As We Begin a New Year

Domestic vs. Wild 

 

Let’s lead with Sunny Juliet, looking back to see how far behind her momma is. We start out untethered when we leave the house, but I have taken to employing the leash on return to ensure that we arrive home together. Sunny doesn’t try to evade the leash. Neither captive nor wild canine, she generally accepts what I propose--though if her opinion differs from mine she will let me know. Oh, yes, Sunny still has opinions!

When she was an opinionated little puppy...

On the evening of Christmas Day—not Christmas Eve but late Wednesday, on our final sortie of the holiday at home—Sunny and I were startled to hear from across the fields a terrifying scream. Not a hooting owl or a yipping coyote but something neither of us had heard before, and I had to do some online searching later, back in the house, to identify the sound as coming from a fox. Talk about the hair standing up on the back of your neck! A screaming fox is a truly alarming wild sound!

 

When we’d started out the first time that day for our morning walk, the bells of St. Wenceslaus greeted us, so our Christmas Day 2024 was bookmarked by two very different voices in our country neighborhood, morning church bells and evening fox scream.

 

 

Bookstores and Libraries Are Not in Competition!

 

Once again the other day, someone in my bookstore referred to our township librarian as my “competition,” and once again I made my usual correction: The correct term is colleague. Booksellers and librarians are colleagues, not competitors. Other booksellers with bricks-and-mortar stores are also colleagues, not competition. (The online behemoth is something else.) There is no necessity for buying every single book you want to read, and I use the library myself. On the other hand—and I should probably explain this, too, when I make the point about librarians being my colleagues—a house without family books is incomplete as a home, and all children deserve to have a few books of their very own, books that belong to them. I’m not going to repeat today everything I’ve written before about bookstores and libraries, though, so here’s a link if you want more than this one paragraph.

Leelanau Township Library on Nagonaba St.

 

Past Light on Present Days

 

Living wholly in the past is incompatible with sanity, but living wholly in the present is no great shakes, either. Give up memories? Give up history? No, thank you. I spent a good part of 2024 in 18^th- and 19^th-century North America, through both fiction and nonfiction, motivated in part by a wish to retreat from the 21^st century, but also, as there is no escaping one’s own time, again and again in my reading finding events and thoughts from our nation’s past shedding light on our present. 

 

It was James Boyd’s novel, Drums, set in the early 1770s, that got me started. My main takeaway from this book was that ours is a country that was born splintered and divided. Not every American wanted to break away from England. All on the North American continent did not see eye to eye with each other. Then I read Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi, a volume from the “Rivers of America” series, and that strengthened my insight about our divided origins. What we usually learn in school about the region of our country covered in Carter’s book begins only with the Louisiana Purchase and visits the area only once again, briefly, for the Battle of New Orleans but otherwise? The Lower Mississippi, by contrast, concentrates on a complete history along the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, with a cast of characters including Spanish, English, French, European-American, African-American, and Native American, with economic and military and political plans and objectives creating dissension at every turn. A country born divided….

 

Neither Daniel Mason’s North Woods and Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River is set exclusively in the 18^th century, but both continue a theme, for me, of the ways in which politics and war impinge on individuals and families and leave marks that endure sometimes past specific memories. While Mason’s time scope is broad, he limits his spatial canvas to a few acres of woods in western Massachusetts. Lawhon also places her two main speaking characters, both Black women, in a small community, a Canadian village peopled exclusively by refugees from American slavery. As different as they are, both novels incorporate voices and stories from far away and long ago, Mason more chronologically, for the most part, Lawhon in a brilliant, dizzying splendor of tales told and read within other stories shared, stories from the Underground Railway, the War of 1812, and complex relationships between indigenous peoples and those escaping slavery. Neither of these novels offers simple reading, but the challenges they present are well worth the effort.

 

Also during 2024 I read a couple of accounts by Englishmen who spent in the early United States and Canada. One of them, disappointed in his hopes for clerical preferment in his native land, hoped for more success in the U.S. but, again disappointed, moved to Canada and might have made a permanent home, except that his wife did not find Canadian life sufficiently civilized. Disappointed in their hopes, they returned to England after only a few months in the New World. The other man had no intention of transferring his allegiance to America, but he made a thorough, three-year tour of the country, including the Southern slave states and the Western frontier. If one were going to read only one of the two accounts, I recommend that of James Stuart, Three Years in North America, over the bare three-month account of the more self-seeking Rev. Isaac Fidler.

 

Margaret Van Horn Dwight’s A Journey to Ohio in 1810 told in diary form of her travels from New Haven, Connecticut, to Warren, Ohio, and was as entertaining as it was eye-opening. We like to think that settlers of that time were sober, God-fearing folk, but Margaret tells over and over of Sabbath drunkenness and “so much swearing … I have never heard before during my whole life,” such that when she encounters a Pennsylvania Dutchman not given to profanity she is amazed. As Margaret was traveling with a deacon and his wife, she had a few observations to make on religion and the clergy, but hers is a very personal account, written for her best friend; however, while not pretending to be anything else, it is a vivid picture of travel at the time. 

 

And then I come to a 2007 ARC, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again, by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes. I am only halfway through this little paperback (which is already on my current new book order list), but the authors’ claims are that (1) the writing of the Constitution should be regarded as a second American Revolution and that (2) the Constitution’s ideas are our national political conscience—“conflict within consensus, compromise, representation, checks and balances, [and] tolerance of debate.” The authors wrote their book, they say, because they see Americans “losing touch” with these basic Constitutional values, “most particularly a commitment to compromise and a tolerance for competing ideas.” 

 

Michigan’s Representative Dan Kildee, who has served the 8^thdistrict in the state Congress for twelve years, said in a recent radio interview that he thinks citizens often mistake disagreement for dysfunction, that disagreement is valuable and only becomes dysfunction when legislators place a higher priority on ideology than on collaborating and compromising to solve problems. This accords with Oreskes and Lane’s thesis. Unfortunately, what we see in Congress these days has been exactly that: an exaltation of ideology and a refusal to compromise.

 

The Framers of the Constitution debated the question of state power and federal power: Which should have priority? In what areas? They wrangled over how states would be represented in the national legislature—equally or according to population—and whether to have one legislative house or two. And when all the compromises had been accomplished and the Framers were reasonably content with what they had put together, they submitted their document to the American public, some of whom still hoped that their new government would have a king at its head. After all, monarchy was the form with which they were familiar. 

 

“No other nation,” the authors note, “had ever submitted its Constitution to its people.” Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the various state constitutions had been submitted for popular ratification. Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death”) was appalled (“inflamed,” the authors write) by the phrase “We the people,” which he saw as pledging allegiance to a centralized power at the expense of the states. And “in the fall of 1787 the People were divided.” There was strong feeling among many that the Constitution needed the addition of a Bill of Rights—and yet the Constitution had to be ratified by the states before it could be amended, and it took until 1791 before the amended Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, was finally ratified. 

 

Had it not been for compromises all along the way, the Constitution of the United States would never have come into being at all.  

 

What would a Constitutional Convention look like today? Here are a few thoughts (not mine). 

 

 

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

 

Many, many people found their way to Northport and to Dog Ears Books for the first time in 2024. What was most gratifying to me personally was how many people, both newcomers and repeat visitors, expressed appreciation and gratitude for my bookshop’s existence and the quality of its offerings. That’s a good feeling, knowing that what you are doing with your life matters to other people, and I had that good feeling frequently in the past year. Thank you so much, friends! It means more to me than I can express in words! 

Now, on the way to the 32^nd anniversary of Dog Ears Books in July 2025, I’m here for another winter, with a short week and short hours while the nights are long and the village streets—let’s say, “uncrowded.” 

The shop will be closed on Thursday, January 9, for our national day of mourning and the state funeral of President Jimmy Carter. 

After that, barring holidays, the winter schedule will be Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (weather and roads permitting, of course). And new book orders only once a month during the winter. That’s the plan.

 

Again, thank you for your custom, your appreciation, and for, as Mr. Rogers used to say, being my neighbor--in this hard, cold, wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world of light and life!

A patch of blue appeared!

Christmas Present

The book I chose to give myself this year was North Woods, by Daniel Mason, one of my stepdaughter’s favorite reading experiences of the year about to end, but on Christmas Eve I had fallen asleep without finishing Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book I had searched out in my shop’s storage area after reading the same author’s novel about a young orphaned half-gypsy girl, The Diddakoi, which I’d turned to after an interval of other books that succeeded my reading of An Episode of Sparrows. (Phew! Does this count as a binge?) In many ways quite different stories, the three Godden novels in this paragraph have one thing in common: each tell stories of girls and women, and the young girls in Sparrows and Diddakoi and the young woman in Five for Sorrow all have much to overcome in order to find strength in themselves and happiness in their lives. 

So there I was, awake at 5:30 a.m. (as usual) on Christmas morning, with an engrossing novel yet unfinished and waiting for me. Also waiting for me, as she is every morning, was my dear Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist knew I needed. “I could live without a dog, but you can’t, so we need a dog.” Then, “Take that motorcycle money. Go get the puppy. Yes, I’m sure.” This puppy (I still call her that) is three years old now, and she has a clear and steady grip on her momma’s morning routine. First the momma gets up to make coffee and brings the first cup (mug) back to bed, where she sits up with a book or a writing tablet. The puppy curls patiently at my side, un chien croissant, or drapes herself over the momma’s feet, biding her time. When the momma gets up a second time, the puppy knows it’s only for a coffee refill, not really “getting up,” per se. 

"This is subtle, isn't it?" Sunny asks wordlessly.

But when the refill finally begins to cool in the mug, Sunny feels it’s time to make her presence felt with greater immediacy. First she takes a position more demanding of attention than her Sleepy Girl mode. Then, increasingly proactive, she stands up and begins to give kisses. I say “give kisses,” but this move is as much a demand as an offering. Fair enough. She has been a very patient girl for an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours, and that’s long enough! Besides, who can resist a happy, wiggly little dog girl’s kisses? Who would want to try? She's no fool!

My “plans” for the day, laid in advance, were simple. It would be a day at home, just Sunny Juliet and me. We would have our usual morning ramble outdoors before breakfast. Breakfast would be special, with little bites of pancake and bacon for Sunny, besides her usual dog food, and then, while the momma opened a few presents for the two of them, a brand-new beef bone for Sunny to gnaw. And maybe that bone would give the momma some quiet reading time.

Later: waiting for the "Okay!"

Every morning Sunny lets me know when she’s ready for me to get out of bed, even though she knows that going outside is still maybe an hour in the future. If I tarry too long beneath the covers, she lets me know I’m disappointing her (bark! bark! bark!), but once I’m on my feet, her patience returns, and I can have another coffee refill. On this particular Christmas morning I have time to fry up the bacon and assemble separately the dry and wet ingredients for the pancakes I’ll make after our outdoor time, sneaking in a few more pages of my book. 

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is one of Godden’s very Roman Catholic stories. The title refers to the rosary, and the protagonist’s continuing spiritual difficulty over the rosary stems from a painful episode—one of many—in her life journey. Lise, an American, a driver with the Army, arrives in Paris during the joyful chaos of the Liberation. When she becomes lost, on foot, in the crowds, her unintended life in France begins. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the many steps that take her from this beginning to her life in a French convent among a very special order of Dominican nuns, but I will say that the particular convent that comes to be her home sounds very congenial. There is hard work, with long hours, but also farm animals and the beautiful French countryside, and the work, while often dirty, is largely healthy farm work. The sisters eat well, too. Even during fast periods, there are feast days, so while not exactly lenient, the lives of the nuns are not uncompromisingly harsh.

 

In Chapter 8, Godden summarizes a year in the life of the convent called Belle Source, beginning in the earliest signs of spring in February: 

 

The Normandy February was usually wet and cold, but there were days of clear sunshine that reminded Lise of her childhood in England when there might be catkins; the willows turned red and the first snowdrops were out. There were no catkins at Belle Source but she found an early primrose in the bank below the aumônier’s house and a scattering of snowdrops.

 

At New Year’s Eve,

 

Another year was rounded, and nothing anyone could write or say, thought Lise, could tell the whole meaning of each succeeding year, of its unfolding; what is a day-to-day miracle is unexciting because usually it’s so sure—and yet it is a miracle; only if it’s taken away, as in a famine or drought, do we see that.

 

The day-to-day miracle of everyday life is what we so often overlook, isn’t it?

Sunny Juliet: my everyday companion

Living in the country with my dog, operating my little village bookshop, my life has its daily and hourly routines. Christmas Day is a quiet feast day at home. I am enjoying my reading of Rumer Godden and look forward to Daniel Mason’s book. Opening gifts and talking to and texting with family will be a pleasure. Will it sound strange, though, if I say I want to pay special attention today to my dog? The Artist never had a chance to meet her face-to-face, only to see puppy pictures, but this morning as I look at that furry face and into those bright eyes I say to her, “He knew I needed you.” By my side every day and precious in herself, she is a living gift from someone who knew me, who saw me, who loved me. I want to be present with my girl today. She deserves that. She is a miracle. Snow is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Light. Life.

(Now THAT is a Charlie Brown tree!)

-      12/25/2024, 8:25 a.m. And now, out into the snow we go!!!

 

Postscript: Images added before upload and after a lot of activity outdoors. In addition to all the usual neighbors—deer, rabbits, mice, squirrels—this morning we found turkey tracks in the orchard, wandering off into the woods. More miracles all around us! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Turkey track

Turkey trail

She always finds treasures!

The Mood Wasn’t Right

Sunny and a plethora of leeks

Lame Excuses

 

In the past two or three weeks, I have begun and discarded at least four posts for Books in Northport. Titles were: Tough Tourism; The House That Had Everything; “You Should Write a Book”; and Where do I want to go? Abandoned, all of them (though the draft beginnings still reside on my laptop desktop), and I know such finicky self-judgment is probably misplaced, as the nearly formless meanderings I occasionally throw out into the world, posts without any central theme or narrative thread, are often more popular and gain more comments than others I labor over to achieve a “finished” feel.

 

Leaves of dogtooth violet, a.k.a. trout lily

Ah, but then someone visiting my bookstore says, “I always read your blog,” and a note from a friend (received two days after a post finally went up) mentions that she has been looking in vain on Books in Northport for something new, and I know it’s time to kick-start my online presence. You don’t have to be “in the mood” – or inspired – to write! You just sit down and do it! And in the case of a blog, call a draft post good enough and hit that publish button!

Random Fungus (until someone identifies it for me)

 

Outdoors

 

Beginning with Sunny Juliet never hurts (see again opening image), because most people love dog stories or photos, my girl is lively and photogenic, and we get outdoors a couple times every day. Even in this morning’s light rain, we were out for a good hour, and as usual there was so much going on (every day at this time of year bringing signs of new life) that I was pulling my phone out of my pocket over and over to photograph my finds. The rain had decided me against taking the camera, but by Saturday, or Sunday for sure, the sun will be shining and those spring beauties – all over the woods! -- will have opened their petals to the light. 

Spring beauties are biding their time.

Plentiful though the wild leeks are, I never harvest them for my kitchen. If you do, never take more than 5% of a patch, and try to harvest where no one else has taken plants before. That will leave enough for coming years, as leeks are slow to mature and proliferate. 

Leeks close up

Toothwort leaves -- no flowers yet

 

We all have different tastes, in food as well as in books. Toothwort, now, is a different story for me, and I look forward to those peppery-spicy leaves and flowers in spring salads very soon. 

Everything is beautiful in its own way, isn't it?

 

That fungus close up looks almost like a rose.

In the Bookstore

 

Thursday, between customers (all from out of town and all gratifyingly appreciative), I worked with the advertising department at the Leelanau Enterprise on an ad to run in next week’s paper. Since Monday, April 22, is Earth Day 2024, I’ll depart from my usual schedule and have the bookstore open that day – if I’m lucky, with my beautiful new canvas book bags to sell, in keeping with Earth Day’s theme this year, “Planet vs. Plastics.” My regular customers know by now that any plastic bags I put their purchases in have been donated for re-use by other customers, but we really do need to eliminate plastics from our lives wherever possible, in the Great Lakes and across the nation. Agree?

And there will be, as there are just about every week, new books and “new” used book additions to store stock. As for me, I’ve been reading a lot of books set in the West lately, books full of mountains and dry washes, scarce water and hard living. I also made my way through a new memoir – what I call a “grief memoir – by Amy Lin called Here After. Although her husband was so much younger when he died than was mine, there was much that resonated with me in her experience. This, for instance: 

 

We shared a language that was all our own. I am now the last speaker of it.

- Amy Lin, Here After 

 

What must it be like for older adults who have to leave a country they've known all their lives and go to make a new life in a strange land with a whole new language? I am blessed to be able to remain in familiar and beloved surroundings.

Finally, Sunny's Mystery Treasure

Smaller than my hand...

Something's -- someone's -- partial skull, but whose? 

Almost to the Turning Point

Only two days until we reach the winter solstice, and then the light will begin to lengthen day by day. Almost imperceptibly at first, and we will certainly have many more weeks of cold (winter, after all), but the return of the light is something to celebrate.

 

Weather Notes

 

This morning’s “feels like” reading of 21 degrees did not encourage me to rush outdoors! On the other hand, the wind had died down, and I took that as a blessing, after Monday’s gales from the north, which were fierce, destructive, and gave no quarter. Sunny and I had the wind at our back on Monday when we walked out but directly in our faces on the way home, and it was brutal! Well, I should speak for myself. The dog girl didn’t mind it at all and would happily have stayed outside all day, playing in the wind and snow on her second birthday. 

 

I thought about venturing into the woods on Monday to get away from the wind, reasoning that standing trees would provide some shelter, but all the fallen trees and branches, criss-crossed on the ground like  jackstraws, gave me pause. After all, I think, they were not always on the ground, and it’s usually wind that brings them down, so standing in the wrong spot at the wrong moment could be fatal.

“What are the odds?” a friend asked skeptically when we talked that evening, adding, “I think you would have been all right.” She had a point. The odds would definitely have been in my favor, and if I were escaping a more awful fate, I would have taken the chance without a second thought. Now that so many friends my age no longer venture into the woods or even out on long walks at all, however, out alone with my dog I look to minimize unnecessary risk. Today, though, ah, yes! Only a mild west wind, and the woods called me in among the trees, where I took a reading of present and future walks. 

 

When the snow is deeper in the woods (it’s only a sprinkling on fallen leaves at present), it is the fallen, not possibly falling, trees and branches that must be minded, along with so much more. Branches disguised by the blanket of snow, deep, hidden pockets in the ground (pitfalls?) where an old stump has rotted away, and the always treacherous wild grapevines – there is much in the woods waiting to trip up the unwary. And yet, stepping carefully and watching where you step, the woods are peaceful in winter and well worth visiting.

 

Book Notes

My local readers and mystery aficionados will want to pick up a copy of Karen Casebeer’s new novel, Calling. Her Northwoods Mystery murder story is definitely plot-driven, with plenty of complications, and I enjoyed equally a running sidebar – cleverly related to the plot -- on one of northern Michigan’s most beautiful seasonal birds, the sandhill crane.

 

Another book I want to highlight this week is How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation, by Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski. If the title puzzles you, that’s intentional. Rather than pose a familiar problem and get bogged down in familiar hopelessness, the authors propose a vision and then ask, if we imagine ourselves already there, what would it have taken to get there? I am not only thinking racism in America, but also political divisiveness in America, and I’m also thinking Gaza. Having a vision is not mere wishful thinking. It provides a goal – seeing it – which provides a direction, which illuminates steps to be taken. And the first steps are to be taken by each of us. We can do it. The greatest barrier to a solution is hopelessness.

 

Bookstore Notes

 

Today is Tuesday, a “by chance or appointment” day for me, but it’s also the last week before Christmas, so here I am in the bookstore. I even have a little wrapping paper and tape for the totally unprepared. Probably won’t be here past 3 p.m., but I’ll be back again tomorrow and Thursday and Friday, 11-3, and then 11-5 on Saturday, as usual.

Someone Is Two Years Old Today

First picture I saw of her

First time I met her

Sunny Juliet is two years old today, Monday, the 18^th day of December, and she is not suffering from the “terrible twos” at all -- that is, I am not suffering terrible twos with her. The little crybaby puppy (“Tiny Girl”) and teen barker (“Naughty Girl”) has settled down considerably. She still barks on occasion (often public occasions I would rather did not include barking), but in general the challenging, demanding, willful, opinionated puppy has become a pretty grownup dog girl and a delightful companion.

Naughtiest thing she ever did (when about a year old) 

Summer tennis ball play in the yard

(Does that video work???)

Sunny and I are staying in Michigan all winter this year -- quite possibly from now on; time will tell -- and that’s fine. Although without canine encouragement, it’s unlikely that I would be going out for early morning walks every cold winter day, starting before the sun has crested the wooded horizon and regardless of how hard the wind is blowing, she needs it, so we do it, and it’s good for both of us. Fresh air! Exercise! Cold doesn’t faze the little girl, and she loves snow!

Last year in Arizona snow

First big Michigan snow for Sunny

Sunny is accustomed to my daily routine, always ready for more time outdoors when afternoon brings us back together after my work day. She will never learn to read books, and I will never have her keen nose for invisible trails in the grass, but Sunny is patient with my morning and evening reading, and I make sure we have ample time outdoors. Learning to be patient has been good for Sunny, and time outdoors is always good for me. Voilà! We both gain and enjoy each other more when we give each other time and space to indulge our respective gifts and loves.

Happy birthday, little girl! The momma loves you!

Sunny wants more snow!