Inspired to Take a Different Road -- Slowly

We are now in “high season.” This very week was 4th of July and, of course, still is Cherry Festival in Traverse City. Cherry harvest is a little late here in the northernmost part of Leelanau County, due to an unusually cold April. We’ve certainly had warm weather lately, though, and the summer people and tourists are swarming to restaurants, shops, tasting rooms, and beaches. High season is the busiest time of year for almost everyone in Leelanau County. 

But Kim Schneider, my July 5 TEA guest, must have inspired me, because on Friday morning I jumped the traces for a modest morning adventure. 

After hanging laundry out before sunrise, I made it to the farm market before official opening hour (most of the vendors ready for business), did bank and post office errands, and then took myself, with Sarah, out for a slow drive to Peterson Park and a stroll around the grounds for — hard to believe — my first visit of the year. Peterson Park looks different with the old dead trees taken down and new little trees of various species planted. Probably a lot like the early days, one third-generation local observed, except that this time a monoculture planting was avoided, which bodes well for the park’s future. With more open area, the views are longer and wider. There is a shaded picnic shelter and also tables in the sun, so take your pick. Whenever I go up there in the morning, with coffee or without, I think what a lovely vacation breakfast gathering spot the place would make, especially on summer Fridays. Fruit and croissants from the farm market, fresh coffee, maybe cook up some bacon and eggs on one of the park grills. 

Sarah and I didn’t take the rustic stairs down to the beach. (That much time we didn’t have.) Peterson Park beach, though, is my favorite place to send people who want to hunt along the shore for Petoskey stones. Kim Schneider asked people who came to her TEA event for their suggestions of ideas she could add if 100 Things to Do in Traverse City Before You Die goes to a second edition. (Would an enlarged second edition have to be called 150 [or however many] Things to Do, etc.? I don’t know.) I’d definitely have Peterson Park on my list, and my other suggestion would be the pow-wow in August in Peshawbestown, an event I sometimes find difficult to fit into my calendar — so much going on all summer! — yet whenever I get there, the chance to relax under the trees and watch the dancers brings peace to my spirit. I call it “that pow-wow feeling,” and it’s another way for me to slow down and simply be here. Important to take advantages of quiet moments and hours along the way, isn’t it?

Back in town, I did my last pre-opening errand on foot, pausing on the corner of Mill and Nagonaba to appreciate what I've always called my "lipstick" roses. I rescued the bush when I was working in a friend's garden business and one client wanted all his old roses dug out and replaced with new hybrid teas. Unable to throw these old-fashioned darlings on the compost pile, I put the bush in my car instead to take up to Northport and plant next to my bookstore, back when Dog Ears was housed in the little bark-covered building on that corner that is now the home of Porcupine. They bloom still, my lipstick roses, with their brilliant shade that reminds me of the lipstick my mother used to wear when I was a little girl. 

My mother's lipstick, working in my friend's garden business, the early days of my bookstore -- to me, all this history is contained in these colorful blooms. 

Deep Breath, First Tea -- and Maybe Riddles?

Talking to Myself

You’re here now. Take a deep breath.

I’m talking to myself. Yes, I often talk to myself, though sometimes under the pretense of talking to the dog, which somehow is not seen as quite so eccentric, although a bookseller, as I told my mother once, is supposed to be eccentric, especially a bookseller whose shop specializes in used books, so since the stereotype already exists, I might as well play it to my advantage. “What will people think?” They’ll think I fit the stereotype, of course. That I’m typical. — Or is ‘typical eccentric’ anything a contradiction in terms? Well, there I go, down a rabbit hole of pointless digression, but so what? It’s early morning … or was when I began writing this, hours and hours ago.

On the morning after my first TEA event — Thursday Evening Authors, my summer literary series celebrating 25 years of Dog Ears Books — while in the backyard watering my straw bale garden in the early sunlight, with birds singing their hearts out all around me, I told myself, Take a deep breath. You’re here now. That is my mantra: You’re here now. Or, more prescriptively, Be here now. Summer is a busy time, but it’s important to stop and look around and listen to the birds and take those deep breaths.

Getting ready for first TEA

The First Dog Ears Books TEA of the Season

Rachel May

One reason I felt I could afford to relax a bit on Friday morning was that Thursday evening at the bookstore had gone so beautifully. Author Rachel May was so natural in her presentation, honest and forthright and well prepared, and the passages she read from her book were so full of detail that we in the audience had no trouble picturing the surroundings she described. Our audience was great, too — attentive, engaged, receptive — and the author appreciated their questions and clearly enjoyed answering. The house was full! We sold out of books! A great start to the series and to the season! And I'm still hearing from people who loved the evening and are loving the book.

Next Thursday (all Thursday events begin at 7 p.m.) is poet and essayist Fleda Brown, and on July 5 we’ll have travel writer Kim Schneider, and we’ll just keep going on from there, all through July and August.

Thoughts on Emily

I had to miss a discussion with friends Wednesday evening on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and ask forgiveness of the woman who would have been my hostess for the evening. But now, how many of my readers are Dickinson readers and/or fans? Some of her poems are well known and quite simple, but I was surprised (not ever having been an “English major”) by how difficult I found many of the unfamiliar pieces. A couple incomplete, random notions on the subject of her work are bouncing around in my head, though, and here they are: 

One friend e-mailed me last week or so that she needed a break from Emily, that there was just too much death and mourning in the poems, and there is a lot, which led me to thinking that death, always a major topic for poets, was particularly so in the 19th century. It was the poetic fashion, one might say. For example, one of my mother’s favorite poems was William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” written when the poet was only 17 years old. “So live, that when thy summons comes to join/The innumerable caravan which moves/To that mysterious realm where each shall take/His chamber in the silent halls of death….” Read the entire poem and see what you think of it. Is it depressing? Morbid? It doesn’t seem so to me. Rather, immersion in nature, along with thoughts of life’s brevity and death’s inevitability, seem both prescriptive and consolatory. And I see the same themes working out in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. People in that age lived closer to death on a daily basis than most Americans do today. We keep it at arm's length. But maybe we are the ones who have the morbid attitude?

My other thought — and this might be a bit far out — is that many of Dickinson’s poems remind me of the literary riddles so popular among the educated classes in the 18th and 19th centuries -- not the simple question riddles but those in the form of verse. In truth however, it is my compulsive re-reading of Jane Austen that brought the riddle idea to my mind when reading Dickinson. In Jane Austen’s Emma, one of the plot lines rests in part on the collection of “charades” that Emma encourages her young protegée, Harriet Smith, to put together. Could some of Emily Dickinson’s poems be riddles? Or is this a very naive and unliterary question to ask?

Anyway, I quite like all the flowers and bees in Emily’s poems. Lots of bees! Full of life, bees and flowers.

And now, Saturday morning, time to take to the road but also, I'm happy to realize, sufficient time to take the slow back roads to town, on my way to errands and another day in my bookstore. The world is lush and green and overflowing with life and death. It is a plenitude. We're here now. And today -- tonight -- is St. John's Eve.