To Mask or Not to Mask (Big Sigh!)

Open, uncrowded spaces!

 

The Big Question – Again!

 

August is here, the summer of 2021 is two-thirds over, but we have not heard the last of COVID-19. Leelanau County, leading Michigan with over 70% of the population vaccinated, is filled with eager vacationers from all over the country, and in many other places the vaccination rate continues to lag, despite a resurgence of cases, hospitalizations, even deaths. 

 

A friend called me on Friday evening to discuss the question of remasking. She and I and our husbands are all over 70, so – perhaps not “compromised” but definitely in the at-risk demographic. Here is a map of the U.S. showing statistics, but the text is worth reading, too. Eighty-eight percent of those infected are among the unvaccinated: you can subtract 88 from 100, right? Twelve percent (12%) of COVID cases involve vaccinated people? That’s what my friend wanted to discuss with me. Recall that the vaccines were never advertised as 100% effective, the first numbers given ranging from 91-97% effective, as I recall, and Pfizer now reporting a drop in effectiveness after four months to 87%.

Well, people living and working in Northport have a Facebook page that I joined shortly after it began, and it was on that page that I posed my question – Remasking? Never stopped masking? – to other people in our business community. My friend and I during our phone conversation had heaved a few big sighs over the remasking question, and the number of sighs coming from me increased after I posed the question to the Facebook group.

 

It was intended as a simple question. I wasn’t asking for medical advice or looking for an argument, only trying to get a feel for how others in business in my community were feeling about this health and safety issue. We all see license plates from Florida, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Alaska, etc. – and everyone who drove from those places traveled through other places (as do the Artist and I when we go between Michigan and Arizona), so how are others feeling about risk these days?

 

Omigod, the brouhaha that ensued! 

 

I had asked another question in the past week about the local source for all the big logs I’d seen being trucked south through the village, and the same thing happened with my mask question that happened when I asked about the logs: First responses were simple and to the point, but very quickly ideology came rushing into the picture, with sides lining up and throwing spitballs at each other. One person not only referred to the slippery slope argument (more entertainingly titled, I always feel, the camel’s nose) but made one of his own. No one (yet) has called anyone else a fascist or a communist, but the terms ‘dictator’ and ‘socialist’ have been thrown around. Ye gods and little fishes!

 

Yes, it’s freedom of expression. Yes, that’s what democracy is all about. But does every question have to be a political football? Really? I mean, everyone on the site already knows which side everyone else is going to join. Nothing new is being said, and no minds are being changed. Oh, one new thing was said: Jean-Paul Sartre was called a utilitarian. No, sorry, he was not a utilitarian. Existentialism and utilitarianism are poles apart. I mention this to the handful of people who will care….

 

Meanwhile, on Saturday in my bookstore I noticed that about half of the people coming in were masked. I wore a mask myself most of the day and will be doing so in other crowded indoor situations.

Sigh!

 

Among My Current Books

 

I read two novels from beginning to end this past week, began one nonfiction book and am continuing my reading of another. 

 

100. Akers, W. M. Westside (fiction)

101. Hicks, Joyce. Escape From Assisted Living (fiction)

 

The novels were as unlike each other as could be. Westside is a noir fantasy, set in an imaginary New York in a Prohibition Era that was never quite like this. The action rarely slows, and I can’t say I followed every twist and turn, but the writing is good, and I could picture the settings as I read, which is always something I look for in fiction. To my thinking, the novel cries out for an animated film adaptation. I’m told that Martin Scorsese has bought the rights and that the book’s author is writing the screenplay, though, so we’ll see what develops.

 

Escape From Assisted Living has no murders (one small mystery as a plot thread) but could legitimately be termed a “cozy” read. I enjoyed it. Again, good writing, interesting and varied settings, and a main character I did not identify with but for whom I felt affection and empathy.

 

I will read the sequel to Escape From Assisted Living but probably not the sequel to Westside. Noir fantasy is just not my genre. I read The Hunger Games and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but not the sequels to either book. I’m not boycotting, just limiting my intake.

 

A friend loaned me the U.K. edition of Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty, a book I'm enjoying enough that I put two copies on my new book order list for the coming week, anticipating that some of my customers will want to read it, too. The author is very young, an extremely gifted writer, passionate about nature (especially birds), and on the autism spectrum. And we’re on “the other side of the pond” as we read it, so altogether we enter another world in more ways than one.

 

I’m about two-thirds through The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, by Mary Helen Washington, a writer who came to my attention because she wrote the introduction to my edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although the style of The Other Blacklist is academic, with requisite citations and the usual repetitions, it makes for fascinating reading, and I am learning quite a lot about how 1950s black artists were targeted and persecuted as “subversive,” whether or not they were officially affiliated with the Communist Party. The official government line was to counsel patience, gradualism, and urge “universal” rather than “racial” themes on black writers. In other words, writing about the black experience at all was suspect. Like Native American children sent to boarding schools to learn how to be white, black artists also were urged to leave color behind – as if white America would ever let them! – if they wanted to succeed nationally. Talk about Catch-22!

 

 

Peasy and the Larger World

He loves his yard.

I’ll confess that Peasy met our most recent visitors (last Sunday and Monday) only while on-leash. And he barked. When we dined outdoors, he watched from the porch window (not barking, please note), and the next evening we occupied the porch for several hours while he lay patiently outside the front door. He is getting used to people coming and going – I hope! Part of managing a reactive dog, however, is not putting the dog unnecessarily into stressful situations. And since Peasy is so bonded to me, he’s more relaxed when I’m more relaxed, so that there is that aspect, too. 

He's good about waiting.

But he is learning. He is very patient when we don’t want to be bothered, and then, when we are ready to pay attention to him and play with him again, he is all wiggles and kisses and overflowing happiness! He is just wicked cute, that little guy! He waits like an angel for permission to approach his food dish or go through a door or jump out of the car. And he is much, much better about not lunging like a cobra when we drop things on the floor. In those respects, his sweet, nonchalant behavior now approaches – normal!

 

So there you are – the world chez nous, as we slide into the beginning of August, with a hint of September in the air. I hope the summer has been treating you well and that you are enjoying books and the outdoors in equal measure.

Behind Us at Last!

The End!
 

That fateful, “unprecedented” year, 2020, the year in which you heard the word “unprecedented” more frequently than ever before in your life – heard it with unprecedented frequency! -- is finally in our rearview mirrors!

 

What a relief! 

 

As communities, we struggled not only social, racial, and political strife -- the stuff of nightmares, so much of it -- but also COVID-19 and the many hardships and losses brought on by the virus. Anxiety, stress, exhaustion. Today, on January first, 2021, not out of the woods yet, by any means, we have at least the sense of hope that comes with every new year, a feeling that, somehow, we can “start over” with renewed strength.

 

We’re going to need renewed strength, aren’t we? We all know that, right? 

 

As for this quiet blog, the discursive and eclectic meanderings of a “tiny bookseller,” I have to admit that what with everything going on, my reading suffered in the year just past: I read 28 fewer books in 2020 than in 2019 (most of the slow-down occurring in late November and early December along with the loss of our beloved dog, Sarah). Reading fewer books in a given year is hardly a tragedy, even on the subjective, personal scale of things. I only mention it, first, because this blog, after all, is called “Books in Northport” and, second, because it is a measure of my own mental and emotional state during those non-reading weeks. In a word, turmoil. I’m sure many others experienced turmoil in the course of the past year, although perhaps with different effects. Maybe you gained a lot of extra and unwanted weight. Or maybe, as did a good friend of mine, your anxiety resulted in weight loss. And/or maybe you had whole days when you couldn’t find the energy to get dressed – since you weren’t going anywhere, were you? 

 

It was a challenging, difficult, heartbreaking year. 

 

The divide between December 31^st and January 1^st is a strange one. The winter solstice would be a more natural cutoff from the old year. Inauguration Day, for Americans, would better capture a new political beginning. And yet, on a night between those two important dates, we “ring out the old year” and welcome the new. Celebrations were quiet this year, the ball falling in Times Square in what could hardly be called a "crowd" a striking symbol.

 

Are you a New Year’s Day traditionalist? Ever since the two winters I spent in Cincinnati, Ohio, hoppin’ john has been my tradition on the first day of the new year. Sometimes we have had New Year's Day with friends, in a party atmosphere marked by champagne toasts. This year we’ll have it quietly, perhaps with small glasses of sherry like those that preceded our New Year’s Eve dinner. (New Year's Eve dinner post is here.)

 

Our new dog, Peasy, already a creature of domestic routine, let me sleep in until 6:30 a.m. today! Here is our morning schedule, times variable but order always the same: Peasy goes outside on a leash for his morning pee; we come back inside, where he has his breakfast, and I have my first coffee; next he gets his first peanut butter kong of the day and after enjoying that must amuse himself quietly (as quietly as possible, that is) with chew toys while I read and write. Eventually there will be coffee for the Artist, radio news from NPR, and another on-leash sortie for Peasy to take care of important dog business, followed perhaps by “pack time” up on the bed, all three of us together – before I get dressed and take the little dog out for his first joyous run of the day. 

Peasy indoors

Peasy outdoors

Non-Peasy aspects of our ghost town winter morning routine include, for me, a daily phone conversation with my son and, except on Sundays and holidays, a stroll down to the mailbox on the highway, in hopes of cards or letters from friends.

Dog encroaches on private library

I indulged in a lot of comfort reading this past year but made the decision on New Year’s Eve that I would begin the new year with a serious and yet positive book of nonfiction. I have been wanting to read President Carter: The White House Years, by Stuart E. Eizenstat, since the first reviews came out, and this morning the moment to begin arrived. My love and respect for Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter is no secret, and I have been a contributor to the Carter Center for many years. Author Eizenstat wraps up his introduction with these words from President Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale:

 

“We told the truth, we obeyed the law, 

we kept the peace.”

 

There was, of course, much more to the Carter presidency than can be captured in any single sentence, but I find deep significance and honor in those words of Walter Mondale and hope the incoming president and vice president of the United States will be able to say something similar  -- and say it honestly – when they leave office, whenever that may be.

 

So now, if you fell asleep before midnight or stayed up until dawn, find a moment today to “take a cup o’ kindness,” and may you be strong and healthy in the months ahead and blessed with love of family and friends!

 

Happy new year, everyone!

Hardly Modern But Grateful To Be in Touch

Good morning! 

Confession: The Artist thinks I’m “modern” because I have a Facebook account for the bookstore and maintain this blog. You know better! I tell him that blogs are old-fashioned now and that if I were truly up-to-date I would be appealing to busy, nonstop scrollers and their short attention spans by tweeting, but what would I have to say to the twittering flock? As it is, I spend a certain amount of time online but basically continue to live life in the slow lane and have no desire to be pushed onto uncongenial platforms. As Popeye always said, I yam what I yam.

 

One might wonder why a book-reading, letter-writing dinosaur would bother publishing an online blog at all. Part of the answer is efficiency. It simply makes more sense to put my impressions of books read and trips taken and life observed on the web than to compose multiple individual e-mails and still leave out too many friends and regular customers. Because "Books in Northport" has been going since fall of 2007, I have some customers I’ve never met at all, people who order from me (instead of the behemoth) books I’ve written about on this very site.

 

Then there is that whole business of espressin’ myself. I have been a writer since that first story, in first grade, about a robin family in their nest and am myself largely via the written word.

 

Finally, habit. After almost 13 years, it would feel strange not to keep up my blog. It has become a natural part of my life.

 

Here, though, is something I realized only the other day. As far as how “natural” it can be called to throw these virtual messages-in-bottles out into the public ether, with no knowing where they may wash up, the truth for me right now that in the summer of 2020, with friendships constrained by 6-foot distance, bookstore encounters masked, hugs exchanged only within households, much of “normal” life is no longer [normal], but while personal visits and bookstore interactions are very different, exchanges not done face-to-face are unchanged, and I don't know about you, but I find some comfort in that. 

 

When my son and I converse by phone, our conversations are not constrained by concerns about distance. There are miles between us, but our voices are in the same space. Coronavirus hasn't changed that the way we talk to each other.

 

When I find a handwritten letter waiting in my post office box, reading it now is as pleasurable as it was one year or 10 years ago. I still have letters and postcards from 10 years ago, too! Like books, they can be revisited and enjoyed again and again, even after the writers have passed on. 

 

My daily texts with my sisters, sporadic e-mails with family and friends are as unconstrained as ever, too. I don't eschew all aspects of the technological world, by any means.

 

So while my blogging subject matter in 2020 has reflected and will continue to reflect this year’s unprecedented concerns (and the virus is far from the only one), the forum itself remains the same, and my relationship with those of you who comment continues to be what it has always been, and I'm grateful for that. For me, it's a little island of normality in the constantly changing, often stormy sea of our life today.

 

Like most of you – and I don’t exclude possible saints, since we know that they too had their dark nights of the soul – I have my down times and occasionally share them here. On the other, brighter hand, when life feels like something to celebrate, I share that, too. "Books in Northport" has no destination: we’re all "traveling between the eternities,” and I find comfort not only in sharing the journey but also, in the year of coronavirus, in having an unconstrained avenue we can travel together. Hope you do, too. 

As always, thanks for reading.

“Dad? Mom? Are We Grounded Yet?”

Always ready for adventure --

Being grounded can hurt. Not going out. Not seeing friends. No fun at all! (My fiendishly brilliant parents added to the exquisite punishment: they took away our library cards for the duration!) Anyway, with shelter-in-place beginning back in March, sometimes it feels as if we’ve all been grounded for a very long time. How long since you’ve eaten inside a restaurant? Hugged a friend not part of your household bubble? Planned an exciting vacation with confidence? Robert Gray of “Shelf Awareness” posted the other day about “staycations” and how they demand bigger bookcases for all of us readers staying home this summer. 

 

It seems that plenty of people from elsewhere are vacationing Up North this year, though, rather than staying home -- but they want books, too, as it turns out. Monday would have been a day off for me, but having caught up on yard work over the weekend and retrieved the new laptop to replace the old (after its logic board failed), I came to Northport to open my bookstore and was greeted by a steady stream of happy shoppers.  

Because while being grounded as punishment is generally felt as a bad thing, there is another sense in which humans seek to be grounded, and while some might not think of reading as “being fully present” in body or connected to earth/nature, for those of us who are readers, holding a book in our hands … looking up from the page to the room in which we sit or to sheltering branches of a tree above us … definitely calms us and gives us a feeling of being “at home in the world.”  

Three of my happy customers on Monday were renting a cabin down near Glen Arbor and, having spent the weekend on the beach, were ready for a rainy day (as Monday was) and the opportunity to lie around with open books, asking nothing more of life than maybe a glass of wine to sip. Many locals and visitors alike, deprived of the usual plethora of summer festivals, seem to be finding quieter pursuits these days. A stop at someone’s roadside stand can feel like a pleasant “encounter,” even if the stand is operated on the honor system and offers no conversation, because cherries, cookies, eggs, maple syrup, and (now) fresh sweet corn all come saturated with a lifetime of happy summer vacation memories.

Similarly, our books are friends, old and new, waiting patiently for our attention whenever we have it to give and evoking old memories at the same time they are creating new ones. For me, after a day filled with morning errands, hours in the bookstore, shopping and meal preparation and laundry and outdoor tasks, that evening moment of sinking into a book on my front porch is accompanied by a happy sigh of contentment, taking me back to all those summers as a kid, reading on the front porch across from a cornfield (or soybeans, in alternate years). Yes, I am home, this is who I am, and this is where I belong. 

I Am in Mourning For Our Country

In Minneapolis, many bookstores were already closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now more have been damaged in rioting following demonstrations over the brutal murder of George Floyd, but you will not find self-pity in the words of these booksellers. As one of them acknowledged, property damage is the "least tragic" aspect of the story. So while I feel sympathy for bookstore owners and employees, most of my sympathy has to go to the murdered man's family -- and to our country at large.

Since March, we have been reeling under a global pandemic that reached our shores. One hundred thousand Americans died of coronavirus. Businesses across the country closed, and people lost their jobs. High school and college graduates had no graduation ceremonies, and children's birthdays had to be celebrated with drive-by parades of friends waving from their cars. That alone has been difficult. A long haul. Unprecedented, to use a word that has never been used so many times in so short a period in my lifetime.

The absence of meaningful national leadership has been appalling and tragic, but unsurprising. Who could have expected anything different or better, given the last three and a half years? Queen Elizabeth, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and past presidents George Bush and Barack Obama stepped forward with calm words of comfort and encouragement. We could have used comfort and encouragement on a daily basis, but we did not get it.

Then came the murder of yet another black man by a police officer, murder committed by someone pledged to protect citizens, murder captured on video for all the world to see. Rage is understandable. Don't you feel it, too? "Violence doesn't solve anything," many people say -- but tell me, what has? Peaceful demonstrations? Cases of brutality and murder brought to the courts? More extensive police training? Body cameras? 

[Update: Here is what we got from the White House today, since this post first went up.] 
[Update 6/2: Houston police chief weighs in.]

I am in mourning for this country. 

I understand the rage. I understand the impulse to destruction, even knowing it "won't solve anything." When nothing reasonable has worked, what is left?

And yet -- from so many credible reports, much of the destruction was not caused by demonstrators from the Twin Cities but by outsiders who came in for the sole purpose of, it would seem, discrediting legitimate protest. What could be more reprehensible? I do not understand that.

And I do not understand disrespect taken to the extreme of causing death. I don't understand how it is allowed to go on and on. I don't understand why so many white Americans fail to get the message of "Black Lives Matter," misinterpreting it by inserting an "only" that was never there. Black lives matter, too. How can anyone not see? I don't understand the lack of understanding.

Another thing I don't understand -- and some of you may disagree with me on this -- is why the launch of a rocket into space is supposed to fill us with hope for the future of our country. "The heavens are opening"? Great! So now we can go mess the heavens up, too? While the mess here on earth worsens? How is that supposed to make anyone feel good?

I am in mourning for this country. My country. Your country. Our country.

But mourning by itself solves nothing. It is a luxury we cannot afford.

How Green Is My Desert

Flowering shrub is bird-of-paradise

The Artist and I have never stayed in southern Arizona this late into the spring before, never seen the desert so green, and every day the change from bare, dead-looking winter trees and shrubs becoming vibrant with leaves and blossoms astonishes us anew. “Are there many deciduous trees where you are?” my son asked me on the phone this morning. Oh, goodness, yes! The mesquite is often more of a large shrub than a tree, but it is ubiquitous, and it is deciduous, and some individuals reach tree size and can have beautiful shapes, and right now all are leafed out, providing shade for cattle and hiding places for birds to build nests. But mesquite is only the beginning. In the photograph just below, looking past the bird-of-paradise and down into the wash, there are at least four more large, green, deciduous plants, three of them trees. At the far right top (back corner) is a walnut tree. 

Nogal in leaf and bloom

The walnut tree’s leafy crown dances in the afternoon wind, and suckers sprout at the base. For five years I’ve been wondering what kind of tree this was, and how I see another farther back behind the neighbor’s fence, and down the road just past another neighbor’s house I’ve spotted a whole row. I don’t know if this is the Arizona or the Texas walnut, but either one goes by the Spanish name nogal, the plural of which is nogales. It’s walnuts that give the name to that Mexican border town, and I am happy to know this beautiful neighbor tree by name at last.

In the center background (and not sharply in focus) of green things growing along the wash is a netleaf hackberry tree, a tree I've written about before. In winter there have always been enough dried berries and dead leaves on the hackberry that I have been able to identify it almost from the beginning of my desert stays, but it looks very different now, clothed in green. 

Center left of that composite shot but not all the way to the left, the light green tree you see is desert willow, another newly learned-by-name tree to me and one that charms me in every way. Since learning it, I’ve found myself photographing the desert willow at different times of day. It is not, you should understand, a true willow. It is a different genus and member of a completely different botanical family from the willows along the no-name creek just north of my Michigan farmhouse. 

Flowers on the desert willow below the cabin have not yet opened, but when we went for a little ride down Chiricahua way, I was happy to spot a desert willow in bloom. 

Does that flower remind you of a catalpa blossom? Both trees belong to the Bignonia family, the desert willow’s flowers smaller and more colorful but very like those of catalpa trees back in Leelanau County, Michigan.

We have never seen the wash flowing with water, a phenomenon that arrives only with the summer monsoons, each flood lasting only a few hours. Over closer to the Chiricahua Mountains, though, where streams flow for much of the year, water-loving sycamores are found. Some are of magnificent size, although during the winter, when they look like ghost trees, it’s hard to believe they are alive. 

Arizona sycamore in winter 

Now look at the difference! It seems nothing short of miraculous. 

Arizona sycamore mid-May

Oaks are deciduous, also, but in this climate they hold onto their leaves through the winter and bring forth new leaves in the spring, at the same time that they begin to drop the old, gradually, with never a bare season to them. Oak trees near streams and in mountain canyons are peaceful places to rest the eyes all year-round.

Cochise County and I have been getting acquainted since January of 2015, but my desert is still full of surprises. Of course, what surprises me is familiar to those who have lived here all their lives. How can I call the desert “mine” at all? 

It’s true I’m a newcomer, but I do love it, more deeply each year, and this year – this strange spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, with stay-at-home orders in Arizona from mid-March until the end of April, being here in a whole new and unexpected way, I feel I have paid a few odd dues and earned at least a beginner’s merit badge in Arizona living. 

Our resident roadrunner has accepted us unconditionally. Bless his little heart!

We Are All on a Rollercoaster

This  has nothing to do with my subject, but she always calms me down.

How are you feeling? Where are you, emotionally? Contented? Restless? Anxious? Got cabin fever, or are you grateful for unstructured time -- or both in turns? Angry at fate and fearful of what’s coming? Counting your blessings? Downright depressed? Maybe confused about what you’re feeling?

A friend said she woke up a couple days ago and felt calm, and that worried her: Had she lost her mind? Had her brain ceased to function? Where was her usual, reasonable, familiar pandemic anxiety?

And it came to me, reading her messages, that we are all on a rollercoaster, every single one of us, but we are all at different points in the looping path on any given day or even at any given moment, so while no emotion any of us feels is inappropriate, we can sometimes be impatient with each other’s expressions. But the feelings themselves are perfectly (can I use this word?) normal. Given the times. All of them.

Gratitude feels good. Anger doesn’t. Sometimes we can shift gears to get from a bad feeling to a good one, and other times we just have to ride out a sickening stretch until we get to a smoother, easier section. Despair at night, joy in the morning – or the other way around, depending on your temperament. Fear, even terror. A blue funk. The sunshiny flash of unexpected happiness, the glow of contentment, or the sweet respite of calm – unless the calm brings worries of its own, as it did for my friend. 

“I’m just tired of it.”

“I want it to be over.” 

Me, too. I’d love to return to that old expectant (false but happy) sense of security I had in early winter 2019 when looking ahead to summer 2020, lining up Thursday Evening Author guests for bookstore soirées in the Artist’s gallery! Those days of planning now seem like some kind of long-ago lost innocence.

My philosophy of life in a nutshell, which is about all of anyone’s philosophy that most people want to hear, is simple: Everything is a double-edged sword. Or, as Joni Mitchell so memorably expressed in her song “Both Sides Now,” there is an upside and downside to everything. In her lyrics, the singer looks back to her past positive impressions, compares them with present cynicism, and concludes that she doesn’t “really know” clouds, love, or life “at all.” But listen to the song. What she can’t help believing in are her “illusions,” that is, the joy and magic that she isn’t feeling in the present moment. 

Can we believe in something when we’re not feeling it, or do our feelings overpower us and create our beliefs? More specifically, can we continue to believe in hope when we're feeling hopeless?

-----

I started writing these thoughts and had to set them aside for a couple of days. Was I depressed or just irritable and blue? 

Depression is a family curse, so I am familiar with it, but in my experience true depression is like interior weather (not situational or caused by something in the outside world), and there’s a horrible physical component to it. I describe it as being encased in a suit of dread. Imagine it as a rigid suit of armor that you’re locked inside. So, no, I wasn’t there, thank heaven! But neither was I enveloped by contentment or anything positive. I went for a walk and dragged myself along, hardly enjoying my surroundings or a pleasantly cool desert morning.

Quite frankly, while I have a lot of happy moments or even hours, positive moods can seem pretty fragile these days. Easily dispelled. Personal contentment can evaporate in an instant with a single blast of bad news, of which there is no shortage. Which brings me back to my rollercoaster theme and its limitations. 

When you go to an amusement park and ride a rollercoaster – when one rides, I should say, because I have never been on a rollercoaster in my life – my understanding is that (1) you know approximately how long the ride will be, (2) that you'll be safe, and (3) that the car will eventually stop and you’ll be able to get out right where you started. Well, right now, these days, on the coronavirus rollercoaster, we have none of these assurances. All we have is uncertainty.

Is it any wonder our emotions are all over the map? It's easy to say we should "live in the moment" and admit our powerlessness, not so easy to maintain that attitude throughout each passing day. 

I try to make most of my posts here upbeat, to brighten readers' days, and I'm certainly not trying to bring anyone down today with reminders of what you already know, that these are damn difficult times. I just thought it might help, if you're feeling blue, to know that you're not alone in that, either. It's okay to feel bad. We all have our private storm clouds.

But if you're not feeling great this morning, I hope you will feel better this afternoon or tomorrow. As for me, I think I've got my "second wind" and can pick up my feet and go on until the next storm hits -- wherever the hell it is we're going!

Into the unknown!

Sheltering Far From Home

No, we are not open!

The only home we own is an old farmhouse in Leelanau County, Michigan. The Artist and I are 83 and 72 and still self-employed in side-by-side seasonal businesses in Northport, my bookstore and his studio/gallery. We came out to the Southwest in December, for a few months of “seasonal retirement” in a rented ghost town cabin, expecting to return home in the spring. Now spring is here, but for the present we are sheltering in place in Cochise County, Arizona, far from our Up North home. 

Family members and some friends urge us to stay where we are, understanding that we feel safe here and dread travel and that there is no real urgency calling for our immediate return. Other friends (a mix of the encouraging and the impatient) tell us that travel is no big deal and we should get right on the road and come home now. They say that -- although still others back home write letters to the editor of the county newspaper saying that “summer people” should not come north! 

Are “snowbirds” and “summer people” one and the same? I don’t think so. We are not “summer people”! But does the virus care? I doubt it. The way I’m pretty sure the virus sees it, travel is travel.

When we peruse the road atlas and read advice about where to find food and restrooms and overnight accommodations, we look up at each other nervously and ask, “What do you think?” Our car is old, our dog is old, and we are old. The decision to stay or go – that is, when to go – seems overwhelming.

Cochise County morning

Setting that troublesome question aside, our life here is peaceful. Yes, the days have heated up, but it is the famous “dry heat” we’ve heard about forever, and in the shade, with a gentle mountain breeze stirring the air, the hottest days are quite tolerable. At night, the high desert cools down quickly, and we welcome the onset of cool darkness. 

Never birders before, we have taken to putting out water and feeders and watching the passing parade at all hours of the day. On a regular basis we see finches and sparrows, cardinal and pyrrhuloxia, hummingbirds and ladderback woodpecker, the curved-bill thrasher, canyon towhee, and cactus wren. It’s big excitement when Mr. and Mrs. Quail come to visit or when Pete the Roadrunner hurries through the yard, as if late for some important engagement.

Gambel's quail

roadrunner

The Artist paints. I write. We both read. Now and then we must screw up our courage, don our masks, and make a run to the grocery store, hardware store, or (yikes!) laundromat. Otherwise, every day is pretty much the same, one “month of Sundays” now having segued into another. 

Back home in Michigan, it is the time of wildflowers in the woods, the lovely spring ephemerals. We are missing the gone-wild daffodils planted long ago by someone who lived in our old house way back when. Soon the grass will be ready to mow, and front porch season will be underway. I think of that porch with longing.

Porch shadows, Michigan

At the same time, we are enjoying more desert greenery than we have ever been here to see before, and a short evening drive only a few miles down the road gives us the opportunity to watch colors in the sky – the sky stretching above the grasslands, pressing against the mountains -- change gradually, imperceptibly, seamlessly from blue through all the warm colors of sunset and beyond, to star-pierced black of night. Next morning, we are wakened by a neighbor’s rooster and the lowing of cattle as close as our windows. Yes, there is a cow with a couple of little calves, right by our gate! I cannot express what joy and contentment the cattle bring, especially now, against the current social background of anxiety and existential dread.

We have been here another moon already

If we left the ghost town today and were home by the end of the week, we would face a 14-day quarantine, but I doubt I would feel comfortable opening my bookstore to the public after those 14 days – or that many of the public will be strolling up and down the streets of our little northern village and in and out of shops. I miss my bookstore and am anxious for its future. I don’t see myself going in the direction of online sales. It isn’t me. Then what? Right now, I have no clue. 

Here and now, anyway, far from home and bookshop, I can still read and write and share books with readers of my blog.  Because connecting readers to books and authors has always been the core of my mission as a bookseller, posting book reviews is my #1 mission at present. It’s something I can do that feels worth doing.

And so, day after day, we postpone our travel decision. The default is doing nothing, staying put. Deciding not to decide brings us relief from anxiety, temporary though that relief must be.

5/7/2020

Dos Cabezas, AZ