Do you wanna be Up North? Are you here already?

Sandhill cranes return every year.

 

Everyone wants to be here! Is that a problem?

 

Bear with me while I start far from Michigan....

Wilma Dykeman, in the volume of the “Rivers of America” series entitled The French Broad, which gives the history of a river region that encompassed western Tennessee and eastern North Carolina, writes in one chapter of a boom in tourism set off initially by “lowlanders” on the coast seeking to escape heat and malaria by summering in the mountains. At first conditions were rustic, but as time went on more and more elaborate hotels and resorts were built. The boom did not last forever—as transportation alternatives came along that allowed greater distances to be covered, the lowlanders were able to vacation much farther from home than Appalachia—but while it was on, it was definitely on, enticing foreigners from England, Scotland, and Germany as well as residents of North Carolina’s seacoast. In the 19^th century, the region of the French Broad River saw “a mingling of Northern wealth and Southern abandon.” 

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be there. 

 

It was the peak of the boom for the watering places in the French Broad country. To these springs and hotels came people who at a later date would be gasping over the canyon of the Yellowstone rather than the canyons of the French Broad. The ‘Lowlanders,’ who set out from their malarial flatlands with a caravan of carriages and trekked up through the foothills and into the mountains on a journey that cost at least two weeks every year, were looking for the same things many of the tourists who hurry through so rapidly today are seeking: A combination of comfort and ruggedness, the uneasy balance between a luxurious personal surrounding and an untamed natural background. They simultaneously sought new experiences yet managed to establish many of their old ways of life in the country they visited. 

 

-      The French Broad, by Wilma Dykeman, from the Rivers of America series, edited by Carl Carmer, as planned and started by Constance Lindsay Skinner

 

The French Broad was published in 1955, that post-World War II era when Americans began vacationing in automobiles, when motels began to replace earlier “tourist resort” campgrounds, but are Americans who leave home today, whether for two weeks or permanently, much different? Don't most still want new places to offer both comfort and ruggedness, nature and luxury, the excitement of new experiences along with the familiarity of their old ways of life?

 

My bookstore is in Leelanau County, Michigan, and these days it sometimes seems to locals as if everyone wants to be here. Or in Grand Traverse or Benzie County or Antrim or Charlevoix or – well, a bookseller friend in the U.P. feels as if everyone wants to live on her road! But the other side of the coin is that businesses rely on customers, whether locals or weekenders or new residents. Then, too, not all of us who live here were born here, by a long shot. I was born in South Dakota myself, of an Ohio-born father and a California-born mother!

***

Who wouldn't want to be here?

[PLEASE NOTE: I was still reading the two books discussed below, i.e., had not finished either one, when I put this post out into the world, because I could not wait!]

Tim Mulherin’s This Magnetic Book: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan explores the “relocation phenomenon” that is swelling the population of places like Traverse City. Northern Michigan, of course, is not the only destination of people fleeing crowds and climate disasters. Arizona and New Mexico and Idaho and Montana are all getting their share of well-to-do “climate refugees” from California. Some people are still moving to the South for warmer winters and sunshine, but others are moving away from the South. 

Americans on the move! Pulled by magnetic forces away from home to new homes!

Mulherin begins with his own migration story, but then in Chapter 2 ups the ante seriously with “An Indigenous Perspective,” interviewing several members of the Grand Traverse Band, whose people were here long before Europeans “discovered” North America. In fact, a list of chapters will tell you a lot about the scope of Tim’s book: 

 

Chapter 1. “A Migration Story”

Chapter 2. “Indigenous Perspectives”

Chapter 3. “Welcome Wagon”

Chapter 4. “Settlers”

Chapter 5. “A Taste of Northern Michigan”

Chapter 6. “Invasive Species”

Chapter 7. “America’s Most Beautiful Place”

Chapter 8. “Protecting Paradise”

Chapter 9. “Eyes to the Sky”

Chapteer 10. “Every Day is Earth Day”

 

Mulherin interviewed over 75 Northerners from various walks of life and a multitude of backgrounds. Pandemic & climate refugees or lifestyle migrants? Which label fits better as you see it? If you came here from downstate or farther away, does either label seem to fit your move to Leelanau or the greater Grand Traverse area? If you’ve lived here all your life, how do you view newcomers and change? 

One fruit grower Mulherin interviews points out that the very places seen as most desirable for new houses are also the most advantageous locations for orchards.

Growing specialty fruit crops in northern Michigan calls for being close to Lake Michigan, within several miles, and on sloping ground. This, of course, also makes for perfect view property. ‘Our desirable fruit-growing land is getting turned into golf courses and subdivisions and wonderful view mansions that can see Grand Traverse Bay,’ King McAvoy explains with a tinge of cynicism.

The lake offers protection, cooling the land in summer and keeping it warmer in winter, but property prices keep going up, while farming remains a gamble from year to year.

Mulherin, who still maintains a home in Indiana, does not presume to have answers or give prescriptions, but it’s clear that no one he talked to wants change and growth to destroy what makes this part of the country such a magnet for vacationers and relocators alike. Unfortunately, where some see destruction, others see improvement. 

 

I admit that part of my pleasure in reading Mulherin's book is encountering so many old friends, but anyone who loves our area and cares about its future will want to read This Magnetic North.

***

Now, can work be a vacation? Maybe that depends on where you are.

 

When Robert “Carlos” Fuentes introduced himself and his book to me recently, my enthusiasm was immediate. The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan is a personal account of what it was like to work in a Leelanau cherry orchard a few decades ago. Robert’s family were not year-round farm workers—his father had a floor cleaning business—but the summer he was 14 Robert was told by his father that the family was going to Lake Leelanau for vacation. The only catch was that they would be picking cherries from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and for a few hours on Saturday mornings. 

 

The day before they left home, when Robert tells his friend Luis that he’s going to Lake Leelanau for a cherry-picking vacation, Luis scoffs at the idea of picking cherries as a “vacation.” 

 

He tells me it is hard, dirty, thankless, and physically strenuous work. His family is still partly in the migrant farmworker stream. All Mexican American families in our neighborhood were from Texas and came to Michigan as migrant farmworkers. Luis tells me that he and his family have already done two weeks of hoeing at some local fields and will soon be heading up north to pick cherries at a farm on Old Mission Peninsula.

 

Robert was grateful he didn’t have to move around the country harvesting different crops. He liked having a settled home in Alma, Michigan. But he was excited about the “vacation” his father had planned for the family on the Esch Farm in Leelanau County, where his grandfather had first come (from Texas) to pick cherries in 1946 and, in later summers, had led church services in Spanish in the barn for the migrant workers.

Before mechanical shakers came along, cherries, like apples, were picked by hand. The author writes in his brief introduction that when machines came to the orchard,

 

…the backbreaking tradition of handpicking gave way to mechanized efficiency. In a matter of years, the thousands of workers who had once filled the orchards, their laughter and voices rising with the rustling leaves, were no longer needed. A way of life was disappearing. 

 

With these few, spare introductory lines, Fuentes reminds us that change is nothing new in northern Michigan. 

 

Robert’s cherry-picking vacation was in 1969, just a year before I moved to Traverse City from Lansing, and I remember the era well: “muscle” cars, Wolfman Jack, the miniature model Traverse City and the zoo in Clinch Park. I don’t remember ice cream at NJ’s. The Twister for ice cream (where Fiddleheads is now) must have come along much later.

 

But whether you knew the area in 1969 or not, the author will take you back in time, as he seamlessly weaves facts about the cherry industry with personal experience (Robert could pick enough to fill an average of 22 lugs in eight and a half hours; the best pickers could fill 25-30 lugs a day but worked longer hours; growers were paying 80 cents a lug in 1969; and growers were paid by the pound, varying from seven to 15 cents in those days), and his story includes not only facts and sights but also sounds and tastes and smells of those days, as well as descriptions of his own thoughts and moods. 

As we read, we hear the whine of mosquitoes and the strains of Tejano music from car and truck radios, taste a special lakeside supper of grilled hot dogs with catsup and mustard (a change from the family’s customary and probably more delicious Mexican fare), smell the Zest soap in the cold shower, and see the roadside daylilies that catch Robert’s eye. He is nervous about talking to a girl he finds attractive, but when she smiles at him all the world is bright.

On a typical day, he and his siblings would have cereal for breakfast, pick fruit until stopping for a half-hour picnic lunch, pick again until quitting time, and then enjoy a trip to a Lake Leelanau beach for another picnic meal, maybe later to NJ’s for ice cream, winding up, for Robert, with an evening gathering of teen boys in their “clubhouse” in the barn, where they would trade baseball cards and have farting contests, which he acknowledges was totally a guy thing. Outside the clubhouse, however, his sensitive nature responded to northern Michigan.

Walking back to the tent through dew-covered grass, I take in my surroundings. I gaze at the sky, marveling at the stars and planets. The wind rustles the leaves, their sound blending with the chorus of crickets and katydids…. This place feels so peaceful right now….

 

***

I am reading Mulherin and Fuentes almost simultaneously--toggling back and forth between them, that is. I’m enjoying the experience, immersed in how life was then compared to how it is now in the same region, and I recommend you do the same. 

The big question is, of course, what do we want this part of Michigan to be in the future, and what can we do about it? Your thoughts?

P.S. Current summer bookstore hours here. 

Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Sharing a Few of My Secrets

Lake Michigan from Jelinek Road

 

I see things that aren’t there.

 

The probability that you would spot a great blue heron wading at the corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is low -- not impossible but unlikely. I’ve only seen a heron once at that corner, hunting in an ephemeral pool after a heavy rain, stalking – what? Surely not fish? What year was that? No matter. Whenever I make that turn, I look for the heron and see him in memory.

 

Not much farther up Jelinek Road I see the buck that leapt in front of our van one evening at dusk, missing the windshield by a hair, only missing at all because the Artist had seen it in time to be able to brake. We could not have been closer to the animal unless we’d collided. That spot in the road holds that incident for me.

 

Still on the same long, curving climb is where we pulled over to the side of the road and sat quietly for an hour or more, hoping to see some noteworthy celestial event, the nature of which I have forgotten. Was it a comet? Whatever it was, we never did see it, our view open to the west but not to the north. Still, it was restful and pleasant to be sitting out there by the side of the road on a summer evening, doing absolutely nothing but looking at the sky and talking to each other. And then we did see something: the International Space Station passed overhead! Neither of us had ever seen it before, and I have not seen it since, but I see again in imagination what I saw with the Artist that night in the evening sky.

 

All of these sights – heron, buck, ISS – I see over and over, although they are not there for anyone else to see who travels that road. And I have not even covered a mile on a single road with these examples, so imagine the many invisible (to you) sights I see along every Leelanau County road….

 

 

My life is a setup for coincidence. 

 

When my sisters and I drove down to Good Harbor a week ago Sunday, I pointed out another memory corner of M-22, this one between Leland and Glen Arbor. There in the woods used to be an unusual tourist attraction. It wasn’t exactly stations of the cross, as I recall it, but giant billboard-like paintings from the life of Jesus that one encountered along a winding path. I called them ‘dioramas’ when describing them, but they weren’t really that: as I say, more like billboards. But what was the place called? Not that my sisters cared, but I wanted to remember. One would occasionally come across an old postcard showing one of the scenes….

 

Well, the very next day I was going through a milk crate filled with booklets and ephemera and came across what I thought would be a menu (it was that size) from the Leland Lodge. It wasn’t a menu but did advertise the Lodge as available for large group dinners. What caught my eye, though, was a list of tourist sights near Leland. The dunes were on the list, of course, but so was -- Lund’s Scenic Garden! That was it! 

 

Not everyone is surrounded on a daily basis by old books and papers, which is why I say my life is a setup to invite coincidences.

 

 

Sometimes I DO dog-ear a book!

 

Rarely do I turn down the corner of a page … or underline sentences … or write notes in the margins. But sometimes I do all of those things to a book, though I never, ever use highlighters on book pages.

 

In almost every case, the book I mark up has to be a paperback, it has to be used, and if I’m dog-earing and underlining and writing notes in the margin and sometimes making my own index (if one isn’t provided) or adding to an existing index (if one exists) – if I’m doing all those things, it’s because I’m working with the book, treating it as an assignment I’ve given myself, wanting to make sure I don’t miss important ideas and information.

 

One book I treated that way last month was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which took me a long time to get through, because it was so upsetting (although I highly recommend it) that I couldn’t read all that much at a time. This month, at the shop and between customers, the book I am treating with apparent disrespect but, really, with my highest respect (isn’t it respect when one engages fully with someone’s words?) is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fortunately, Antifragile is not a world-historical horror show but a fascinating and original way of looking at the world in general and human life in particular. Taleb’s runaway bestseller, the book that put him on the map, was The Black Swan, which I have not yet read, and since all his books grow from one central idea and since he has his own somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary that carries through all the books, I am picking up his language piecemeal as I go.…

 

I am an introvert at heart.

 

This is a secret shared by many booksellers and librarians. We grew up with books as friends and had adventures in stories, and thus we are not the greatest of “party animals.” We were often shy as children and have had to work to overcome our shyness. My first summer selling books (yes, in Northport), I began each day with butterflies in my stomach, anticipating the ordeal of facing and talking to strangers! It probably took five years before I realized how shy many other people are. That was a growing-up lesson.

 

When someone comes into my bookstore for the first time (as is true whenever anyone enters a bar or restaurant or retail establishment for the first time), that person is entering “my turf” and trusting that the atmosphere will be welcoming, so it is (my tardy realization here) part of my role to put people at ease, to assuage their shyness rather than to indulge my own. Whether they want to browse without interference or have questions or want suggestions is up to them, and I try to be aware of those differences. There is no single way to treat all potential customers.

 

 

Sometimes I read on the job.

 

For one thing, reading books is part of my job, my sister reassured me years ago, but it’s also a way that my introvert self can stay out of the way of people who need to make their own discoveries and have their own experiences in my bookstore. I do look up and greet everyone who comes in and often ask if they want a particular subject area. If someone is looking lost, I’ll ask if that person has a question. But I don’t follow people around pushing books at them. Who comes into a bookstore for that?

 

 

I make things up as I go along.

 

Bookstore hours are something I’ve tried to keep consistent throughout each season. Last year Sunday was always a day off, Monday a BCOA (by chance or appointment) day. This year those days are sometimes reversed, and Tuesdays in July are different from Tuesdays in June and August, because the FOLTL Summer Writers Series takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Willowbrook Mill, and since I am on hand to sell books at those events, my Tuesday bookstore hours in July are only 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every year I make up my schedule season by season, or even month by month.

Tonight's featured author and book, 7 p.m.

It should be no surprise that I make up prices on my used books. For the more expensive items, I try to stay in the general ballpark of the national market; other times, with inexpensive books, or when I need room, there are bargains to be had! Right now, for instance, I have my rolling cart full of $3, mostly hardcover books, some of them minor classics, such as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelius Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. How many times did I read that book when I was young?

 

 

I love my work!

 

For years I worked at jobs that made me very unhappy. My parents had insisted I take a typing class in high school so I would have “something to fall back on,” and I fell back repeatedly, year after year, going to school for a while and then dropping out to go back to fulltime work I found terribly uncongenial. We natural introverts are, I think, often unhappy when we have bosses, but we don’t like bossing other people, either, which makes having my own one-woman bookstore the perfect work world for me.

 

But I love going home, too. 

 

Much as I love my bookstore, any season of the year I love going home at the end of the day, too. Home to books and dog, home to gardens outdoors and cozy reading chair in the house, home to homey projects, such as making jam or chutney or applesauce, or more professional projects, such as editing work.

 

I still consider myself a lucky woman. 

 

Nothing, of course, is the same or ever will be again since the Artist died in spring of 2022, but I often repeat to my dog words the Artist spoke aloud so many times:

 

“We live in a beautiful place!”

 

“It’s a beautiful day – and we’re alive!”

 

Also, I am rich beyond belief in memories.

 

Original Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo St.

Crazy Week Ahead–

Open today (Tuesday), despite appearances
 

Not to say that last week wasn’t crazy, too. For one thing, I made a large purchase of books, only three carloads of which have found their way to Waukazoo Street as yet (due to everything else going on in June and July), which meant I was nearly buried in boxes of books, and boxes surround me yet today. There is an entire new subject area, American Lakes and Rivers. And the Civil War, American presidents, and nature & country living sections have all been rearranged with “new” (some very old) titles.

THEN--

Sorry if you missed her, but I do have signed copies available.

Saturday, of course—as you know if you regularly read Books in Northport—was guest author Bonnie Jo Campbell’s signing of her most recent novel, The Waters. She also signed a few copies of Once Upon a River, chatted with customers, and braved the rain after three hours to return to Kalamazoo. We had a great time, and you can see more pictures here. 

 

Later that evening my former Arizona hiking partner, a neighbor in the ghost town where the Artist and I spent several happy winters, arrived with her dog, and the four of us (2 women, 2 dogs) spent that evening and all day Sunday and then Monday morning pursuing fun. Fun in the yard, fun in the woods, fun on the beach! There’s no fun like dog fun!

So last week, what with moving books and getting ready for Bonnie in the shop and Therese at home, I was too tired at night for ambitious reading and went to bed four or five nights straight with Shaun Bythell’s Confessions of a Bookseller, a re-reading experience obviously tailored to my preoccupations. Then for two nights, after Therese and I and the dogs (after my exciting afternoon at the bookstore) were caught in a downpour on Saturday evening and came home drenched, and the following day, first at Houdek Dunes and then Good Harbor, hiked a total of six (6) miles with our dogs, I read the first sentence of a Prix Goncourt novel over and over again before turning out the light in defeat, too drowsy to retain that sentence’s sense and proceed normally to the next. Last night and this morning I finally did better with a book my neighbor loaned me, an adventure set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula….

 

Today (Tuesday) I’m back in the shop on Waukazoo Street, open despite the forbidding appearance of scaffolding in front of the door. Painters are doing some repair to the façade, as well as painting, but there is access to Dog Ears Books through Red Mullein, my neighbor just to the south in the same building. And if you haven’t checked out Red Mullein yet, you should do that, too. It’s like nothing else in northern Michigan, I promise. 

 

This week, though! Ah, complicated: 

 

      Wednesday: I have a late morning appointment so won’t be in until noon at the earliest.

 

      Thursday: CLOSED for personal reasons.

 

      Friday & Saturday: Normal hours, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 

My next post will introduce July book news, of which there is plenty, much of it thanks to Friends of the Leelanau Township Library. Preview hint: their annual book sale is Saturday, July 6, but there's more in July, so stay tuned. 

Meanwhile, I have many projects of my own, at work and at home.

Sunny Juliet is my sidewalk supervisor on this project.