The Summer Blur Is Underway

(Reminder to self and others: Make time to write letters.)

Calendar and community are full to overflowing.

When summer hits, it’s hard to keep up. Everything—grass, gardens, weeds—is growing; everyone is shopping and visiting; and not a single day on the calendar is empty of some sort of meeting or concert or lecture or art opening. There are more temptations and obligations than there is time to fit them all in, but we do our best. 

This Friday--today!--is the Friends of the Library book sale in Northport, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. It's also the weekly farmers market, and when I was at the market I saw that people had already staked out territory, with folding chairs and tablecloths, for tonight's Music in the Park. 

On Saturday, the 4th of July, tomorrow, there will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence in front of the post office at 10 a.m. The Cancer Run for Funds race also begins at 10 a.m. on the 4th. And of course, in the evening there will be fireworks, best in the county. 

Northport Flood, 2026

The big news this past week in our village, though, was a flood of historic proportions on Monday. It made the news far from northern Michigan, with distant friends calling and texting to see if we were all right. We’re fine. No loss of life, and as far as I know no injuries, but lots of road damage and some structural damage to buildings. Second Street was a river, and the edge of the parking lot at the visitors center was the top of a waterfall, as a cascade descended from there to the overflowing creek. More rain pounded down on Wednesday, but not as much, for which all were grateful.

A few of the delicious dessert offerings! Can you say "sugar buzz"?

Then there was a lovely gathering at the Willowbrook on Tuesday evening, hosted by Mimi and Joel Heberlein, to celebrate the life and honor the memory of the late David Chrobak. David’s specialties were flowers and delicious, beautifully decorated cakes, so along with shared stories we enjoyed all manner of sweet desserts and then tossed flowers wild and tame into the creek to be carried down to Grand Traverse Bay in his memory. The Fabulous Fish Queens were on hand in their regalia. David Chrobak loved the Fish Queens. When asked if he had invented them, he is reported to have said, "No, but I made them famous."

Note one of my favorite wildflowers top left. Can you name it?

The FABULOUS FISH QUEENS!

The preceding Saturday (unfortunately, on the same evening as a village choir concert at the auditorium), the Northport Arts Association hosted an open mike night (now called open mic, but I am old-fashioned) for writers, poets, and story-tellers. Featured guest was Traverse City author Jerry Dennis, whose readings moved me to tears, but all participants were excellent. 

I was glad I went that night and also on Tuesday night to the Willowbrook and am sorry I can’t get to everything, but my energy runs out faster than it used to, along with my young dog’s patience. People are getting used to hearing me say, “I have to get home to my dog."

Farm news is news for everyone. 

It’s been 12 years (is that possible?) since I first wrote a blog post about where I get my news. Yes, way back in 2014. I did an update in 2021 and am coming back to add what has become my #1 source of information on current events, because more than anything else I now rely on a weekly midwestern newspaper called the Farmers’ Advance to keep up-to-date. Published in Mansfield, Ohio, Farmers’ Advance (since 1898!) focuses on Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan but covers issues from local to global. It is way more than a report on soybean futures. 

Almost every policy decision our federal and state governments take affects farmers one way or another. The Farm Bill is only one example, but naturally that gets coverage, the July 1 headline on the topic reading “Senate farm bill omits E15 [biofuel], Proposition 12 [which would have imposed California standards on animal housing across the nation] and pesticide labeling.” Another article in this same issue bears the headline “Missiles, drones and rising prices: What Trump’s war in Iran has cost the US.” There’s more. Farm production costs, like fuel and grocery prices, are up and expected to hit record highs next year, according to the USDA. Fewer Americans are now receiving SNAP benefits (rolls down 10%), and administrative costs are moving to the state level. New immigration policies, it turns out, are lowering legal immigration faster than illegal entries—2-1/2 times faster in the first nine months of 2024, which makes it more difficult to find farm workers while reducing the number of workers paying into social security (non-citizens have to pay in, though they do not receive the system’s benefits), the generally declining workforce also leading to lower economic growth. These policies affect all of us: Farmers just see it more easily and faster than the rest of the nation. 

The July issue tells of fairs in Ohio, equine therapy for people with physical disabilities, what to do for monarch butterflies, and a rare goat-sheep hybrid born in Olmstead Falls. Most issues have at least one story on organic methods. There are warnings of invasive plant species and unwelcome animal pests. (July 1 issue shines a light on invasive elm zigzag sawfly, not nearly as terrifying as the horrible screwworm found in Texas recently!) There is a Bible trivia quiz in every issue and, often, memories of family jam-making sessions. 

One ongoing saga since I started subscribing is data center developments in rural communities. Well, naturally, that’s where “empty” land can be found, but rural areas usually constitute also what might be called news deserts, something like the food deserts found in poor urban neighborhoods. Even in cities, local newspapers have been in steep decline, but in rural areas if there is one newspaper in a county, it may have only one reporter. Add to this the rash of nondisclosure agreements insisted upon by developers and the middlemen who scout locations for them, and you can see how difficult it is for local residents to have the information they need to govern their rural communities. The July 1 issue of Farmers’ Advance directly addresses the question of middlemen, while previous recent issues have looked at acreage lost, volume of necessary water inputs, etc. 

There’s no way I can get everyone in Michigan to read this newspaper every week, but I did the next-best thing and paid for a second subscription to go to our local township library. As I read my own copy, I generally pass it along to one friend or another. 

Leelanau Township Library

What I have been reading lately

A couple of new memoirs went home with me recently, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery and the Currents That Carry You Home, by Kimberly Warner, and What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis, by Theodore Richards. The Warner book has a northern Michigan connection, and Richards promised a bit of philosophy. I found both engrossing enough that I rather raced through them. 

John M. Barry’s history of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is impossible to race through, and there are a lot of interruptions, as I’m reading it at the shop, but I have made my way into Chapter 5 and don’t intend to stop. Quite extraordinary, how the issues of Englishmen in the 17th century feel so relevant in our United States of the 21st century! King Charles I, who succeeded King James, warned Parliament in his opening address to them that if they failed to give him

“What the state at this time needs, I must, in discharge of my conscience, use those other means which God hath put into my hands…. Take not this as a threatening, for I scorn to threaten any but my equals.”

Barry notes that Parliament “bristled” at the king’s words, telling them they were not his equals (as if they didn't know that!), and they reminded him of the “many necessary liberties and Privileges” that belonged to the king’s subjects, “by the common laws and acts of Parliament.”

Freedom of conscience—and, by extension, speech—was one those liberties exercised by the brave and repeatedly punished by the king. Also habeas corpus and due process. Plus ça change…. Oh, my, what drama Chapter 5 holds! Is the king above the law or the law above the king? Can the king imprison his subjects, seize their private property, even have them executed on a whim? This is the issue at stake. Chapter 5 alone is worth the price of the book, and if I could quote the entire chapter here, I would. 

As for fiction, I have ventured a few pages into an old novel but not far enough to tell much about it yet except that the pace and setting please me. More on that next time.

What is blooming these days

Bee balm, bergamot—call it what you will. The species Monarda is one that both bees and butterflies appreciate, and I like it as much for that reason as for its deep colors. Pansies are annuals always worth having around to fill in between blooms of perennial species and for their own cheery faces. Snapdragons, now: I did not buy new snapdragons this year but took last year’s pots in onto the front porch, where they overwintered in freezing temperatures, without any water, and came back again this year. That is one hardy annual! 

Second summer for these snapdragons

Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, has long been one of my favorites. I like the way it takes care of itself, the way it multiplies, and the way it lasts for days and days as a cut flower, its leaves possessing what I think of as architectural interest. And it’s blue. Blue like lobelia, blue like false indigo. Blue makes such a statement in a garden border, impossible not to notice.

Purple? Okay, that's in the blue range.

And everywhere, for the monarchs, milkweed!

On the home front

We three --

Besides gardens, the big news at home is that Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and yours truly have formed a new household. We are embarked on a new adventure, unforeseen a year ago, and it feels exciting and entirely natural at the same time. Tree Guy hit the ground running, as his first two evenings with me involved packing and schlepping heavy boxes of books. I told him my life isn't always this arduous: It's not every week I buy a three-carload private library, in the middle of a heat wave, with 4th of July coming right down the pike at us!

Happy 4th, everyone! Be safe, celebrate the holiday, count your blessings, smile at your neighbor, and signal all your turns, whether in an electric or gasoline-powered vehicle or on a bicycle. And watch out for deer and pedestrians on the roadways!

Here, for the 4th of July, a T-Shirt and a Poem

A writer friend, critical of our nation's true history as well as much that is happening in American society today, was asked this question over and over, “Why don’t you love your country?” The person asking seemed incapable of understanding my friend’s answer, which was “I do love my country!” She loves the land, the people, the lofty ideals. My friend simply wants what so many of us want, which is for our country’s policies, foreign and domestic, to reflect our stated ideals and for all our citizens to respect and protect one another.

Perfection, of course, is a moving target, but certainly we can aim to be better and, aiming sincerely, improve. We can make the future brighter than the past has been.

Pictured above is one of my favorite t-shirts. Like so many in what I would not even presume to call a “wardrobe,” this one came from a thrift shop. I couldn’t resist it, and I love to wear it. “When was America ever kind?” the Artist asked the last time he saw me in the shirt.

I told him it’s like the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” a poem written 85 years ago during the Great Depression, when Hughes and so many millions in America and around the world were struggling to make ends meet, let alone to realize their dreams. There is sharp poignancy in that word again, since the America that Hughes envisioned, as he makes clear in the poem, “…never has been yet.” 

I have a connection to Langston Hughes, tenuous but important to me. After she graduated from high school, my mother worked for an organization (perhaps the YMCA or YWCA) that sponsored a local reading by the poet, and since she was responsible for putting the event together, my mother was privileged to meet Langston Hughes, who inscribed a copy of his autobiography for her. That treasured book now belongs to me. 

So for July 4, 2020, I want to share my favorite Langston Hughes poem with you who have known it for years as well as you who have perhaps never read it before, because – you know this troubled country of ours? We don’t always act as if we know it, but we truly are all in this together.

Happy 4^th, friends! Let freedom ring!

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

by Langston Hughes 
(1902-1967)

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain 
Seeking a home where he himself is free. 

(America never was America to me.) 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — 
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme 
That any man be crushed by one above. 

(It never was America to me.) 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty 
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, 
But opportunity is real, and life is free, 
Equality is in the air we breathe. 

(There's never been equality for me, 
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, 

I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek — 
And finding only the same old stupid plan 
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, 
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! 
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed! 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean — 
Hungry yet today despite the dream. 
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years. 

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream 
In the Old World while still a serf of kings, 
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, 
That even yet its mighty daring sings 

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned 
That's made America the land it has become. 
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home — 
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, 
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, 
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came 
To build a "homeland of the free." 

The free? 

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today? 
The millions shot down when we strike? 
The millions who have nothing for our pay? 
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay — 
Except the dream that's almost dead today. 

O, let America be America again — 

The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be--the land where every man is free. 
The land that's mine — the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME —
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, 
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, 
Must bring back our mighty dream again. 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose — 
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, 
We must take back our land again, 
America! 

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me, 
And yet I swear this oath — 
America will be! 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, 
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, 
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. 
The mountains and the endless plain — 
All, all the stretch of these great green states — And make America again! 

Let’s Think Carefully, Then Talk to Each Other

Out in the countryside

Friends and strangers stopping in the bookstore the last couple of days have been shocked to see me underlining phrases in a book. With a pen, no less! I explain that it’s an old paperback, spine cracked and pages ready to start falling out, and that some previous studious reader already went through the whole thing with yellow highlighter. One young man asked, “Are you doing a word search? My mother does that.” Seems the whole concept of underlining key ideas in a text had passed him by. But I am of another generation, of course....

The book I’ve been reading is a little anthology of historical writings on the American Revolution with an arresting title: The Ambiguity of the American Revolution. The book’s editor, Jack P. Greene, in his excellent introduction, traces the history of our history, as it were – the different interpretations given over time to the Revolution, starting with contemporary accounts -- because even in the 1770s, there was no unanimity of view. Loyalists saw the conflict one way, patriots another, and their perspectives colored the way they wrote their accounts. John Adams himself said there were as many American Revolutions as there were colonies and perhaps as many as individuals in those colonies. Everyone had a slightly different take on it at the time, and through successive periods of our country’s life new interpretations have emerged in waves, to be supplanted in their turn by others. This diversity of perspective is something we often lose sight of, now that we’ve had two hundred and forty-one years to come -- more or less, in textbooks if nowhere else -- to agreement on a national narrative.

[See continuation of discussion of this book here.]

David Ramsay, a Maryland physician who graduated from the College of New Jersey in the year of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), eventually wrote of the Patriot cause and the newly formed United States of America:

The world has not hitherto exhibited so fair an opportunity for promoting social happiness. It is hoped for the honour of human nature, that the result will prove the fallacy of those theories, which suppose that mankind are incapable of self-government. 

– from his History of the American Revolution, first published in Philadelphia in1789, an excerpt of which appears in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution

President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, addressing the crowd at Gettysburg, noted that the crowd that day “met on a great battlefield of that war,” a war “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Far short of three hundred years old, our country remains an experiment, its success into the future far from guaranteed.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press: If the “national security” entails restricting those freedoms, what “security” do Americans have? I picked up another book at home this morning, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, and, opening at random, fell by chance – true story – on a chapter entitled “Journalism and Democracy.” On the first page of that chapter, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes) says that after less than two years as White House press secretary,

It took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. ... 

 I also had to relearn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

The lighter side

Today is the 4^th of July, and Americans are gathering again, all over the country, in crowds large and small. We take time out from our ordinary pursuits to re-read the Declaration of Independence. (In Leelanau County, such readings usually take place in front of a village post office. See below for Northport event.) The mood of Independence Day is celebratory. There are parades and marching bands and flags waving in the breeze and displays of fireworks against the summer night sky.

Patriotic village gathering

While most of us do not see ourselves “met on a battlefield” this July 4, 2017, we are painfully aware that our country is deeply divided. We are divided not only on issues, but on our most basic core value, freedom. What does ‘freedom’ mean, and how is it best protected? Beneath all the posturing and tweets and insults, that is the crucial question.

Coming fast upon the heels of the first question, however, is another: How can the question about freedom be answered in a civilized manner?

If we cannot agree on an answer to the second question, the first becomes moot, because when civil discourse gives way to hate, attacks on freedoms proliferate, and repression ensues, and when hate gives way to violence, life and liberty both fall victim.

Can the current trend of incivility and increasing repression be reversed? Can our freedoms endure? It’s worth taking a few minutes to ponder these questions on this day of air shows and hot dogs and sparklers.

Eternal vigilance!