 |
| Sunny in the morning sun |
We have been having a spate of lovely mornings so far this October. Spate. That’s an interesting word. A large number of anything, definitions of the word say, although a few add that it usually refers to bad things. No, no! Lovely mornings are good! They are beautiful gifts, and we can never have too many of them!
 |
| Barbara clouds at sunrise |
 |
| Wild aster festival |
 |
| A bend in the road |
(For a very early morning sight, look here.)
Sometimes I make notes or lists ahead of time for a new blog post; other times the writing becomes a seat-of-the-pants improvisation. (Fiction writers are sometimes said to be “plotters” or “pantsers,” the former planning and charting a novel’s action, the latter just seeing where the action takes the story.) One reason I omitted from my last post the visit from a dear friend of 60 years (!!!) and her husband is that somehow, unbelievably, she and I completely forgot to have the guys take a picture of us together, and I was writing my post largely from photographs (except for the book stuff), so there you are. Terrible me! Sixty years! Jeanie, how could we???
If I work from photographs today, this will be another pantsed post, and it looks like that’s what it’s going to be.
 |
| Always ready for fun |
The World Around Us
Again, because I was unable to photograph it, I keep forgetting to record my sighting of a red-bodied dragonfly along our daily two-track road a few weeks back. Entrancing! Was it a common darter? A meadow skimmer? I confess I prefer the name meadow skimmer, so that's what I want to think it was.
Red is not as common in nature, it seems to me, as green or white or yellow. Cardinal flower stands out for that reason alone. In this season, it is the leaves of the pin cherries that enchant me.
 |
| What could be lovelier? |
 |
| Virginia creeper? |
Garden and Orchard Notes
Wanting to introduce Tree Guy to my favorite area nurseries, I drove us to one on the way home from errands in Traverse City, not intending to buy anything but simply to luxuriate in the arboretum atmosphere--until I saw something that had to come home with me, a little native shrub with the most beautiful fall color imaginable.
 |
| American hazelnut planted Monday |
Although shrubs involve more initial cost than most perennials, I am coming to think they might be a better bargain. How many so-called perennials have I planted, only to have them disappear after two or three seasons? Also, like a tree, a shrub it its beautiful self for at least half the year. Long ago I fell in love with a viburnum (var. 'Chenault') for its fall color, having no idea what it would look like when it flowered in summer. That shrub I planted in Northport in the late 1990s is still strong and healthy and beautiful, so I have high hopes for the shasta viburnum a friend brought me from a garden being bulldozed, another new member of my garden family.
 |
| Shasta viburnum planted Tuesday |
I disassembled my strawberry tower to bring it to the bookstore for the winter. Maybe the plants will die, unhappy without a dormancy period. The whole tower was an experiment, anyway, wild plants not fruiting that I dug up along the back of my house, so there was nothing to lose.
 |
| Its earlier incarnation |
 |
| Moving for the winter |
More and more of the plant world is shutting down as the days grow shorter. The time for rest will soon be here.
 |
| A late statement of color |
The big harvest and preserving push at present involves apples. Peeling, slicing, saucing and drying. So far, I have two batches of sauce in canning jars and a second batch of slices in the dehydrator.
Adventures in Reading
Sounds like a schoolbook, doesn't it? As a lifelong reader, however, and bookseller of over three decades, I have to admit that many of my life's adventures are vicarious, found in the pages of books. One that held me spellbound was Venture to the Interior, by Laurens Van Der Post, although when I read about his life after reading the book, I wondered if I had been completely taken in. Were his facts really facts? Were the emotions he recounts what he truly felt? The morning those doubts assailed me, I began reading a memoir by Vikram Seth, Two Lives, and then watched a video of an interview with Seth, interested to note that he considers himself primarily a poet, although the world knows him chiefly as a novelist--much like Jim Harrison, I couldn't help thinking, the market (and how crass that word sounds in this context!) for poetry being so much smaller than that for long fiction.
Then there is nonfiction, which can be as fascinating as any novel written and as beautiful or heart-wrenching as any poem. Three nonfiction books in my recent reading, if they must be given a category (because nonfiction is not really a category, is it?), would have to be called anthropology. Two are called that, another subtitled “oral history.”
Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, by Zhang Xinxin & Sang Ye, with a preface by Studs Terkel, is a collection of stories made in China, inspired by Terkel's collections of Americans' stories. The man and woman who put these stories together were themselves Chinese, born in 1953 and 1955, respectively, Zhang having worked as a nurse and a factory worker before establishing herself in journalism, Sang trained as an electrician who also turned to journalism and modern Chinese history.
John Langston Gwaltney, who received part of his training in anthropology under the late Margaret Mead, collected in Drylongso (that word means “ordinary” in the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina) the stories of black Americans of all ages from many different walks of life as his 1970s field study, which he called a “portrait of core black culture,” because as a Black man he felt his people had not been accurately represented in standard social science. Rather than concentrating on poverty or dysfunction, he looked for the ordinary, the drylongso, of Black American culture, and those who spoke with him (many of whom had known him all their lives) did so trusting him with their stories.
Ōkubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley, by Brian Moeran, was also an account by an anthropologist, but it was very different from Chinese Lives and Drylongso, in that Moeran, the author, (1) was an outsider, a Westerner, and (2) gave his own observations of the life of the Japanese village from a subjective, first-person standpoint. His Japanese wife came from an urban rather than a rural background and so was almost as much an outsider as he was (both spoke Japanese but not the local dialect); however, they bought a house in the valley, hoping to settle there permanently and that they would eventually be seen as “belonging.” Two years later, those hopes were dashed.
Zhang and Sang, like Gwaltney, allow their subjects (for want of a better word) to speak for themselves, and as readers we feel we are meeting these individuals directly. Fascinating as Moeran's book is, we never have that same feeling. We are given only his stories of the people among whom he lived, and so, like him, we are held at a distance from their lives. Like him, we remain an outsider.
I'll be getting back to Vikram Seth soon. But Tree Guy and I will also be having more company this month, and there is still a lot of fall work to be done, too, around the home place.
We are still learning, Sunny and I.
 |
| One of my favorite portraits of her |
Last Monday may have been our last agility session for the season, or we may have one more, depending on the weather. Be that as it may, I asked Coach Mike to take a couple pictures of Sunny and me on the course, and this is what I have:
Endings can be beautiful, too.
Besides lovely October dawns, we have also had some spectacular fall sunsets. Those are the Manitou Islands out there on the horizon.
No comments:
Post a Comment