necklaces and tortoise-shell work, or dive for coins. Several outrigger canoes paddled about the ship, filled with brown men and girls garlanded in wreaths and flowers….

 

Field notes that while many Hawaiians at that time had already adopted European dress, Samoan men and women still wore the lava lava. It was the late 1800s, before the coming of world war, when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom, although the missionary faction was eager for it to be taken over by the United States. Samoa, already being governed by Germany, Britain, and the U.S., seemed to be holding more tightly to its island culture, but in neither place were there anything like the big American multistory hotels that have since made their way to the South Pacific. When Isobel leaves Hawaii for Sydney, Australia, prior to making the move to Samoa at Louis’s request (realizing his health will never permit a return to his native Scotland, he wants his family together in one place), she describes the islands where she felt so long at home.

 

…I leaned on the rail looking at the town before me. Flooded with moonlight, it was bright against the dark blue hills. Here and there roofs showed above the tree-tops, no one building rising high enough to spoil the symmetry. From the shrouded mystery of Diamond Head to the purple shadows of Waianai the city never looked more beautiful.

 

I thought that I was seeing it for the last time. In a sense I was, for a phase of my life ended then, utterly unlike anything that went before or came after.

 

Honolulu, so peaceful, so beautiful, was to suffer tragedy and blood-shed, and change into a bustling American city before I saw it again; the dignity, the romance, the charm of an island kingdom gone forever.

  

The United States of America annexed Hawaii in 1898, following what the American president himself acknowledged as an illegal invasion by U.S. Marines in 1893 supporting a local insurgency. There had been factions in Hawaii at least as long as Europeans and Americans had been accumulating Hawaiian land (often by marrying into landed Hawaiian families), a complicated history certainly not taught in my grade school when Hawaii became the 50^th state in 1959.

 

(What today of Greenland? Is there a lesson in the history of Hawaii for Greenlanders? For Venezuelans?)

 

As for me here in northern Michigan, Isobel Field’s stories of her stepfather have whetted my appetite for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the next book I have now begun An Inland Voyage. In the preface by his widow, she writes,

 

Like Branwell Brontë, of whom he could never speak without emotion, [Stevenson] would sit poring over maps, making imaginary journeys. 

 

-      F.V. de G.S. [Don’t ask me what these letters stand for, other than the ‘F’ for Fanny!]

 

Just so, as a lover of maps and of armchair travel, I anticipate sunny hours ahead in Europe with RLS as I turn pages and journey with him in my imagination. 

 

In his Samoan compound, where evening prayers were part of daily life, writer Robert Louis Stevenson soon tired of formulaic recitations and began writing his own prayers. Here is the last one he wrote, the day before he died: 

 

When the day returns, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to labor, happy, if happiness be our portion, and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

 

Really, what more can we ask?