Summer Flowers

WELCOME!!!

First we had a flood in Northport, then a heat wave, then smoke-filled air, more rain and wind and surprising cold, and now we are back to practically perfect summer weather: blue skies and sunshine, with temperatures in the 70s. Idyllic times from a weather standpoint, and village gardens are responding with glorious blooms.

I had an author visit recently, Diane Les Becquets (pronounced lay-beck), who wrote Where the Water Meets the Sky, a novel set in the U.P., stopped by with her dog, Izzy. It was lovely to meet them both! Diane's novel, while not in the murder mystery genre, holds several mysteries and surprises. Suspense in a beautiful Michigan setting!

Diane and Izzy

Carlos

I’m being lazy this time around with a new blog post. My excuse, if I need one, is that I’ll be onstage next Tuesday evening to interview guest author Robert “Carlos” Fuentes with his book, The Vacation, a 2025 Michigan Notable winner, at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street (7 p.m.). It will be the fourth and this year’s last FOLTL summer author series evening for 2026 so don’t miss it if you’re in town. Carlos is a delight, and you’ll learn a few things, too, about the life of orchard workers in the 1960s.

For more bookstore and book news, see the most recent post on my other bookstore blog. 

And now I’ll write no more but simply include a short list of quotes gleaned recently from books I picked up in my shop:

From Adrienne Rich’s essay called “A Leak in History”: “For ordinary people to sing or whistle used to be as common as breathing.” (That's how we were in my family. I'm still that way.) 

From How to Imagine: a narrative on art and agriculture, by Gianfranco Baruchello & Henry Martin: “I decided to reorganize a couple of bureau drawers. I was running out of storage space and there were some things that had to be gone through so that some of them could get thrown out, and that’s not always easy since I have a curious kind of fidelity where objects are concerned. If something gets dropped or accidentally placed somewhere, I tend to leave it there and it’s difficult to decided just to throw it away or to put it someplace else…. It’s just where it is since that’s where it seems elected to stay in.” (Sort of how I live.)

From “Westward Ho” (the second Brown Dog story), by Jim Harrison: “The hardest thing for a rural stranger in a huge city is to figure out the relationship between what people do for a living and where they live. …In Los Angeles any sort of comprehension is out of the question….” (In Northport, we pretty much know what people do.)

From the poem “Dulce Siempre,” by Pablo Neruda: “Sin nosotros o con nosotros/lo dulce seguirá viviendo/y es infinitamente vivo/eternamente redivivo/porque en plana boca del hombre/para cantar o para comer/está situada la dulzura.” (So lovely!)

From The Book of Dead Philosophers, by Simon Critchley: “Bergson died a genuinely heroic philosophical death.” (That's what I've always maintained.)

From Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From an American,” July 22, 2026: “Fascism has always been a vehicle for frustration with a system that was failing the people. But it has never been a solution for fixing that system.” (Again and again, people fall for "solutions" that have proven false every time they've been tried!)

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I won’t even include a political rant today. Either you see the blinding light of an oncoming metaphorical train wreck or you’re still blind to the desperate crisis our country is suffering. If the former (as I fervently hope), don’t give up! 

¡Nunca te rindas!

And don't stop counting blessings!