Now, if ever, come perfect days.

Weeds have their place in my landscaping.

As it always does, June is racing by, and our northern Michigan world is a flowering chorus. Can’t you hear these hawkweed and lobelia singing? Lilacs are spent, poppies dropping their petals, but the show goes on and on and on, succeeding blooms arriving on cue to fill the stage with song. Hawkweeds are a special favorite of mine, both the dandelion yellow and the lollipop orange colors.

A volunteer rose made itself at home in my small shade garden, and I let it be for a while, but at last it had to move, as it was blocking from sight the more appropriate shade garden inhabitants. And a rose, anyway, needs sun. So on Tuesday evening I dug it up, replanted it in a border, pruned it back, and tucked a couple of cuttings into what I think of as my “nursery,” where this summer I hope viburnum and lilac cuttings in vermiculite will also take root. 

Before, with volunteer rose hogging the stage --

After, with evening light reaching everyone --

and finally, rose in its own new location. There!

As always, I am digging into books, too, though my reading progress slows when summer arrives. Whereas in winter I can get through three books a week, now in June, with so many customers in my shop (not a complaint!) and so much work to do outdoors at home (I love that, too!), it can take a week for me to read a single novel, so you can imagine how long it may take me to get through a serious book of history, even one as brilliantly written and engrossing as John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Barry tells a compelling story: that of the 17th century’s search for a balance between government and religion. The ascent of King James, son of Mary Queen of Scots, to the English throne in 1603, made a lot of people nervous. Would he lead them away from Calvin and back to Rome? But James was more concerned with his own power than with that of any religious group: The “divine right of kings” was his own pet theory. Kings are gods, claimed King James, in that they can “make and unmake their subjects, …have power of raising and casting down, of life and death, of judges over all their subjects of all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only…,” and so to question or rebel against a king was to rebel against God! The problem for James was English common law, which had long established property rights for Englishmen. Thus, the law and the king were in conflict! Interesting, no? And yet, how many times did Parliament roll over to placate the king? You can see why the 17th century is still relevant for Americans today.

I finished the second of my Jean-Luc Bannalec policiers as recent bedtime reading. Quoi qu’il en soit.... I translate that as “Whatever!” Bannalec’s characters say that or a variation of it all the time. 

Now my bedtime book is a slow meander down the shores and lakes of the Mississippi River with Virginia S. Eifert’s River World: Life of the Mississippi. Her piling on of adjectives in the Introduction made me wary, but I relaxed into the first and second chapters as she described the spring breakup of ice and the first birds and frogs and green plants arriving and appearing for another season of life and growth. The Upper Mississippi, after all, is much like northern Michigan, so I felt right at home, especially in the section on ground pines, which called up for me memories of walks with friends in the dunes near home, the place I remember seeing these little plants and knowing what they were for the first time.

The ground pines or club mosses, those miniature evergreen “trees” which are more closely related to the ferns than to anything else, standing nobly a few inches tall, are plants of ancient design and incredible endurance. Each year they faithfully bear thin, spore-filled, primitive cones on the tips of their stalks. 

They have been doing this since the Carboniferous period some 250 million years ago when the Lepidodendron trees reached their greatest size and variety. They were giants as they grew in the ancient coal swamps and prehistoric forests of the world….

- Virginia S. Eifert, River World: Life of the Mississippi (1959)

The ground pines are part of what Eifert calls the “Canadian carpet,” and here the term Canadian refers to C. Hart Merriam’s life zones, which I first learned about far from the Mississippi, out in southern Arizona, where one can ascend through life zones not by traveling north but simply by climbing a mountain. In the West (where I think Merriam came up with his categories), it is elevation rather than latitude that determines a biome.

Eifert’s book (with illustrations by the author—always a plus in my eyes) was written and published well over half a century ago. How different is that same river world today? Am I reading of a world that was, or one that still is? That I can recognize the Canadian carpet from her description and place it here in my own Leelanau County gives me hope that the river world the author described in 1959 still lives on, if only in certain stretches of the river’s length.

I pause briefly over “250 million years ago” and think of the difference between that and the mere 250 years that our country has been in existence. Our country’s age times a million—that’s the age of club mosses, and yet how many of us give a thought to their existence? Did you even know of them? What will the universe look like 250 millions years from now? Will there be anyone then to give a thought to us?

St. Johnswort

We’ve had a cool stretch of sunny days in Leelanau, perfect for making hay. Today is the Feast of St. John. Last night, on St. John’s Eve, I saw the first bloom of St. Johnswort. Cool weather must have slowed it down, or there would be more in flower by now. Meanwhile, coreopsis, which I associate with the Longest Day, was going gangbusters long before the solstice. 

Coreopsis

One tragic note this June is the extreme heat in Europe, casting a pall (in the form of a heat dome) over summer festivals such as Faites de la Musique, or Fête de la Music, which in Paris took the place of the old St. John’s bonfires back in the late 1980s. (In 1987, St. John’s Eve was in full swing; after that, music took the stage in place of the traditional bonfires. I had mixed feelings about the change, but Quoi qu’il en soit!) Celebrating music or a saint or national history is joyful. Celebration is joyful! People dying of heat is not at all a cause to celebrate, and finding relief from deadly heat in a city like Paris is difficult, to say the least. Fountains will be teeming with microbes, and in an apartment without air conditioning (or anywhere else), there is a limit to how many clothes a person can remove: skin stays on! I was there one summer in the early 1990s, my head wrapped in a dripping, water-soaked towel, and the maddening heat made me want to scream! Although I guess wanting to scream was a good sign I was not on the brink of death, so I pray for those in Europe who have gone beyond screaming.

Beautiful Sunday clouds. Today (Wednesday), rain?

Sunday was a day to make hay.

My Michigan life did not slow down with cool weather. Far from it! Mowing, planting, pruning, weeding, watering—I’m not making hay myself (not literally, anyway), and yet the pace of summer can sometimes be daunting, and I remind myself to stop and take a deep breath and employ my mantra: I’m here now. I’m here now. 

Sunny reminds me that she’s here, too, and ready for action! Enough with the books and gardens! Time to play, Momma!

Momma's girl!

"There's just books in there."

 

Catalpa in full bloom

Thirty-one years ago a couple of summer visitors walked by the original Dog Ears on Waukazoo Street (in that long-gone little shed next to long-gone Woody's Settling Inn down the street from our present location), and one of them stuck her head in the door briefly, then reported to her companion before they continued down the sidewalk, "It's just books in there." She might have said, "It's nothing but old books in there," because Dog Ears started with exclusively used volumes. It was at least six years later before I added a few new titles. 

But the warning is apt for today's blog post, as it is an annotated list of books I read in the month of June. To refer to dates for the LTFOL Summer Author Series, see my previous post. I've kept my political opinions on an entirely different blog. This is "just books." #1 here on the June list is #97 in my year-long list (which ended June at #109), but with other things keeping me busy, my reading has slowed down considerably since the beginning of the year, and the next couple of months' lists will no doubt be shorter.

Books Read June 2024

1. Mulloy, Pamela. Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel (nonfiction). Having been raised in a railroad family – father a civil engineer for a railroad, grandfather a train-driving engineer, great-uncles who were train conductors – I had a most fortunate childhood, with many memorable train journeys. Those not so fortunate, however, may want to experience armchair train travel, which is what the author did during COVID, remembering and recounting her time on trains.

2. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (nonfiction). How to present this book briefly? That is the challenge! In the United States, our national tendency is to conflate democracy and capitalism under one heading, labeled “freedom,” but Klein demonstrates (in one case after another around the world, as well as in our own country, i.e., in New Orleans), that capitalism and democracy are easily uncoupled, given sufficient force, and that “freedom” for unregulated capitalism generally erodes democratic “freedom,” since what people want (good job, decent housing and health care, etc.) is often at odds with what predatory capitalism wants (smallest costs and highest profits). Big business plays the game all too well. They put the fear of Communism into the population while taking advantage themselves of public funds. In one country aftere another corporations (mostly American) have  dismantled public institutions and safety nets in the name of “freedom.” Think NAFTA. If globalization had really been “inevitable,” why did we have to speed up and rush into it? Death is inevitable, but that’s no reason to commit suicide today.

3. Keen, Andrew. The Internet Is Not the Answer (nonfiction). Rather than “democratizing” the world, the Internet in its privatized and heavily commercialized incarnation has increased and compounded inequality, creating a two-tier world. The worst of it is that, unlike shock-and-awe troops that did so in the wake of disasters and wars (see Klein’s The Shock Doctrine above), Internet inequality is something we have done (and continue to do) to ourselves, albeit without that intention. Falling for the hype, however, we have produced a handful of billionaires and a few bestselling authors and artists, with everyone else working without pay in the trenches, “creating content” (like this blog). I admit I skimmed this book pretty quickly, having just finished Klein’s after two of three weeks of intense concentration. Keen thinks he has the answer and quotes Canadian political theorist Michael Ignatieff: “A question haunting democratic politics everywhere is whether elected governments can control the cyclone of technological change sweeping through their societies.” Keen believes that governments, along with “voluntary, market-led solutions” can control the sweeping changes. I have my doubts, especially when we see that so many members of the United States Congress and the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are in bed with the corporate billionaires. And how much of government has already been outsourced to corporations? (See again Klein, above.) P.S. This book would be better with an index.

4. Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (nonfiction). I would not say the author explores “the link” between creativity and alcohol (not all creative people are alcoholics) as much as she explores the role of alcohol in the lives of half a dozen well-known American writers also known well for their alcoholism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Laing says she will never abandon ‘hybrid’ writing for strict genre work, and The Trip to Echo Spring typifies her preference as it combines travel and personal memoir with biography and investigation of a social and medical problem. That worked for me. I might not have wanted to read book-length biographies of all the writers she includes or a memoir of her alcoholic family, and I was amused to read (after finishing the book myself) some reader responses from people who didn’t like one or another aspect and wish she told a narrower story. No, I liked the way she did it. I loved the train travel and the places she visited, found the writers’ lives and relationships fascinating (if often horribly depressing), and I was grateful for notes on recent social research and physiological findings about how people become addicted to alcohol and why the addiction is so hard to escape, with clues here and there that explained what had been mystifying behavior of alcohol-dependent people in my own life.

5. Dennis, Jerry. A Place on the Water: An Angler’s Reflections on Home (nonfiction). I did not put this book aside to read Pamela Mulloy’s and Olivia Laing’s books because Jerry Dennis failed to enchant me but because I was so thoroughly enchanted that I was in no hurry to reach the end of the book. When Hemingway couldn’t sleep, he reviewed actual fishing experiences and imagined others. When I wake in the middle of the night, I reach for a book. A Place on the Water is a book that puts me right there, midstream. Very comforting.

6. Buck, Pearl. All Under Heaven (fiction). In the author’s epilogue, she writes that this novel was put away unfinished for a long time, until she felt ready to complete and publish it. To me, it still feels unfinished -- undoubtedly because events were still in process, but between the Chinese revolution and the novel’s publication in the 1970s came the McCarthy era in the U.S., and while the story of former diplomat Malcolm MacNeil and his Russian-born wife and their family establishing themselves in the eastern United States following Malcolm’s return from 20 years in China (America a first-time experience for his wife and children), what seems like foreshadowing in the story is never developed, and Malcolm seems not to have come to any conclusions by the last page of the book. The backgrounds of the family members and their responses to their new home are interesting, but when the novel comes to an end it feels as if we have left the characters at the story’s midpoint.

7. Hamilton, Steve. The Lock Artist (fiction). I wasn’t sure how I felt about this for the first few pages but kept going and became engrossed. Very likable young protagonist gets himself into a helluva mess! Not set in the U.P. (as are his Woods Cop novels) but definitely an attention-grabber.

8. Samuels, Robert and Toluse Olorunnipa. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (nonfiction). You’ve heard his name. You know how he died. This book tells you how he lived. It’s one thing to read statistics about rates of arrests and incarceration for Black men and/or about how many Black families live in poverty, even to read a history of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws in the South. It’s quite another thing to follow generations of a family from slavery to the present and then to follow one individual from birth to death – and then to follow his family’s experiences after he died. He didn’t want to be another picture of a dead Black man on a t-shirt. He had dreams and struggles and family and friends he loved. A reader feels his presence on the page and wishes to have known him in person. His name: George Floyd. Read this book.

9. Portis, Charles. True Grit (fiction). I read this novel because Bonnie Jo Campbell said it had been one of her inspirations for The Waters. It seems many people who have discovered it take it to heart and read it over and over, but I probably won’t re-read it myself, though it was interesting. Part of the interest was in the fact that it was written and published in the middle of the 20^th century but feels like something much earlier, around the time of the novel’s setting.

10.             Franqui, Leah. Mother Land (fiction). Jake at the library in Leland got this one for me through interlibrary loan. I’d read America for Beginners and wanted to try something else by the same author. In Mother Land, an American woman who has moved to Mumbai with her Indian husband is surprised by a “visit” from her new mother-in-law, who announces that she has left her husband and is moving in with son and wife. Wife is dismayed. Mother-in-law begins to take over running of household. Son departs on a month-long business trip that stretches out beyond the month. The novel goes back and forth between the two main women characters (both in third person), which was interesting to me, but very little actually happens until, near the end, things seem to happen in a big rush. I know friends who would not persevere to that end, bored by earlier lack of action. I probably won’t re-read this book, either, but the inner lives of the two women and their struggles to find themselves kept me reading.

11.             Bythell, Shaun. Confessions of a Bookseller (nonfiction). I had a busy week. On Monday I made a deal to buy 7,000 used and rare books, the entire contents of another bookseller’s shop, inventory his widow needed to liquidate. She made me a good price. But moving 7,000 books is no picnic, and I told her I had too much going on in June and July to clear everything out until the beginning of August. She was very understanding. Still, with the help of her daughter and son-in-law we managed to pack up and transfer three carloads of books from Leland to Northport, leaving me depleted end of day and with no energy to dive into the challenge of a new book. Instead, rereading Shaun’s diary of a year in his bookstore in Scotland – stretching his year out over a full week of my bedtimes – was the perfect solution. 

12.             Kellogg, Richard. Wall of Silver: A Treasure Hunter’s Dream (fiction? nonfiction?). My neighbor (who printed this book for the author) loaned me Wall of Silver. The author swore it was a true story. Who knows? It reads like an exciting and suspenseful adventure tale, though the author is never able to return to the mine to claim the treasured silver he says was there.

13.             Caldwell, Erskine. Some American People (nonfiction). Known for his fiction, Caldwell undertook cross-country travel during the Depression to talk to Americans in all walks of life but particularly the poor, unemployed, and marginally and vulnerably employed. This picture of the Depression is as grim as any you’ll read and certainly bleaker than what we read in school history books. Back before there were strong unions and would-be workers were desperate, Detroit’s auto industry comes off as a nightmare, but there are also migrants from all over the Great Plains (not only Oklahoma), moving west in hopes of finding fertile soil to farm and rain to water it. Starving, malnourished babies; men “riding the rails”; girls and women turning to prostitution; and countless families broken by a broken economy. And yet—I doubted the first quotation so checked that Henry really said it and found the citation—Ford claimed in 1934 that "The Depression was just a state of mind. It is over for everyone who has changed his state of mind" (Ford News, back cover, April 1934). He also opined that "Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman" (Ford News, p. 2, 8/1/1925). Workers who spoke to Caldwell had a different view of machines, particularly when “the line” was speeded up, workforce simultaneously reduced, and safety devices removed to avoid slowing production. It was labor unions that made auto factory work the bedrock of Detroit’s mid-20^th century new middle class. In the 1930s, fulltime work was hard to come by and easy to lose. And then the poor sharecroppers in Georgia! Be glad you are living now, friends!

A Scent of the Past

By the side of the road ...

... have you ever noticed this?

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time. 

-      Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

A summer visitor who usually comes up from Texas later in the season was enchanted by the woodland wildflowers in May and asked me what would be blooming there in June. Not much, I told her. The spring ephemerals are pretty much finished by June, and the canopy filling in with leaves, shading the ground. But field and roadside and garden flowers come on strong and are so many and so varied that it’s hard to keep track of them.

Viburnum

Campion

Some are, however, easy to overlook. The plant in the three images at the top of this post is an instance of the easily overlooked June wildflowers – or weeds, if you prefer. A scruffy little fellow that sprouts in the dust of driveways and dirt roads, pineapple weed, Matricaria discoidea, is identified by Stan Tekeila in Wildflowers of Michigan: Field Guide as “inconspicuous.” But when I pull over to the side of the road and my tires crush its greenish-yellow tops, releasing their scent, I am once again, if only for a moment, seven years old.

There were pineapple weeds in my grandmother’s dusty driveway in central Ohio. Must they not still be there? And shouldn’t my grandmother still be there, too, feeding her chickens and shelling peas, with little me beside her, eager to help? Will my grandfather be working out in his garden or his large raspberry patch? If a storm is coming, will my grandparents call me down from the swaying fruit trees in the backyard to join them in the safety of the house?

Other easily overlooked June blooms bring other memories.

Clover in the grass takes me back to Barry County.

Daisies by the drive elicit "Thank you, Claudia" every day they bloom.

In Brideshead Revisited, the narrator recounts, from the perspective of World War II, scenes of his adolescence at the end of the Great War, the one not called “First” until the Second arrived. The book opens with his coming unexpectedly upon scenes from his youth:

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

How strange it is to come upon – often out of context -- an old familiar aroma strongly associated in memory with a particular place and time and people. Here it is again, the same as always, that old sense perception, but now absent its old surroundings. Or one comes upon it in the old surroundings, as did Charles, but the familiar place has been transformed and is empty now of all those one remembers in it. 

Hidden creek blooms: Where is the old water ram?

Bridalwreath

How can it be? we ask ourselves. How can those vivid scenes have vanished? They feel so very near at hand that one more than remembers: memory repeoples, reanimates, and reincarnates the past.

The river in Waugh's novel was the Bride, and June is the traditional month of brides. The many white flowers of garden and field seem to honor wedding couples, don't you think?

May or June? Lake Superior or Lake Michigan? Both and Both!

The wildflowers in the woods are at their peak in the merry month of May, and there is always a single magical day in May when I would give anything for a PAUSE button. It’s that day when the smallest flush of first leaf and bloom takes the winter nakedness away from trees, that perfect Impressionist moment of light and color after months of winter and early spring drab. When May arrives, it is the best time of the year. It’s a miracle, time after time. Then along comes June and steals my heart, for what is so rare as a day in June? June is the culmination of spring and the beginning of summer. If May is the courtship, June is the wedding. The days are not all sunny (in either month), but the season rushes on, relentlessly filling and greening.

This year June is extra-special for me, "Lake Superior Month" at Dog Ears Books, so to introduce the theme, below is a photograph of Lake Superior at Hurricane River, west of Grand Marais, from our last September's all-too-brief getaway.


A week from now, on Friday, June 17, we will be hosting the Leelanau launch of Ellen Airgood's South of Superior. I've written about this book before and about Ellen and about my love affair with the Upper Peninsula and particularly with the little town of Grand Marais, the model for Airgood's fictional McAllaster. As wonderful coincidence would have it, the following Monday we will have a visit from another author whose novel is set on Lake Superior. Danielle Sosin, from St. Paul, Minnesota, will come to Northport to sign copies of her book, The Long-Shining Waters, at 1 p.m. on June 20. I hope some of you will be able to meet both of these talented authors and welcome them along with me to Lake Michigan country.

I'll end today's post with an image of Lake Michigan at Peterson Park. I could have chosen a sandier beach, perhaps a dramatic sunset over Good Harbor, but Leelanau Township is my home grounds, and this cool, morning-shaded, rocky strand is a favorite summer haunt. Besides that, I feel rich to have it all--May and June, Lakes Superior and Michigan, the rocks and the sand and the Michigan authors and their books.