As May Approaches

Do you see her?

Seasonal sights

A recurring obsession in my life, spring ephemeral wildflowers, comes into focus now for its all-too-brief season, briefer than spring itself, which began earlier with winter aconites and Siberian squills (blue flower above) in the yard and will extend beyond the days of shy woodland beauties as the first impressionist flush of returning life in the branches of trees all too quickly swells unfurling into shade-providing leaves. Right now, however, the time of ephemeral blooms is just getting underway, although my photographs here, from two and three days ago, are not an accurate report of today in the woods. 

My old news here is of Dutchman's breeches, blooming above, and of trillium and toothwort preparing to bloom. Will trillium and toothwort flowers open today before I get these words thrown out into the world?

Daily I watch buds in the orchard, as well as on my own little apple trees and solitary plum. When will the cherry trees blossom? people ask. We are all hungry for spring’s abundant, harmless beauty.

Spring rain was abundant this year, far too abundant in many places (lots of flood damage), and even in Leelanau swelling creeks and ponds and creating temporary bodies of water in low places. Some, like the ponds in my yard, lasted only 24 hours, while others deserve their lovely name, vernal pools, and these days, morning and afternoon, I visit both the ephemeral and the year-round ponds to watch ducks and geese and cranes and gulls. 

One morning I was rewarded by seeing three lesser yellowlegs, a single bird at a vernal pool and a pair on a larger, more populous body of water. The pair was gone the next day, the bachelor a day later, all of them on their way north to Canada’s boreal forest land. Hawks, too, are migrating north, but wild turkeys remain, turkeys and mallards courting and breeding here among us.

Just passing through....

A busy bookshop day

We had a lovely gathering of people for poet Fleda Brown’s reading last Saturday as we celebrated National Poetry Month and Indie Bookstore Day. I forebore photographing my guest, as it was her first public event since back surgery, and she was still strapped into a white plastic, torso-hugging brace. “A bionic poet!” I exclaimed. She may not have appreciated that name but was pleased, as was I, by her audience, and we were all very pleased with her. On the most serious of subjects, this poet manages to cast a sideways glance, providing a wry look at our human absurdity, while never losing sight of life’s priceless details. Her poems and essays are gifts to the world.

For all Saturday’s unwelcome cold (spring is a season of many short, teasing setbacks), even after the poetry crowd dispersed my day in the shop continued busy right up until 4:30. Where did all these book-lovers come from? Serious browsers, good sales, great conversations—it was like a day in July, all the more heartwarming coming as a surprise in chilly April.

Fleda Brown's 2025 visit to Dog Ears Books

Trend or anomaly?

My phone often makes a sound as for an incoming text when no text is coming in, as if the phone is tugging at my sleeve or nudging my arm to say, Pay attention to me! You’re not paying attention to me! Apparently a new "thing" for young people on college campuses these days is the phone-free gathering, where attendees sit with hands free and look into each other’s faces and talk directly to one another, making the conscious decision not to let their phones dictate their every waking minute. Isn’t that a hopeful sign?

(When an old friend and I were going to get together for the first time in many years, I suggested that we leave our phones in another room. We didn't miss them at all.)

Another development in the growing rebellion against digital technology (more astonishing to me than a return to vinyl records) is the rediscovery of VHS. Movies in boxes! Don’t have a VCR? You can rent that, too! I am told that even CD and DVD technology amazes more and more young people, accustomed as they are to streaming music and movies. What do they make of VHS tapes?

(In novels written a hundred or more years ago, we read of parties where young people gathered around a piano, singing songs, thrilled with the arrival of new, up-to-date sheet music. Country life without a piano might still feature a fiddle, guitar, harmonica, or other instruments. Stamping feet. Clapping hands.) 

I wonder (the eternal springing of hope!) if perhaps my busy spring Saturday of bookselling is related to these other stories, another turning away from tiny screens. Maybe we will have an Indie Bookstore Year!

What is on your mind these days?

This morning I watched grey clouds outside my window as they moved slowly from south to north. A south wind. Occasional glimpses of blue sky. Then a more uniform grey, devoid of contrast, reminding me of ground recently monochromatic white. My first coffee of the day, whether at 5 a.m. or 6:30, is my time to come awake to the world gradually, to look back on days past and plan the days ahead, to read or write, to—I admit it!—look at my phone to scan headlines as well as to see the weather forecast. “Violence is never the answer,” people around the world say solemnly today, a predictable chorus, as they condemn the latest lone shooter. Who would disagree? Yet if war is not violence, then nothing is. That is one of my morning thoughts.

First faint flush of green!

Trees. I think about trees daily and look forward every morning to being outdoors again among them, although I confess to taking up arms against autumn olive and popples advancing into land I want to preserve as meadow, just as I contemplate possible ways to discourage spotted knapweed in my meadow without the use of poison. Controlling nature is not possible, nor is it my wish. I am grateful for the proliferation of squills and forget-me-not in my yard and yellow-headed coneflowers in the meadow. Finding another hawthorn in the meadow delights me. I don’t want to be engulfed by autumn olive and knapweed, however, and they would take over the world if they could. Such greedy bullies! 

My constant companion

Sunny Juliet has no such concerns. Whatever grows or doesn’t around us, the outdoor world delights her, and she has a genius for turning up deer bones. It is as if she and the coyotes have made an agreement—they will make the kills, and she will scavenge the bones—while in the yard at home, life this spring involves an astounding number of tennis balls, more and more of them turning up where they had been lost in winter’s snow. 

Sunny taking a bone break from tennis ball play

It is good to have a dog in one’s life. A constraint on freedom, to be sure, but then, there are many constraints on freedom, which can never be absolute. In our family and civic lives, we are frequently held back by consideration for others; in our outdoor lives—every move we make!—nature sets boundaries on what we can do. I step carefully in the woods, watching where I put my feet and testing a slender tree before trusting it fully as a handhold. Sunny bounds ahead confidently, much more stable on four legs than I am on only two, but we are together in our enjoyment. We are here now. We are blessed to be here now.

Changing Moods of Northern Michigan

One rainy morning on Waukazoo Street

 

The season is dragging its feet, but the rocket took off.

Spring break? I didn’t take one. A lingering cough and less-than-optimal driving weather put the kibosh on travel plans. There were a few highlights in the week, however, including birthday dinner at a friend’s house, where we watched the launch of Artemis II together. 

Moon launch! Following the crew of Artemis II these past few days has been good medicine for me, a cheery antidote to the insanity of you-know-who and you-know-what.

As a devoted earthling who has never had the slightest desire to travel in outer space, I’ve never been a big fan of the space program, but Wednesday evening’s launch warmed my heart. Here’s what I loved most about it: Everyone involved was calm, competent, skilled, intelligent, knowledgeable, dedicated, modest, and grateful to be part of a team effort years in the making. What a breath of fresh air in today’s world! And one of the four astronauts, 47-year-old Christina Koch, is from Michigan! 

Thanks to the Artemis II mission, we have already learned to call the side of the moon facing away from earth the “far" side, rather than the “dark” side. Makes me think of Gary Larson’s cartoons. Here are some Larson takes on space travel.

Much, much closer to home than 250,000 miles, spring plants whose flowering was set back by two feet of March snow are preparing once again for their postponed season opening. Winter aconites, snowdrops, and hellebore seem as eager to blossom as I am to see the blossoms. Even buds of small branches torn from big trees—little detached limbs!—want to participate.

Reminders of my friend Chris, who gave me the first ones

Need to plant more of these in the fall

Still crumpled from their sleep under the snow

Life force!

Participating in democracy is heartwarming.

The March 28 “No Kings” gatherings across the country were once again peaceful and full of joy. Recovering from one of my life’s worst colds, I didn’t think I could handle a big Traverse City crowd but made a sign and went to join demonstrators in Suttons Bay. The thought I had that morning was that I was not only demonstrating for those whose views I share but for all Americans, not only for my own future and that of my children and grandchildren but for the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of all Americans to the seventh generation—at least! 

It was good to see demonstrators carrying American flags. We were out there on a chilly morning because we love our country!

I wanted a larger, clearer sign on March 28 than the one I’d held earlier in Northport when I joined “the stalwarts” (as I call them) for a couple Thursdays on the corner south of my bookstore. My solution was to take a large trifold pasteboard I’d put together for the Artist’s memorial gathering in Leland and tape it closed, using what had been the back of the trifold for the front of my sign. No one else knew, but I liked knowing that the Artist and my family and friends were with me inside that sign.

My reading is random, as usual.

“On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also, I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

- Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)

Barker’s historical novel, Regeneration, takes place during World War I and opens with poet Siegfried Sassoon's letter protesting the war’s continuance. Taken to be suffering from shell shock, he is sent to a hospital for treatment rather than being court-martialed, and in the hospital he, the historical character, and we, the readers, meet other soldiers sent home from the front and gradually learn their stories. One of the others is young Wilfred Owen, another English poet, killed when he returned to action, age 25, a week before the war's end. (Sassoon lived through the war and died at the age of 80.) The character whose thoughts we follow most intimately is the doctor in charge of Sassoon’s case. 

But it was that letter on the first page of the novel that grabbed my attention like a fire engine siren, with the phrases “callous complacence,” “agonies which they do not share,” and “have not sufficient imagination to realize.” Isn’t that the case with the present war begun by our own country? Except that the sufferers today are, for the most part, not our country's military but civilians (including children) of the country our president wants to bomb “back to the Stone Age.”

***

Shifting gears here--On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes, edited by Michael Welch, is a  collection of nonfiction and poetry by 33 different writers living in the U.S. and Canada on one or another of the Great Lakes. The publishing house, Belt Publishing, is new to me, and none of the writers in the book had names I recognized. An interview on Interlochen Public Radio with one of the writers (Sara Maurer, “What Are Yoopers Without Winter?”) brought the volume to my attention and led me to order it, and I am so grateful to IPR for the connection! I’ve been skipping around in the volume, opening at random and reading wherever the book opens, and everything I’ve read has been excellent. Not just good but excellent, and I am eager to get this book into my bookstore customers’ hands.

Slowly, the season to come is taking shape.

Dog Ears Books will celebrate Indie Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 25, with a poetry reading by Fleda Brown at noon. This will be Fleda's fourth appearance in Northport, so it's safe to say there is mutual affection. Mark your calendar now!

May will be a quiet month, without any special events, as I have several special events in my personal life that month. 

On Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m., our bookstore guest will be Robert Downes, doing a slide show presentation on the arrival of Europeans in North America and what that meant for indigenous cultures, along with a signing of his new book, Sun Dog: A Novel of Native America. 

***

Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

Second Thoughts

Leelanau Twp., 4/15/25

Is spring having second thoughts about getting underway?

 

You would have thought so if you were in Leelanau on tax day, Tuesday, April 15. We got out of bed in the morning to fresh snow on the ground and a biting wind! But besides being tax day, it was also “Alyssa’s Day of Kindness,” a day to put a smile on the faces of friends and/or strangers by treating them to ice cream or coffee (two of Alyssa’s favorite things) or flowers or anything else—or simply doing a kind deed for another person—in memory of a 21-year-old who died by suicide. Alyssa’s family came up with this wonderful memorial idea, which was kicked off three years ago. Those of us who participate take photos to share, and it is a lovely way to remember this beautiful girl I’m sorry I never met—though I can’t help wishing we didn’t need this memorial and that Alyssa were still here to enjoy another spring in her young life….

 

Beautiful Alyssa!

Note: Please see the number in the flier above. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 for help!

 

Biting My Tongue

 

Some people think we should always blurt out whatever comes into our minds, right there on the spot, and they call anything else “self-censorship,” meaning something bad. I disagree. Why say something I’ll be sorry I said, when there’s usually no reason not to pause and reconsider? By taking time, I may revise my expression, tempering or strengthening it, as the situation seems to require. Sometimes I’ll decide to say nothing. Not speaking right then doesn’t mean I won’t say something later.

 

And yes, once in a while I do blurt out my first reaction! Am I always sorry? Not always! You would love to have an example of that, too, I know, but those unscripted moments are not for a public showcase! Mine is not a blurting blog.

 

Life happens moment by moment, though, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum but always at a specific time, in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and it’s a harsh rule that admits of no exceptions.

 

 

Changing My Mind

 

Related to the idea of exceptional blurting is another notion of second thoughts. One recent day I had stopped by my bookshop to drop off a few books and pick up others to take home on loan. I sat down at my desk for a minute, and a woman walked in the door I hadn’t locked. “I’m not really open,” I told her. She looked disappointed but then admitted she was only looking for a restroom. I suggested the gas station next door, but then, as she was getting back in the passenger seat of a car out front, I had second thoughts and went out to invite her back in. Why not? She was very appreciative and thanked me repeatedly.

 

When I locked up shop a few minutes later and went over to the gas station myself to pick up a few items, I met a woman I’d known in Kalamazoo decades ago. She had gone out to her car and found her sister missing and been alarmed. “She has dementia!” I told her I’d let her sister use the restroom in my place and that she was now safely back in the passenger seat of the car. Everything had worked out fine.

 

Even if I hadn’t met the driving sister, though, I had already felt better about my second thought and decision. The woman’s dementia was not obvious to me, but that she had some sort of illness was, and each and every single one of us knows how much it can mean to find a restroom when we need it! As characters in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, said more than once in that book, it was only a little onion. Such a little onion I gave!

Throwing Out the Script

 

The foregoing is introduction to my telling you that this post on having second thoughts is not the post I planned to publish on my blog today. The discarded post began with the statement “I can’t do it” and went on to detail my heartbreak over the ongoing events in our nation over the past—how many days and weeks has it been?? It isn’t that I would have wanted to “take back” anything from that post, had I put it up. No, but I had two reasons for starting over: first, I have no hope of changing a single mind (you can't make people care if they don't); and besides that, I know that at least a couple of my regular readers come here for something other than politics and current events. News they can get elsewhere. News is hard to avoid! What they want from me is strength and courage and dog and landscape photos, a smile, news from my little corner of the world, and (some of them) gentle meanderings about books. 

 

And why not?

 

 

Back to My Little Corner

 

Well, today was a sunny day in my one and only precious life. Song sparrows sing again in the mornings now, and redwing blackbirds make their creaking calls from the top of the barn, sounding like the old swings of my childhood school playground, swings with heavy wooden seats hung by heavy steel chains. (At least, I presume that metal was steel. Joliet, Illinois, was a steel-making town, after all, our township high school team known as the Steelmen—though also, confusingly, as the Iron Avalanche, unbeaten until they were beaten.) Robins cry out in self-admiration, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" 

Barefoot child with grandfather c.1951

Canada geese fly overhead these days in honking Vs, and every once in a while I hear the clatter of a sandhill crane’s voice and stop whatever I’m doing outdoors to search the sky, hoping for a sight, while mallards and herring gulls find refuge in temporary ponds that have formed in fields of corn stubble. It's good to see them, too.

All of which is to say that life goes on. (Or as I have come to say in recent years, “Life goes on ... until it doesn’t.” None of us is going to live forever.) The earth rotates and orbits the sun, day alternates with night, and the cycle of seasons repeats and repeats. Our blue-and-green planet, brimming with life, has not always been in existence and will probably not exist forever, but here we are, right now, and here it is, and there is comfort in knowing and seeing that we haven’t yet killed our home.

Toe of my boot illustrates how tiny these daffodils are.

Now that the yard is free from snow (again!), Sunny and I have resumed her work on the weave poles, which she finds the most challenging of all the agility equipment. She loves jumping the hurdles so much that it’s hard for her to understanding that weaving does not require that she jump. Do we all need a challenge? “Weave!” will be Sunny Juliet’s challenge this spring and summer.  

Sunny with challenges!

Also, let’s not forget that April is National Poetry Month! Poetry! There’s a reason to celebrate! 

 

My poet of the year 2025 is Fleda Brown, and Fleda will be here on the Friday before Memorial Day, May 23, to read from her new chapbook of prose poems, Doctor to the World. There will be chairs in a circle in the Artist’s gallery next to the bookstore (I’ll have it cleaned up before the event, I promise), and we will convene at noon, so I’m inviting attendees to bring sack lunches for an informal and intimate gathering. 

Poet Fleda Brown on a previous visit to Northport

 

Finally, in closing –

 

Life! It’s what we’ve got, so take it easy, my friends, or take it hard, but take it, and don’t take it lying down! Also, don’t forget, if you can manage it, to brighten the corner where you are.

 

¡Nunca te rindas!

 

Also,

 

HOORAY FOR HARVARD!!!

At Home in Michigan, Nonfiction, and Arizona

Spectacular forsythia this year

On Saturday, we had a soft rain in the Leelanau, mostly just sprinkles. Monday morning, after a dog walk in real rain (my grandmother used to say, “I’m not sugar; I won’t melt”), I planted collard and arugula seeds in the garden, having gotten peas and spinach in two days earlier, and the timing worked out well, because half an hour later a downpour commenced. Meanwhile, in the house, lettuce has come up in Jiffy pots (the pots are in trays), and the first tiny, brave tomato seedlings have appeared. My only “greenhouse” is a window, so we’ll see how those things do.

Nothing to see yet

Small, hopeful signs here

Outdoors, spring is popping, and you can follow this link to see a blossoming black cherry, along with the lovely spring ephemerals blooming in the woods last Sunday morning. I want to add “finally,” but the truth is that we are way ahead of the normal spring season. The little plum tree in my yard will be blossoming any minute now. 

Plum blossoms coming soon

It’s funny, but no matter how impatient I am for spring to get underway, when it all does start to happen I am almost sorry, afraid it will be too soon over! There is a certain moment, the soft, fresh, pointillist impressionism of a few brief days when the first leaves are appearing – a moment when I want to hit a pause button and just sit quietly and gaze for hours, but instead the projectionist speeds up the film and rushes into summer. For a moment, though, the soft green is almost like a haze….

Do you see what I see?

 

Here's another question for you: When you see a section in a bookstore labeled “Essays,” do you move toward it or away? 

I have more people than I can count in recent years who ask me if I have a “Nonfiction” section, and I’m always baffled by the question. I have many nonfiction sections! History, travel, philosophy, religion, economics, biography, memoir, sports, hunting & fishing, health, business, cookbooks, natural science, physical science, building, visual arts, performing arts, etc. None of that is fiction; therefore, it is all nonfiction. So when asked the question, I usually ask a question of my own in return, trying to determine what subject area the person hopes to find. 

 

But now, I think maybe they might be looking for what is nowadays called “creative nonfiction,” books I would generally consider kind of memoir essays. I think of them as memoir because they are usually personal stories from someone’s life, but they can and do overlap into travel and/or nature, sometimes psychology, religion, regional Americana, or the arts. If you hear or see the word essays, though, does it put you off? Answer honestly! Does it remind you of your school days and having to write about “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”? or (worse yet) a compare-and-contrast piece on two writers, neither of whom set your soul on fire?

My obsession: hawthorn!

Me, I love essays. I love the form. Tony Judt, Adam Gopnik, nonfiction by our own Leelanau writers Jim Harrison, Anne-Marie Oomen, and Kathleen Stocking – essays range far and wide. They can be humorous or serious but are generally explorations, the writer trying out thoughts and connections. The French verb ‘essayer’ means just that: to try, to attempt, to examine. I think of them as explorations above all, whether of place or thought.

 

A sermon is a sort of essay, usually built on a bit of scripture, and any essay, like a sermon, usually begins with some small kernel. It can be a quotation, a word, something glimpsed or overheard, a nugget of wonder. Then from that initial seed, the writer grows a world, a forest of trees and ferns and flowers, all spun from that small, simple beginning, and in the most satisfying of essays (as is true only in baseball among team sports), we end by coming home, the writer having taken us far away and then having closed a circle. Poet Fleda Brown is a genius at this: thinking and writing about essays led me to pick up again her collection titled Mortality with Friends. An earlier collection, Driving with Dvorak, is another that wins my highest recommendation. 

 

But the book I want to hold out to you today is Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, by Renata Golden. When an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) was offered to me by Columbus State University Press, and I realized that the author had lived and written from, in part, the Chiricahua Mountains of Cochise County, Arizona, I could hardly wait for the book to arrive in my mail. 

 

I climb to the top of the mounds behind the house in Sulphur Canyon where I once lived, more than a decade ago, on and off for three years. … When I return, I hear the mountains speaking to me in a tone I can’t ignore, a voice humming with suggestion.

 

-      Renata Golden, Mountain Time

 

Full disclosure (for those arriving at this post without having followed the blog for years): My husband (the Artist) and I lived several winters in a rental cabin in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, just down the road from the Chiricahua National Monument. Renata Golden lived on the other side of the Chiricahuas, the New Mexico side. I found Sulphur Canyon on my Arizona atlas. It is in the San Simon Valley, east of the Chiricahua range, while our side of the mountains (west) was the Sulphur Springs Valley, but Sulphur Valley and Sulphur Springs Valley, though separated by mountains, are both Cochise County, and it’s all Apacheria, so there was no way I would be able to resist this book. And look: right on the cover is the word ESSAYS in a red-outlined rectangle.

 

How long must we survive in a place before we can say we belong there? How much time passes after we leave a land before it forgets us?

 

Golden begins her examinations of mountain time by remembering Irish great-grandparents she never knew, a generation that managed to survive the Great Famine but were not allowed to own land in County Kerry, so the next generation, Renata’s grandparents, left Ireland and came to Chicago to make a new life in urban America. The author explores in detail the 19^th-century history of the Chiricahua Apaches, an all-too-typical American tale of broken promises and eviction, the latter called “relocation” when applied to Native Americans. (No land in Cochise County has ever been returned to the Apaches, although a tiny reservation in New Mexico was designated “Apache Homelands” in 2011.) She also gives the history of her parents’ purchase of land in New Mexico that they fondly imagined would be their retirement home, a home that was never built, the land so worthless her parents were unable even to sell it.

 

The book, however, is about more than mountains and the people who live and have lived in them. There is an essay on rodents, one on snakes, one on prairie dogs, and (I’m not listing them all) a personal story of panic in a wild cave, where the writer’s reluctance to ask for help is at odds with her fear.

 

The passage of time like the passage of water reforms what was once undeniably solid. The river that carved this cave exploited the vulnerability of its limestone walls. The empty places are oblivious to the rock’s former resistance; the water leaves behind only the memory of what has been diminished.

 

Certain lines brought tears to my eyes – not for the packrat or the rattlesnakes or even the cute little prairie dogs, but for what Golden writes about aging and loss and home. Here is an entry from her “Chiricahua Glossary” –

 

Home. Where the heart is. Where you hang your hat. Where your family lives. Your natal place. A place you leave. A place I’m still looking for.

 

My heart is here in Leelanau County, Michigan, but it was also in Cochise County, Arizona, and part of it remains there. I have hung my hats and caps in both places. My family lives elsewhere, though no one related to me lives any longer in South Dakota, where I was born. South Dakota, Illinois, Arizona were all places I left. Must home be singular? 

Mi cabeza

I have to admit that I missed the high desert ghost town of Dos Cabezas this past winter and early spring: morning hikes with a younger neighbor and our dogs, get-togethers with other dear neighbors (people look out for each other in Dos Cabezas, as they do in Northport), the mountains and birds out my back door, the vast spaces, and Chiricahua only a short drive down the road. I left the ashes of two beloved dogs buried in the wash behind the cabin, and the cabin – so small and so cozy with all our books and other treasures collected over the years – is the last place the Artist and I were at home together on this earth.

Cabin seen from wash in winter

But when our grandson asked if I could imagine myself ever living fulltime in Arizona, I had to answer in the negative. Give up my Michigan home? How could I? And now that trees are beginning to leaf out and blossom, as I drive the familiar roads of my township I slow down to stop at favorite spots and say aloud but with quiet astonishment, “I love it! I love it!” 

The wild nearby

Indoor refuge

I don’t need to look for home. I’m here. Still, that other place felt like home, too. The land forgetting us? Mountains are indifferent to our presence, as are lakes and rivers: the love for them is in us. 

Do we deserve them? I wonder.