Escaping Thoughts and Impressions of a Wandering Mind

Geese in smoky sky

Our Outdoor World

June’s weather story in northern Michigan was a flood. July’s is smoke. 

With over 800 wildfires burning in Minnesota and Canada, we are having evenings without sunset and mornings without sunrise. We catch a brief glimpse of the mid-morning sun before it is swallowed up by thick smoke (not haze, though it looks like haze), aromatic as a campfire but impossible to escape by walking away. A shifting orange-brown shroud hangs over almost half the country, though the flames are hundreds of miles away from us here in Leelanau. Will we get rain, and will it help dampen down the smoke? Time will tell. Meanwhile, I break out a mask for brief outdoor sorties.

Uncomfortable, but 95% protection is better than zero

“How’s your summer going?” It’s half-over! comes the unwelcome thought. But that’s only if summer is June, July, and August, right? If it’s July, August, and September, as I like to think, it is barely underway. After all, my cucumbers and beans have produced only flowers as yet, edible portions still to come. 

Black raspberries ripen continuously now and require twice-daily picking. 

There will be only a handful of gooseberries, but I’m hoping for a good apple crop this year, after two dud years (first codling moth worms in 2024, then in 2025 a late freeze that killed blossoms).

General garden knowledge can be gathered from books, but site-specific knowledge home accumulates only through the years. Monarda, a.k.a. bee balm, seems happy in my hard and has been blooming steadily in the border, a number of plants providing various colors in sequence—pale lavender, bright fuchsia, deep pink, pale pink. Hellebores are very happy in one spot; in another they were miserable, and I’m hoping they will be happier in a new corner. Hollyhocks by the backyard clothesline didn’t come back this year at all. That was disappointing, as I thought I would have them for the rest of my life, thinking of my grandmother’s hollyhocks growing by the outhouse. (Maybe if I’d had a working outhouse, my hollyhocks would have lasted?) In wild areas it’s all Black-eyed Susans and sweet peas now. 

My World of Books

Acquisition: It’s been two years since I made the big book buy from a former dealer in Leland. This year’s largest purchase wasn’t quite as big (only three carloads in 2026 rather than the eight trips in 2024, two with a pickup truck accompanying my car), but I am so well stocked that I almost passed on a chance to look at books from an estate—until I realized it was the home and the books of a very close friend of many years. The old friend’s house … his enormous book collection … some books he had written himself and many others by mutual friends … stray photographs and snapshots and prints by and of old friends … the yard engulfed by brambles, deck railings broken, electricity off in the house. As I went through shelves, selecting books, more and more memories kept coming to light. An emotional evening....

Authors: This past Tuesday Barbara Stark-Nemon was onstage at the Willowbrook, interviewed by another Northport author, Karen Mulvahill. It was the second in this year's Friends of the Leelanau Township Library summer author series and a lovely evening in every possible way!

Barbara's first embroidery project, a copy of her new novel's cover

Reading: Although I’d only gotten to Chapter 6 of that fascinating book about Roger Williams (a little about it in this recent post), more recently I fell into another that I’d never heard of before, its contents spellbinding and thought-provoking.

THE GURU PAPERS: MASKS OF AUTHORITARIAN POWER, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad.

Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., 1993

Here are some lines from the preface: 

…We found authoritarianism embedded in people’s psyches, affecting much more of day-to-day existence than is generally conceived. This is because in most people’s minds authoritarianism is associated with political systems such as dictatorships rather than with worldview…. In the process of writing this book, we deepened our understanding of how authoritarianism in its varied guises has been and largely still is a primary mode of social cohesion—and also how it has now become a major factor in social disintegration.

Then toward the end of the preface: 

This book presents a point of view and ideas that we want to stand or fall on their own merit. … Our major concern is clarity—namely, that anyone who cares to follow the train of thought will understand it, whether in agreement or not. 

The authors' “enemy,” so to speak, is any individual who (or institution) that would encourage people to mistrust their own minds and impressions and perceptions. They hope to foster “self-trust as a foundation for living.” 

Their view of authoritarianism, therefore, is broader than simply a study of dictatorships, and they use the guru relationship not as the only variety of authoritarian structure but as a paradigm. The first, early stage of the relationship they call messianic proselytizing, with the guru preaching a message of higher good, such as saving mankind. This phase offers a “celebratory, party-like atmosphere” to new recruits. The fully enlightened guru is at the peak of the group’s hierarchical pyramid, his inner circle just below, etc., but even the lowest can feel superior to outsiders who have not yet even realized their need to be on this particular path to enlightenment.

Then, 

A time inevitably comes when the popularity and power of the group plateaus and then begins to wane. 

People begin to doubt and must be pulled in more tightly. Our authors say either one of two things happen (I’m wondering if both can occur simultaneously): either the guru’s message will turn to a doomsday forecast of disaster, or he “makes increasingly extreme promises and bizarre claims….” It is dangerous, he tells his followers, to associate with anyone not on their path, and the mistrust the believers have for outsiders is 

...not totally paranoid (there is a reason for it) because as the group becomes more closed and bizarre, outsiders react more negatively. 

The chapter on “The Attractions of Cult Hierarchy” (the cult offers certainty in a tumultuously changing life or world—though the authors are careful to point out that a hierarchy in itself need not be authoritarian) ends on page 90, so I have a lot of ground yet to cover, but this is a fascinating book! I will not draw explicit parallels to our world today, which you can do for yourself. Oh, but here is one more bit before I get off the subject: 

Looking carefully at a guru’s inner circle is extremely revealing. Those closest to him, his most dedicated students, display better than anything else where his teaching leads…. Are they strong and interesting in their own right or are they boring sycophants who continually feed his ego? It is also very enlightening to observe how gurus treat and refer to those who leave their fold.

Bad News/Good News/Bad News

The death-dealing ICE traffic stops struck once again. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work, as usual, and he was not even the target ICE was seeking, but he is now dead (his wife a widow, his children orphans), and so is Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran, and so is a 28-year-old man in Florida—three deaths in one week—no charges made against them, let alone any opportunity for a trial.

One day we had surprisingly good news: ICE did not plan to cease traffic stops completely but would scale back on the number. Unexpected relief! Because otherwise, what could we do? Protest each succeeding death, with no hope that there would be an end to them? Hope surged.

The very next day came the bad news: the president told ICE not to reduce the number of traffic stops. The idea, apparently, is to keep people running scared.

It was hard for me to work up a lot of enthusiasm for the 4th of July 2026, the 250th birthday of our nation. I love my country. I love its ideals, and I love the progress we seemed to be making for decades. Now, from where I stand, we are going backward at rocket speed. I cannot think of a single aspect of our national life that has been improved under the current administration. In fact, it’s difficult to see any positive aspect of that same national life that has not been reduced, degraded, or outright eliminated. 

Protections for workers and for the environment are stripped away. Public health is on the trash heap. There has been no real help for health care costs and inflation in general, despite the campaign promises. Is discrimination against minorities even illegal any more, or is bigotry what is now protected? The United States has become an aggressor country in the world theatre—the bully, not the one protecting others from bullies. And the president is so terrified that his party will be voted out of power that he threatens the election process itself. No surprise there. No surprise—and yet it is heartbreaking, maddening, so shameful!

One night I woke up with the thought: This isn’t even murder. It’s vivisection. A living entity, our country, is being tortured and torn apart and cut up in pieces. No more sleep that night!

Yet all of us go on with our lives, because we are alive and have no choice. Both those who oppose the current administration and those who—incredibly! inexplicably!—continue to support it live our lives as best we can one day after another, we the opposition with breaking hearts and determined, resolute hope. 

Do their hearts not break, the hearts of the supporters? Do they not miss the neighborliness we used to share? Can they look unmoved upon the deaths of children, of children’s parents, of their own neighbors? If they are so certain that God’s will is ordering everything that happens, what explains their frantic politicking and their desperate denials of fact? 

I do still hope, fervently, stubbornly, however, that our country will survive and turn once again toward freedom and the common good for all our grandchildren and great-grandchildren—. Don't you?

***

Coming back to add another wandering thought I had this past week about Republicans in Congress: I was wondering whether they are simply spineless (afraid to lose favor with the naked emperor) or if they are terrified deer in the headlights of oncoming history, realizing full well that theirs is a doomed legacy of shame. The thing is that remaining paralyzed is no protection against history, which just keeps rollin’ along. The moving finger writes, and all that. In time, history itself throws cowards under the bus. Their only hope is to wake up, jump out of the road, and yell “Sorry!” as loud as they possibly can. A good first step would be to vote against confirmation of the most inappropriate candidate for U.S. Attorney General ever proposed to fill the position. 

On the Home Front

Merging households, especially in a busy season like summer, involves a period of transition, so there’s a little chaos and a lot of clutter at Casa Bookseller-Tree Guy these days. Small items go missing on a daily basis. We had that big three-carload book move during the heat wave immediately preceding the holiday weekend, too! Despite it all, we are finding our new life together almost unbelievably easy and natural, and Naughty Barker goes right along with it, too. She now has company during the day when her momma goes to work, and she gets extra walks and extra attention and another someone willing to throw tennis balls for her. And have I mentioned that Tree Guy is a reader? Icing on the cake!

Guest Book Review: ISABELA'S WAY

Book cover for ISABELA'S WAY

Local Northport author Barbara Stark-Nemon has done it again. After two other outstanding novels (Even in Darkness and Hard Cider), Isabela’s Way may be her best work yet.

Set in the early seventeenth century, this absorbing historical novel describes the impact of the Inquisition on families forced to flee persecution. As the story opens, non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and enforcement of the Inquisition is spreading to Portugal.

Isabela is a conscientious fourteen-year-old Portuguese girl and a talented needlework artist. Her mother has died of the plague. Her father, a textile merchant, is traveling and living in Hamburg. While her village is roiled by illness and the terrifying unrest of the Inquisition, Isabela maintains the household and fends for herself, with help from her friend David.

An enigmatic stranger, Ana, contacts Isabela with an urgent message from her father: Isabela is in danger and must leave Portugal immediately. As cover for her escape, Ana announces that Isabela has been commissioned by a family in the Basque region to embroider their daughter’s trousseau. 

Raised as a Christian, Isabela had assumed she would be safe from religious persecution. She is shocked to discover that her own heritage is Jewish and that she and her family, as converts, or “New Christians,” are also at risk. Isabela learns that her friend David has fled Portugal with his sisters and is escaping along a northern route. 

During their journeys across Spain, Ana, Isabela, David and his sisters are aided by a network of friends and sympathizers helping Jews escape persecution. Isabela finds a safe retreat with the Basque family and completes her commissioned work, but she is at growing peril of being exposed and eager to find her father. 

Ana, Isabela, David and his sisters continue traveling east, seeking refuge with additional sympathizers in France. All of them are also being pursued by a priest from their home village, who is determined to enforce the strictures of the Inquisition. The account of Isabela’s attempts to escape to safety and reunite with her father and David is gripping, with many suspenseful scenes and unexpected twists.

The book is rich with historical detail, offering deeply evocative descriptions of the cities, architecture, and culture of seventeenth-century Europe. At the same time, the themes of religious intolerance and oppression are utterly (and unfortunately) contemporary and relevant. 

Stark-Nemon is masterful at creating spirited female characters. Isabela uses her embroidery talent to assist with the refugees’ safe passage; she stitches elaborate symbols for banners that indicate safety or danger at each sanctuary on their route. Her growth from a perceptive but innocent girl to an assured, wise woman makes for a compelling coming-of-age tale. Similarly, Ana is a compassionate and gifted herbalist and healer; she bravely risks being apprehended as a heretic when she aids the sick and injured along the way. They are inspiring characters facing menacing danger with grace and hope.

Like Isabela’s embroidery, this intricate, beautifully written novel, with its complex, intertwining story lines, is a testament to human resilience and strength even in times of tyranny and cruelty. 

Author's needlework rendition of book cover

Reviewer Kristen Rabe also says:

"I am always thrilled when Pamela invites me to review a book for her blog. We have so many talented authors in Northern Michigan, and it’s a delight to highlight their work. Barbara Stark-Nemon is among the very best of those authors, and this fascinating historical novel with its remarkably relevant themes should attract a wide readership. Thank you once again, Pamela, for all you do to promote thoughtful discussion in our community."

Note: The release date of this book is Tuesday, September 16, 2025. I have it on back order and should have copies next week. Barbara will also be signing and selling her book at a booth during Leelanau UnCaged in Northport on Saturday, September 27.

Book Review: HARD CIDER

Barbara Stark-Nemon’s new book, Hard Cider, is quite different from her debut novel, Even in Darkness. Both novels present characters based on members of the author’s family, and Hard Cider will undoubtedly hold readers’ attention, as did Even in Darkness, from start to finish, but the differences are at least as numerous as the similarities. The earlier novel was set in the 20th century. The new work, its story unfolding in the present, is much closer to home.

Most of the action in Hard Cider, except for a brief New England section, takes place in Michigan, primarily in Leelanau County around Northport. The new novel is closer to home in a figurative sense, as well, with much of the material coming from the author’s personal experience. Marriage, family, heartache, and dreams. When you get beneath the surface, none of it is as simple as it first appears.

Abbie Rose Stone, first-person narrator, retired from a dual career in teaching and speech therapy, dreams of launching a commercial hard cider business from the family vacation home outside Northport. Locals, summer people, and repeat visitors to the area will recognize many familiar village and township scenes. Knitters, quilters, and craftspeople will be especially charmed to find their favorite Northport shop, Dolls and More, prominently featured, proprietor Sally appearing under her own name. Other names have been changed, and a few characters may be imaginary. Nevertheless, the novel’s locale and cast will be presently vividly to any reader’s mind, including those readers who have never set foot in northern Michigan. As for readers who know the territory — well, if I were far from home — say, in Paris — reading Hard Cider, I would be transported to northern Michigan.

Sally at her shop, Dolls and More, with beautiful yarn

Retirement and an unexpected inheritance have given Abbie Rose Stone an enviable freedom. While her husband’s law career still keeps him tied closely to Ann Arbor, Abbie Rose spends as much time as possible in Northport — its beaches, woodsy trails, and orchards (apples, though, not cherries). Her children grown, she’s ready to make her next dream come true.

Whenever I could, I haunted Charlie Aiken’s orchard — first in May, when the young trees burst into blossom, their sweet scent drawing bees to pollinate, and then as fruit set and the schedule of spraying and fertilizing marched into June and July. I helped out frequently, especially on a day after a vicious thunderstorm damaged orchards in a swath across the whole peninsula. The youth of the trees and ou solid spring pruning kept the danger to a minimum, but Charles, James, and I spent a whole day trimming and clearing. 

But Abbie Rose loves the Leelanau peninsula in all its seasons, even savage winter.

The lake no longer pounded out rhythms to the falling snow, and the softened fields, laced tree branches, and muffled sounds combined to create a winter wonderland that never failed to thrill me. No snowbird behavior for me; I loved northern Michigan in the winter precisely for its harsh beauty and isolation. Short days and long nights brought me inward, forcing a welcome shift to indoor work with my hands....

Winter orchard

Parents' worries do not end when children grow up and leave home, however, and her sons still give Abbie Rose cause for concern, especially Alex, the boy whose growing-up years were the most difficult. Whenever she hears his voice on the phone, Abbie’s heart gives a lurch. She can’t help wishing to have this son living nearby again, pursuing his own physician assistant career, of course, but also serving as consultant to her cider business. Steven, her husband, given his already strong reservations about Abbie’s dream project, is even more dubious about his son becoming involved, i.e., “dragged into it.” This, then, is the Stone family. Close, loving, happy, and successful, but with undercurrents of tension and worry. 

The novel opens with a scene from the family past: the Stones return from vacation, the youngest child only a babe in arms, to find their Ann Arbor home burned to the ground, the work of an arsonist, everything in it lost. Other significant pieces of the past emerge gradually, in bits and pieces. Happy families are not all the same. Each family has its particular complicated history, and this is certainly true for the Stones. 

Neither do all complications lie in the past. Like so many downstaters who come to know Leelanau as their vacation “happy place,” Abbie Rose comes to Northport for peace and quiet, for a chance to unleash her creativity but also to “get away from it all.” While Steven is in Ann Arbor and the boys off leading their own lives, she cherishes her winter lakeshore solitude. Who, then, is this young woman appearing one day on the road? Where did she come from, and what is she doing here? Abbie is curious but can’t help feeling a bit irritated, too, by the stranger’s presence.

Antique apples at John and Phyllis Kilcherman's farm

Hard Cider steers clear of murder but provides plenty of mystery. Moreover, since this is not a formula genre novel, “solving” the mystery does not end the questions to be faced by the book’s sympathetic cast of characters. Instead, as life throws them curve balls, old decisions have a long reach, as new knowledge makes new demands on Abbie and her family, challenges we realize will continue long after the novel’s final page.

If you’re like me, you read a variety of books for a variety of reasons: to learn about the world or to escape it; to find characters like yourself and/or  unlike yourself; to stimulate your mind, calm your soul, challenge your preconceptions, and/or calm your fears; to immerse yourself in a place or to take you far from where you are. Barbara Stark-Nemon’s new novel will satisfy booklovers’ needs and desires in these and other directions, I’m sure, depending on individual starting points. 

Besides, don’t you love being Up North? Or wish you were? Or wonder what it’s like? There’s that delight, too.

Looking toward Lake Michigan

Report from the Tweet Front

Awaiting the big news --

Today’s report is from Saturday, June 25, the first-ever Dog Ears Book tweet fest. Will there be another? I suppose it could happen, but it would be hard to top yesterday’s for thrills.

Logging on....

Treats!

The tweeting occasion took place far from Northport, down in Orlando, Florida, at the national convention of the American Library Association. ForeWord Reviews was there to announce their 2016 Indiefab awards, and Even in Darkness, the novel by Barbara Stark-Nemon of Ann Arbor and Northport, was a nominee in a couple of categories. ForeWord would be tweeting from Orlando, Barbara would receive the tweets and Facebook announcements, and so she proposed re-tweeting results from her favorite bookstore, as a few other nominees around the country were also doing. Being Barbara, she not only brought laptop, iPad, and iPhone but also what my fellow blogger Gerry Sell calls “excellent treats.” My technological role was limited to sharing a Facebook post Barbara tagged me in. I could handle that.

Thrills!

We didn’t have a big crowd, but the moment Barbara logged on and saw her award – right away, no waiting! – she read it aloud, and she, Clare, and I screamed in delight. You should have been here. I’m sorry you missed it. Barbara won the Gold (first prize) in literary fiction, and Bronze (third) in historical fiction! Over the top excitement! 

Sharing the excitement

Our giddy delirium lasted quite a while, and several browsers who wandered in caught the fever and bought copies of Even in Darkness to take home. Then when the decks cleared, Barbara and I went down to Northport Brewing to relax and chat at an outdoor table with a couple of cold pints. That was a first for me, too. Finally!

Relaxing, enjoying....

Tweeting? From Dog Ears???

Still making news!

Can you imagine tweets coming from Dog Ears? If it’s ever happened before, the activity was surreptitious, and I was not involved. I won't be the one doing the actual tweeting this time, either, but it will occur in my bookstore, with my blessing.

The instigator is -- and tweeter will be -- Barbara Stark-Nemon, author of Even in Darkness. And the reason is that Barbara’s book is up for a 2016 INDIEFAB book award from ForeWord Reviews, and ForeWord will be tweeting live (and posting on Facebook) on Saturday from the American Library Association’s national convention in Orlando. Make sense now?

Our “live” show will begin at 4 p.m. on Saturday. This is the first such event hosted by Dog Ears Books. Call it a historic occasion. And if you want to be part of the excitement, come join us!

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Unrelated to Saturday's planned event (except insofar as this other item is also related to books), this morning I finished reading The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story, by Susan Hill, a former library copy that turned up in some random box a few days ago. Opening to the first page, I was immediately taken by the illustrations and probably began to read the book for the sake of the pictures. John Lawrence, the illustrator, was not a name I recognized, and there was no further information about him on the dust jacket. The publisher, however, was David R. Godine of Boston, one of my all-time favorites. That explained a lot. Trust David R. Godine to come up with the perfect illustrator for a story! From now on, I'll be looking for John Lawrence's name, as well as Godine's. The book really was charming. And yes, there was a dog in the story.

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Finally, today is St. John's Eve, and the St. Johnswort has started blooming, but my golden yellow wildflower closing today's post is coreopsis. Aren't they simply glorious?