“Locals’ Summer” Is Underway

Friends of the heart

Labor Day is past, but for locals who work all summer, it has only just arrived, and I started the season with Sunday and Monday (September 8 & 9) spent mostly outdoors, under alternate cloudy skies and sunshine, when Sunny and I hosted our hiking buddies from Arizona, who now live in southeastern Michigan. The four of us picked up right where we left off with our last visit. 

Auntie Therese is Sunny Juliet’s second mom and young husky Yogi SJ’s best friend. Wrestling in the yard, chasing tossed balls, walking on the beach, wading in Lake Michigan, or just lying down near each other, Sunny and Yogi reunited were in seventh heaven. We left them alone in the house for a couple of hours (first time ever!) and returned to find everything exactly as we’d left it. Happy dogs, happy dog moms!

Lunch without dogs, can you believe it?

Then Tuesday it was back to work for me, refreshed and relaxed, bookstore door open to balmy September air. The giant book purchase and move, all seven or so trips with car loaded down with heavy boxes, was finished before our friends’ visit, so I was able to start my slower season without the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

 

Of course, besides integrating as many as possible of the “new” additions into my preexisting collection, I squirrel away a book here and there for home reading this fall and winter, awaiting a future time when shelf space opens up on Waukazoo Street. One book I took home expecting something very different was an exciting surprise. The cover didn’t look like much, the dust jacket was missing, and the title didn’t tell me anything at all, but a little voice whispered in my ear, and home with me it went. 

Faint pine cone only clue....

How wonderful! Driftwood Valley, far from being the Western novel its title and brown cloth-covered boards seemed to indicate, turned out to be – well, a reissue of the book in 1999 by Oregon State University Press clearly informed potential readers what to expect with a subtitle: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness. 

 

The author, Theodora C. Stanwell-Fletcher, and her husband, Jack, entered the wilds of northern British Columbia in 1937 and lived for a year and a half on an otherwise uninhabited lake (after building a log cabin) hundreds of miles from towns and roads, in country noted on maps only as “unexplored” and “unsurveyed.” Their nearest neighbors were Indian trappers; their work was “collecting” (she generally wrote of “collecting” and avoided calling “killing” by that name) animals to ship skins and skulls to an American museum. They returned in 1941 for another couple of seasons before world war intervened.

 

Prior to their marriage, Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher had accompanied her naturalist father on many of his travels and earned her doctorate in animal ecology from Cornell in 1936, while her husband, John Stanwell-Fletcher, had experience in the Arctic. Their modes of travel including snowshoes, canoe, pack horses, and pack dogs, Teddy and Jack traveled and hiked by themselves at times, other times with Indian guides. They camped outdoors in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero, when managing to make a fire meant the difference between life and death, as did succeeding in killing a few grouse – better yet, a moose -- for meat to sustain them on the trail. Following the text at the end of the book are lengthy lists of plants and animals the Stanwell-Fletchers collected in the wilds of British Columbia. The lists alone, with genus and species names, is impressive. Four varieties of horsetail alone!

Only the first page of the lists --

 

Driftwood Valley, I learn online, was Wendell Berry’s favorite book during a period of his boyhood in Kentucky, and it's no wonder. Wilderness adventure! I reached the final page on Tuesday morning before breakfast with my company and a long walk with our dogs, drinking in the beauty of Michigan at the same time as we reminisced about our hikes with these same dogs in the mountains of southeastern Arizona. My Michigan country life is tame and domestic compared to northern British Columbia in the 1930s and ’40s or even Cochise County ghost town winters, but I am happy to live where I live. It's a very good place!

Happy dogs off-leash in the yard.

Tomatoes seen behind non blooming (so far) morning glory vine

Tomatoes are ripening at last in my garden, and jalapeno peppers have formed nicely. Okra was a total bust, even though started early from seed, and my friend said hers in southeast Michigan didn’t do anything, either, though she’d had success in warmer Arizona summers, but Japanese anemones have bloomed at last (they need a tomato cage support to keep from falling over) ...

 

... and the brilliance of velvety scarlet snapdragons rewards my decision to introduce a few annuals in pots among the perennials. Only one chrysanthemum blossom so far, and that’s fine, because ’mums need to wait their turn, and it is not their turn yet. Plaintively, however, I cry out, “Where are my purple coneflowers?” Little grey-headed coneflowers in the meadow have been prolific again this year, and asters are coming along nicely, but not a sign of the purple coneflowers do I see. 

 

Wednesday:

 

I began writing this post on Tuesday before remembering the evening’s scheduled presidential debate. I had no intention of watching (no TV) or streaming (my watching would not affect the outcome), and I didn’t even want to get into the frequent Facebook checking with friends who would be watching and commenting, because Wednesday morning, I assured myself, would be soon enough to hear what happened. Meanwhile, having wrapped up the story of the Stanwell-Fletchers in British Columbia, I chose for Tuesday evening’s bedtime escape reading a John Dunning murder mystery, Booked to Die, something I read long enough ago that I didn’t remember anything about the plot, only that the used and rare book business played a prominent part in the story.  

 

Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway, a compulsive book collector outside of work hours, finds in the murder of a book scout all the earmarks of the same murderer who has eluded him multiple times. By the middle of the book, Janeway has gone beyond the law to punish the murderer, turned in his badge, and is preparing to open his own shop on Denver’s Book Row.

 

…Bobby [the book scout] had come to Madison Street alone. … He had insisted on loading the books himself, which was fine with the two heirs, who had no intention of helping, anyway. Bobby had brought hundreds of cardboard boxes and had spent all night packing and loading the books. … [He] loaded the last of the books as dawn broke in the east.

        - John Dunning, Booked to Die 

 

The paragraph quoted speaks not of the romance of rare books but of the physical reality of a big book “deal,” the one where you get a good price because, rather than being able to cherry-pick a collection, you agree to take everything. This is the part of a bookseller’s life that does not involve “thinking outside the box” but thinking constantly, obsessively, about boxes: Too small, and they won’t hold enough books; too large, and they’re too heavy to lift. They need to be sturdy. Cartons from the grocery store that held jugs of water or bottles of wine are a good size and appropriately sturdy, but storage boxes for legal files have handholds and lids so are more readily stackable. 

Object of bookseller obsession

.

Too many when you don't need them, too few when you do.

Yes, it’s mundane, but the mundane is often a crucial consideration in any endeavor, and it cuts a lot of ice in bookselling. As a colleague likes to say, “You only get one back.” A good sturdy handcart with tires that won’t go flat is also worth its weight in gold. So it is that the concerns of Janeway’s murdered book scout resonate with my experience, as does advice Janeway’s new colleagues give him. 

 

People often say, “advice is cheap,” because people give it for free usually when you don’t ask for it. Over the years, I’ve learned to smile when people who have never owned or managed a bookstore or any other kind of business tell me what I “should” be doing. Once, though – and I’ve never forgotten it – a seasoned bookseller turned around in my doorway as he was leaving and said, “A word of advice --.” I smiled, and he said, “Good shoes.” That’s all he said. Years later he reappeared in Northport and said, “You probably don’t remember me.” I said, “Yes, I do. ‘Good shoes’! It was the best advice anyone’s ever given me!” Good shoes and a well-cushioned mat behind my desk are my recipe for extending the health of my feet and back, and the shoes also go well with dog walks and agility practice. 

 

Back to Tuesday --. As I say, I figured my watching or not watching the debate wouldn’t change the outcome and that I’d hear all about it the next day. Then Wednesday morning I woke to realize that it was once again 9/11, that infamous date on which our country was attacked. No rush, then, I thought, to post to my blog. What with the debate the night before and the sad anniversary come around again, who could possibly care about the life of one little small-town bookseller, even if she also has a dog whose online face makes strangers smile?

Sunny says, "I'm the cute one."

So now it’s Thursday, and here’s my post for the week, with bits from my reading, my business, and my life with friends and dog, here on a little northern Michigan peninsula, now all-too-thoroughly discovered but still quite beautiful and with protected public shoreline for us all to share. We are so lucky!

 

It's Travel Time

WHAT month is it???

In northern Michigan there are, besides weekend tourists and short-term vacationers, summer people and “year-round” people. The year-rounders who can afford to make a getaway in late winter or early spring, though, are not shy about doing so, and who can blame them? Some take February or March in Florida or Mexico or the Caribbean. For years, before and between the Florida and Arizona winters, the Artist and I made more modest forays to Lake Huron on early spring weekends when March rolled around, because cabin fever isn’t just about getting to an exotic location. It’s more about seeing different scenery and different people. 

 

“But we didn’t even have winter this year.” 

 

“We had a month of winter (January).” 

 

“No, we had ten days. That’s all!”

 

Okay, and now February, typically the coldest month in northern Michigan, has been bringing us daytime temperatures in the 40s! Along with many others, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this month’s weather. It isn’t right, isn’t normal, it bodes ill for the future – and yet, in the present, it makes life easier and certainly (because of lower fuel bills and no plow bills at all) less expensive, which is hard not to appreciate. And who can complain about blue skies? Besides that, for me (and I know I’m not the only one) this time of year is a minefield of associations. Anniversaries after loss are ambushes along life’s road, in that you know they’re coming – looming inexorably -- but not the moment or hour or the manner they will hit. So with all of the financial and emotional possibilities threatening, I found unseasonable February warmth and sunshine more than helpful.  

While we still had snow --

Blue view --

Thanks to books, I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ireland and Scotland, France and Italy, some of it over a hundred years ago and some in more recent times. Fiction, nonfiction – one is as dreamy as the other, when it comes to exploring mountain villages, river sources, stone ruins, and local stories from local folks in faraway places. When March arrives, I’ll post my “Books Read” list for the month of February, with enough annotation to give an idea of each title’s contents for anyone who might be curious.

 

Leelanau County itself, though, provided me with antidotes to cabin fever. Monday, Presidents Day, was a bank holiday, so I had to go to Traverse City on Tuesday instead to take care of banking errands. By noon, though, I was already zipping out of town when the beautiful sunshine inspired me to detour to Good Harbor Bay, where Sunny and I walked on the beach! As close as I live to Lake Michigan, you would think beach-walking would be a frequent life activity for me, but somehow, unless I have company, time just seems to slip away. Well, not that day! I seized it!

Good Harbor, Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Again, the following day, Wednesday, the Artist’s birthday (he would have been 87, if still living), when I felt the need to do something special, Good Harbor was my choice. I'd first contemplated a stop at the Happy Hour for a beer on the way home, maybe even buying for whoever might happen to be sitting at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, but there was no way to include Sunny Juliet in that plan. And as it had on Tuesday, the sun was shining, the sky blue, so with sunset later and later every day, Sunny J. and I had plenty of time after I closed the bookstore at 3 o’clock to drive down to Good Harbor again, scenes of many memories and associations over the years.

Lake Michigan, Wednesday afternoon

Calm water

This is how I am traveling in February now. Books take me to other countries, and I take mini-vacations close to home with my dog, because, as the Artist loved to say, so often, “We live in a beautiful place,” and whatever the weather, every road of my county is saturated with memories, making it all the more beautiful. Travel time in my home county is any time, and any county drive is also time travel, my present brimming over with the past. 

Thursday morning fog -- beautiful!

 

Today’s postscript:

 

If audiobooks are your thing, please consider signing up to get yours from libro.fm – and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore. Your audiobooks won’t cost any more than they do if you buy from the online behemoth, but you will be supporting a small indie bookstore in northern Michigan. Thank you! And special thanks to those of you already ordering from libro.fm via Dog Ears Books!!!

Out With the Old, In With the New

"Table!" is an agility command that translated well to this forest stump.

Since winter arrived (or this season's version of winter, anyway, which hasn't been all that wintry in terms of snow), Sunny and I go out a couple times a day for half an hour to an hour on what I call a walk -- she does a lot of running, which I’m happy to leave to her -- and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were no exceptions. Before I get into those days, though, I want to back up in time. If you read my 12/28/23 post, you already know that Sunny was invited with me to the home of friends for Christmas Day dinner and that she behaved very well (i.e., amazingly well, which is to say, she amazed me!). My reason for turning back so far in the 2023 calendar is not to repeat myself, but to focus on one of the ornaments on our friends’ holiday tree. You might not see it if you didn’t look closely. 

So much to notice on one tree!

But here is the dragon.

There, you see? I don’t recall the artist’s name who made this ornament (Marjorie would have to remind me), but isn’t it perfect for my first post of the new year, the Year of the Wood Dragon? (I would have put it at the very beginning, except that Sunny thought she deserved top billing.)

 

A day or two later, I had another invitation that included Sunny, and while I wouldn’t have time to get her out for a lot of hard exercise before we went to the home of these friends, our hostess promised a walk on the beach – and, as I say, a “walk” off-leash for Sunny means she gets to run -- and run she did! She had a glorious romp, and sunset was glorious, too! Dinner conversation was so lively that Sunny didn’t start barking until she noticed her reflection in the windows. 

Barbara leads the way.

Happy girl!

Glorious sunset --

So not only did I have an unusually social week, but so did my dog, and that made me happy! 

Without any big plans for ushering in the new year, I asked friends if I could bring them cheesecake on New Year’s Day afternoon, and they graciously agreed. Then, out of the blue, I had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party that was scheduled to run from 7:30 to after midnight, hosted by old friends I hadn’t spent time with for quite a while, so while I have never been much of a “party animal,” I resolved to attend and enjoy myself. 

 

Driving the back roads of the township after dark, I was visited by ghosts of years past, remembering Basil S. back when he still did car repair at his place; Louis R., an old Barb’s Bakery regular; Ellen B., who drove her big car much longer than she should have been driving. Driving out of my way at one point and, turning around, seeing cattails in my headlights, I thought of Ellen going off the road and into the swamp, where she stayed overnight until someone discovered her. (That must have been before cell phones.) I remembered the parents of my host of the present evening, too, and sitting next to his mother at a New Year’s Eve dinner years ago….

Old trees make way for the young.

Now we – my host and hostess, her brother and sister-in-law, and I – are the old folks. There was a moment in the evening when the younger people fell silent while we oldtimers belted out Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but otherwise we were the quiet generation, and that was fine. I looked around the living room at everyone gathered there and felt a surge of tenderness for all, tinged with a bit of melancholy, of course (because in years past, the Artist and I attended this NYE party together), but I was happy to be there, even at that.

 

I’d spent most of the day on Sunday making a big pot of hoppin’ john and a pot of rice to go with it so on Monday afternoon took a couple containers up to my neighbors, as well as, later, a container of each with the cheesecake to my Northport friends. Another good visit, comparing notes on one another’s lives past and present and our hopes (mine very modest) for the year to come.

 

(Two nights coming home in the dark! Really, I guess, it was all the same day, first at 12:30 a.m. and then around 6 p.m.)

 

I finished out my 2023 reading year with two books of fiction, both first novels by authors I hope to see more from in future: from Detroit, Shifting Through Neutral, by Bridgett M. Davis, and from Idaho, Winter Range (a novel set in rural Montana), by Claire Davis.

 

On the last day of the year, I began what will be the first title on my Books Read 2024 list, a memoir by Susan Straight entitled The Country of Women, and I cannot say enough about this author. I did say a bit back on November 2, but since then I have read another of her novels (Mecca, her most recent) and have been devouring her memoir, a long love letter addressed to her three daughters, telling them everything she knows about previous generations on both sides of their family.

Now, with Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, coming out in only days, something that strikes me, despite their different worlds, is how much Campbell and Straight have in common. Both of them are content to live in what “sophisticated” people on the East and West Coasts (or even in the higher echelons of academia in any part of the country) would probably see as poor, backwater communities. Straight was asked in one of her writing classes why she kept turning in stories about working-class people, and Campbell’s fiction has been labeled “rural noir” or “grit lit.” I just shake my head. These women are both brilliant writers, and they make, of their overlooked neighborhoods and neighbors, fiction that rings true and important for the same reasons that any fiction rings true and important: the characters are people whose lives are fraught with challenge, who are sometimes (not always) noble even in failure, families that are, as much as any other, Americans, all of them together making up not a melting pot but a rich, many-flavored stew -- vivid characters who come alive on the pages and live in our minds and hearts after we close the books. I should probably add that Straight and Campbell’s works are also noteworthy for portrayals of strong women. So whatever your gender or orientation, if you are weary of the women in Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, or if you simply want literature that includes more layers of complex and diverse humanity, make 2024 the year that you discover Bonnie Jo Campbell and Susan Straight. 

 

Make it also, please, a year of enchantment, if you can. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush or a flute or guitar, go for a walk in the woods or on the beach or just around the block, and leave the to-do lists in a desk drawer. Get lost, if only in a dream. Explore, if only with a paper map. 

We won’t always be here. Don’t overlook the wonderful in ordinary life. Today we are alive, and that is beautiful.

Home, Sweet Home

Postscript: 

 

I’ve gone back mentally over my holidays and decided they definitely deserve a higher rating than I’d been giving them. When people asked, I was saying, “Not bad.” Well, the time was much better than “not bad.” 

 

From the people I fed to the people who fed me, from the bookstore customer who brought his tools to put one of my bookcases back into working order to friends who invited my dog to their homes, from quiet hours cooking in my “Paris kitchen” to outdoor rambles in the countryside that has seen so little snow that I haven’t had to have my driveway plowed a single time yet. Messages of holiday greetings to and from distant loved ones. People who found their way from faraway to Dog Ears Books. My own reading at home. Those peaceful, dark country roads with occasional outdoor holiday lights on homes passed. The dog park and the beach. My little Charlie Brown tree on Waukazoo Street and my much tinier tree at home. And so much more!

 

My holidays were good. As for this new year just begun, it’s a wonderful life, and I don’t want to waste it, so my friends, let us be light to one another.

"When it's cold outside / I got the month of May...."

Post-postscript:

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell here.
Interview with Susan Straight here. 

Many more to be found online -- just search for the authors by name.

What a Weekend! (And what a transition, from dog parade to French literature!)

Summer is winding down....

This past Saturday was the Northport Dog Parade, the second-biggest day in the Northport summer – second only to crowds for the 4^th of July fireworks, that is, but as for daytime crowds probably the biggest day, and the 2023 theme, “Canine Couture,” certainly inspired colorful entries. I took a different approach to watching the parade this year. I didn’t take my camera outside, just stood on the sidelines enjoying the spectacle and applauding the entries as they passed by. Other people – plenty of other people! – would be taking plenty of photographs and videos, I knew, and so it was. The Traverse City Record-Eagle even sent a reporter and photographer to cover this year’s event. In this video you can see our former township librarian, Deb Stannard, parade marshall, in a car driven by Clifford the dog.

Sunny and friend -- reunited!

Sunny and I had other important fish to fry that same evening and all the next day and on into Monday morning, because Therese and Yogi, formerly our Arizona hiking buddies, came for a visit! Sunny and Yogi greeted each other with joyful abandon and familiarity, as if they had been parted only the day before. There was playtime in the yard, there were long walks, even trips to beaches – the whole nine yards. Yogi did the first dog paddling of her life! My visits to nearby Lake Michigan now number seven for the summer. It’s probably been years since I’ve been so diligent about getting to the beach. (Diligent? Yes, that’s what I mean. Double digits are now within reach!) But again, no photos from the beach. My friend took photos and videos, though, so here are the two of us: 

Another pair of hiking partners reunited!

Once dog parade is past, and we reach mid-August, though, once the first goldenrod blooms, cherry harvest is over, and apples are beginning to ripen, fall is in the air. Pow-wow is next weekend, and for me that marks the transition from summer to autumn. It's time to get the rest of my berry jam made as soon as possible to clear the decks for making applesauce and drying apples. 

 

As time permits (i.e., at night before I fall asleep or when I wake in the middle of the night), I’m nearing the end of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and plan to read it again soon in English translation, amazed at myself for being so enthralled with historical fiction, especially set in the time of the Roman Empire. But there was a reason Yourcenar was admitted into the French Academy (first woman member): her telling of Hadrian’s life in a voice she invented as his is mesmerizing and convincing.

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”  

― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

 

What are you reading as summer of 2023 winds to an end?

Snippets From Township and Village -- “in these uncertain times”

It will be August in only one week! Cherry harvest is underway. Nursery stock has begun to go on sale. In the wild, chicory and Queen Anne’s-lace are joined by spotted knapweed, that invader of Leelanau hills and fields that is, however, not despised by bees. No big festivals this year, nor small ones, either. Even the Thursday Evening Author series at Dog Ears Books is not taking place in this strange summer of 2020. We do, thank heaven, have farmers market in Northport on Friday mornings, something to anticipate eagerly all week long.

Northport marina parking lot on Monday morning

Farmers market. on Friday morning

My bookstore is open Tuesdays through Saturdays. “You’re risking your life to sell books,” one local customer friend remarked yesterday in mild tones. Was he chiding me? Expressing gratitude? Did he feel his life was in danger when he came in to buy a local author’s memoir? I don’t know. These days, with all of us concentrating on wearing our masks properly, sanitizing our hands, maintaining correct social distance, and conducting business transactions as expeditiously as possible, I don’t get into many deep discussions in my bookstore.

Bruce Catton: Civil War books

My customers, however, continue to be cooperative and pleasant. They appreciate being allowed again into bookstores and libraries. And we readers are reading a lot these days, more than ever. I’m finally reading one of Bruce Catton’s books on the Civil War. 

…During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices—made the debaters should more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation. - Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

Long a fan of Catton’s memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, and his Michigan: A Bicentennial History, until now I have avoided his multivolume Civil War works, because, open almost any book on the Civil War and you are confronted with more dates and battles than you can shake a bayonet at. Officers are continually changing rank and assignment, troop movements are given in what a friend called, years ago, “penetrating and remorseless detail.” (The friend was talking about something else, but his instantly memorable phrase entered our household memory bank then and there, to be pulled out whenever an occasion calls for it.) History fascinates me, but it’s ideas and politics and journalism and people’s daily lives I want, not military strategies and campaigns. Strictly military history is not for me.

But I should have known that Bruce Catton could not write history that I would find boring! 

Old favorites, highly recommended

American society was in turmoil in 1860. Underlying much of the turmoil were big changes in world economics and technology. Cottage industries were giving way to large-scale manufacturing that threatened the self-sufficiency of small farmers and villagers, and what was for so long a quiet, local American economy was becoming a global web, its threads set vibrating by events faraway and out of sight of workers. Whole populations were on the move. The North viewed immigrants from Europe with suspicion, while the South, clinging to their culture of slavery, saw their region’s dependence on imports spelling out eventual doom. 

And in the midst of all this uneasiness, 1860, like 2020, was an election year. 

The Democrats could not agree on Stephen Douglas as a candidate for the presidency – as Catton put it, “the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South hated him because he liked it too little” – and finally the party split in two, with Northern Democrats running Douglas and Southern Democrats settling for Breckenridge. Everyone in the country, including William H. Seward, viewed Seward as a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, but somehow in the end the nod went to “gawky frontiersman” Abraham Lincoln. A fourth party brought forward yet another presidential candidate. Long before votes were cast, however, Southerners were planning state conventions to decide whether or not the expected election of Lincoln would be sufficient cause for them to secede from the Union.

The Artist likes to quote what he says is an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” My own feeling is that there cannot have been any time on earth when life was not interesting, but I understand that he takes the saying as a reference to times of crisis and catastrophe, fascinating in retrospect but frightening and sometimes life-threatening as one is living through them. The year 2020 has certainly given us “interesting times” already, and it’s doubtful the year will grow any less interesting or anxiety-provoking as November approaches. Again, in our own time -- corporations shipping jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets or replacing workers with robots to boost the bottom line -- as in 1860, immigrants and racial minorities serve as political footballs.

Times of social upheaval, with technological and/or social innovations throwing a market for employment into disarray, have always put human beings at each other’s throats. Choose the particular hill on which you are willing to die, conveniently setting aside other complicated issues, and you have chosen your enemy -- who may well be your next-door neighbor. The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial described attendees at the convention in Charleston as “screaming like panthers and gesticulating like monkeys.” 

Sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, recent rain swelled and split local cherries. Not good. Creeks and lakes rise to destructive levels in many places. The sun shines on a regular basis to bring the annual parade of wildflowers to blossom, each in turn, and as Northern Lights waver tantalizingly overhead the comet Neowise hangs in the evening sky, and the International Space Station circles the earth. Here in the northwest lower peninsula of our state, we view the sky over Lake Michigan. Elsewhere in the country Americans scan for heavenly bodies and activity over fields of wheat or mountains or deserts. 

And as the summer flies past, most of us, at least in Leelanau County, continue to take precautions against COVID-19. The future’s not ours to see. It never has been. But we should probably slow down and think about it a little more dispassionately. Talk less, listen more. Be slower to anger. Register to vote.