Rushing Headlong!

Look out, world!

Whenever we get to the dog park or we’re playing the game at home where she chases tennis balls launched through the air by her momma or any old time she happens to spy a rabbit in or near our yard at home, Sunny Juliet goes into high gear in a heartbeat. Not the soulful bedtime cuddler, she is a speeding rocket! 

Shadows on fresh spring snow

 

I wish I could say northern Michigan is rushing headlong into spring with the same speed Sunny shows when chasing a rabbit, but – nah. We had a teasing short course of spring weather, followed by yet another snowstorm. Then the weather warmed up again, and we were visited with torrential rain before once again cold returned, bringing both snow and ice. The result of, first, the heavy, wet snow, and then the rain freezing to ice, both times with pounding winds, was a lot of tree damage—in the orchards, the woods, and along northern roads. 

Northport Creek nearly at street level

Another result for many (mostly in the northeast corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula) was loss of electrical power. Calling the ice beautiful, then, seems insensitive at best, perhaps even cruel, and yet what else to say when the sun shines on pellucid, glass-encased branches, making tiny rainbows in the bright, clear air, and every breeze brings the sound of tinkling crystal as shards fall to the ground? 

Frozen vineyard under blue sky

Workers clearing away fallen branches

Hear the sounds of crystal?

Nature can't help her awe-ful beauty.

But yes, I know, friends, that I have been fortunate while others have faced devastation, and my heart goes out to those who have had losses. Life isn't fair. That's why we have to be fair with and kind to each other.

Piles of presents!

Sunny was not forgotten, either.

As for me, personally, although I was not at all in an anticipatory mood in the days leading up to it, I had another birthday the other day. Rushing headlong through my eighth decade, I am now another year closer to the dreaded eight-oh! But I was so fearfully spoiled by cards and texts and presents from family and friends—and the day itself dawned with what seemed miraculous: a sunrise!—and then I tricked a friend into letting me treat her to a late lunch, not telling her it was my birthday until afterward (she says she’ll never trust me again)—that, all in all, unexpectedly, it was a very satisfying day. 

Tuesday sunrise - what a great gift!

Fisher's Happy Hour cream puff (K. Snedeker photo)

Sunny and I had been to the dog park earlier, and later I bribed her with a beef bone so I could spend the evening calmly and quietly, reading and visiting on the phone, all snuggled in a sleeping bag with my feet up. My old friend James, had he seen me, would have said in a voice pretending to be shocked, “Pamela! You sybarite!” It was my own personal, self-indulgent holiday.

But Sunny was not completely ignored. That never happens.

Other than advancing age, another reason I wasn’t much in the mood for a birthday is the way my beloved country seems to be rushing headlong away from freedom, democracy, and universal suffrage and off a cliff to land into the opposite of such values. (I will refrain from giving a name here to the opposites that are daily before our eyes, because you already know what words are so painfully appropriate.) After a day spent resolutely offline, though, in bright sunshine, at the dog park, opening presents, and visiting with friends, in person and by talk and text, I thought I would chance looking at headlines on my phone. Maybe only headlines. What a wonderful surprise greeted me: Cory Booker standing up in the Senate for the U.S. Constitution and the American people! I was so heartened! What a terrific birthday present! The next morning I could hardly wait to check in again with him. As you know, he stood and spoke for over 25 hours, a new Senate record. I am so grateful to him and proud of his presence in Congress. We need more standup men and women there!

Back at work in Northport on Wednesday (with some of the nastiest weather so far this year: snow turning to sneet, then rain coming down, turning to slush on the sidewalks that will no doubt freeze to ice overnight—ugh!), I had not expected anyone in my shop, but browsers and buyers appeared as if by magic, and they were lovely visitors, too, all of them. I was glad there were dog treats in my jacket pocket for the little Boston terrier who needed to come in and to warm up. 

Now before the weekend arrives, I need to put together an April display for National Poetry Month. Always something to do in a bookshop. It's my good life.

Friday, May 23, noon -- details to follow soon.

My life has changed a lot. (Our lives are always changing.)

School is back in session. The number of boats is thinning in the marina. Playground equipment stands empty in the rain, and leaves are beginning to turn and fall. Autumn is a season of change more obvious than the gradual changes of summer.

The rest of the United States, when it recognizes the name Bruce Catton, thinks “Civil War historian.” Here in Michigan (especially northern Michigan, where Catton spent his boyhood and youth), we know him as one of our own, not only the writer of books about the Civil War but also author of an engaging and moving history of Michigan, as well as his beautiful and much-loved memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train. 

 

Catton had a tragic sense of history. His thesis in Michigan: A Centennial History can be stated simply, if metaphorically: “We are all Indians.” With this phrase, the author was not taking on the colors of a wannabe and dressing up in literary pow-wow regalia, pretending to be something he was not. This is not cultural appropriation. What Catton meant is clear to readers of the book: the relentless march of American history, the tide of white Europeans invading and claiming ancestral tribal homelands, which meant cultural destruction to Native American tribes, bringing change faster that the native peoples could adapt to it (had the Europeans even allowed them to adapt, which is another story) – that kind of rapid, destructive cultural change is the fate of us all, whether we realize it or not. One example from Michigan history is the destruction of old-growth white pine forests: in the short term, the timber industry provided jobs locally and lumber to rebuild Chicago after the fire, but the resulting fields of stumps provided nothing for the many young lumber towns that rapidly fell into decay.

Perhaps being overcome and left behind is the fate of the older generations everywhere in the world where change is rapid. In this Western “civilized” world, certainly, we are (and have been for generations) overdriving our headlights – and we are also, simultaneously, the deer in the headlights, those bringing change no more in control of the future than those overwhelmed by changes wrought.

In my own life, for a long time, there were certain things I did every year and naively thought I would always do, and now I find myself falling away from many of what used to be annual personal traditions, while at the same time unforeseen developments have come into my life, complicating and changing it irrevocably. One recent development is the dog we call Peasy.  I knew I was adopting a shy dog, a dog with “issues,” but I had no idea what it meant to live with a “reactive” dog until, as we got to know him better, I began reading more about the special needs this little guy has, which is why I now say that he is “my comfort and my challenge, companion and burden, solution (to some of life’s problems) and problem (on his own, in many ways).” Fortunately, I am not alone in dealing with the challenges Peasy presents, however, because the little dickens has managed somehow to worm his way into the Artist’s heart, as well. How amazing! 

“He’s so full of life! And he’s so grateful to us! It would be churlish not to love him,” says the Artist (who adds that the last thing he wants to be is a churl). When Peasy trots proudly into the bedroom carrying one of his toys to show us, we dissolve in laughter. He plays joyfully and brings his joy to us, another of his treasures and one he shares happily. If only he could spread his joy and love around to other people, as Sarah did! But that, sadly, is not his nature.

Nikki was a shy little plain Jane, “pure mutt,” as I used to say when people asked. Sarah was a beautiful, calm, very sociable Aussie-border collie mix. The world was a scary place for Nikki, but with us she had a good, long life. Sarah was the easiest puppy and dog in the world to live with and loved just about everyone and everything in the world. Neither of those dogs prepared us for Peasy. But although the accommodations necessary for dealing with him and friends and family at the same time are sometimes a real pain in the neck, he loves us so much that we can’t help loving him back.

 

So that is one big change in our life. Another, creeping on us gradually, but more speedily with each passing year, is that we are getting old. Us! Whoever thought that would happen? It doesn’t mean a thing that it happens to “everyone,” because what has “everyone” to do with us? 

 

I began this post with Michigan history, zoomed in on my personal life, and now want to pull back again for a wider, longer view. Northport. Leelanau County. Traverse City. Northern Michigan. In Traverse City, change has been bigger and faster than out here in the county, such that if we don’t go to town for a couple of weeks, we hardly recognize the place. Okay, slight exaggeration. But really! High-rise hotels and motels have taken the place of old mom-and-pop tourist cabins, and enormous condominium buildings sprout like giant mushrooms from outer space along the Boardman River and Grand Traverse Bay. We look at what we see there now and recall to each other how the same place used to look forty, fifty, sixty years ago, when Traverse City really was still a small town. 

 

Well, Northport is still a small town. We have our dog parade in August and homecoming parade in the fall. In the summer, there is the farmers market and, on Friday evenings, Music in the Park. There is a blinking traffic light at the south end of the village, and there are parking lots but no parking meters. Yet change is inevitable everywhere, and Northport is no exception. Will our little village be able to accommodate change and retain its friendly small-town atmosphere, or will the atmosphere itself be changed? No one, I think, wants the latter possibility to be realized. Those of us already here like our town the way it is, and new people come because they like it, too.

 

When I posted on Facebook that I had a couple copies of the book Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, two village council members put dibs on those copies (so I should probably order more). Is it possible to limit growth? How do we do it?

 

It’s bow season right now for deer, to be followed by firearm deer season, and slowing down on county roads is a good idea. Maybe slowing down in other ways is a good idea, too. Easy for me to recommend slowing down, though: I’m getting old. How do you feel about change and speed?

 

P.S. Please see here my pitch for the kind of support that counts with booksellers, whether you like life fast or slow. Thanks!

What Next? (I refrain, please note, from full caps.)

Where (on earth) are we going?

First it’s beastly hot

And then it’s not.

Then we have the sun

And then the rain.

Cloudy skies abide

And then retreat

It’s undecided now,

So is it gonna do?

Waukazoo Street on Saturday morning

We were fortunate on Friday for farmers market in Northport in having an absolutely perfect day. It was a good day to have the bookstore door open, too, with Bruce at the helm and me taking time off at home with old Sarah-dog. Saturday came the deluge! Then Sunday morning both sky and forecast threatened more storms, but clouds moved off around midday and let us enjoy perfection once again, with a much lowered humidity and strong, refreshing breeze. 

Sunday and Monday are both days off this year at Dog Ears Books, but, expecting a UPS delivery, I came in for a while on Monday after latte outdoors (we braved the cool morning air) at the New Bohemian Café with a friend, and not only did my book order arrive earlier than anticipated, but so many people came in to browse and buy books that I stayed until almost 5 p.m. A full day in the bookstore, after all. Could not turn away people who were so happy to find the door open!

Glorious composites of July!

Backing up to the beginning of the weekend -- the Artist and I failed to see the meteor when we went out to wait for it on Friday, and maybe we should have been disappointed; however, it was so lovely and calm and peaceful out there on the hillside overlooking Lake Michigan as the stars came out that staying out late seemed more than worthwhile. We reminisced and shared memories of our respective childhoods and watched what we later learned from a knowledgeable friend had probably been the International Space Station – although when I went online to check its orbit, I only became confused, but I’m going to believe that what we saw was the ISS, as our friend so familiarly called it.

But while all that was part of our peaceful country life Up North, we remain connected to a larger world – the larger world, the world of conflict, dissension, anger, and resentment – the world in which, for years now, the “unbelievable” has been occurring on a daily basis. We here Up North are not playing ostrich, nor do we deny responsibility for our share of both the problems and what we hope will be solutions. Many people are working hard, and I see battle fatigue in friends’ faces (what I can see of their faces, what with masks covering our mouths and noses to protect each other from coronavirus transmission) and also “hear” rage erupting out of fear in the FULL CAPS of Facebook posts. But I am trying to listen carefully and (when possible) sympathetically before rushing to respond, to think about what others may be trying to say, not just how their words sound, and also, often now, to pass by without comment those spewings that indicate a mind too upset to hear me without winding itself tighter and tighter. 

And, as often in my life, I turn to books.

One book I’m reading right now is a fictionalized biography (it reads like a novel) of Mangas Colorado, by Will Levington Comfort, titled simply Apache, and another is a book of essays by Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. I read in Apache last night and this morning opened the larger book to Berlin’s essay called “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in which he argues that almost all critics of Machiavelli have failed to grasp the essential position, what Machiavelli saw (Berlin believed) as “an insoluble dilemma,” or “two incompatible moral worlds,” that of a virtuous private life or that of successful existence in the social world, a dilemma that forces choice on all human beings but most implacably on political leaders. Basically, Machiavelli believed, one can emulate Jesus or Caesar, but not both – and only the emulation of Caesar will keep a nation strong and together. It’s interesting to me to think of Mangas Colorado (as presented by Comfort) as a wise Machiavellian leader, though in the end he and his were outnumbered and outgunned….

If you are wondering what Machiavelli might think about present-day American national leadership, I would say that Berlin would say that Machiavelli would say that it fails on both counts: it fails to be virtuous (in which case it would necessarily, according to Machiavelli, fail as leadership), but it also fails as strong leadership. This, however, is my point of view as seen through the lens of an interpreter of a thinker who was himself interpreting mankind in the early sixteenth century, so make of it what you will.

Was Machiavelli right about human nature? That is another question to ask of anyone, to be answered only after we have determined for ourselves what that person said and believed.

Berlin himself coined the phrase “agonistic pluralism” to describe American political society. Pluralism is the idea that there are multiple incommensurate values that cannot be purged altogether of conflict, and hence we have social agon, or conflict. What does this mean for the future of democracy, in our country or in the world? Here is an essay on the subject that I need to read carefully. If you read it, too, let me know what you think. 

Today's flowers and greenery are a reminder that while Nature can be "red in tooth and claw," in other moods she can also soothe our souls when we are, perhaps, weary of each other. 

Book Review +Trip Down Memory Lane + Love Letter: NORTHERN HARVEST

Northern Michigan cherry orchard, spring

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women

       In Food and Farming

by Emita Brady Hill

Detroit: Wayne State University Press (A Painted Turtle Book), 2020

Paper, 327pp w/ index, $24.99

Warning: This book is not a love story! It is 20 love stories, all told in the words of northern Michigan women involved in one way or another (some in multiple ways) with growing, preparing, selling, and/or writing about local food. Emita Hill had the genius to collect and edit these oral histories, and her daughter, Madeleine Hill Vedel, to whom the book is dedicated, took many of the portraits that introduce each section. 

The book is organized into six sections: 

I.         Two Orchards and a CSA

II.       Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate

III.     Pastry and Cheese

IV.     Chefs and Restaurants

V.       Writers and Teachers

VI.     Two Homesteads

It will not take readers long to discover, however, that there is much overlap in the backgrounds, interests, and passions of the women in the various stories. Many, though not all, are first-generation Americans (at least one an immigrant herself) who grew up in urban immigrant communities where food held families and neighborhoods together. Another related thread running through many of the stories is travel, with women exploring world food at all ages of their lives, in various ways, from Peace Corps work to cooking classes with famous chefs. A third commonality shared by almost all is education. Whether educated through on-the-job training, self-taught by trial and error, having studied under experts and/or at colleges and universities – also, teaching at every level imaginable -- these are women passionate about learning.

Before I get too far into my raving about this fascinating collection, though – and I’m so glad to see something like this in print! – I should acknowledge that I have known many of the subjects for years. For example, I met Anne and John Hoyt back when their Leelanau Cheese was still a dream: now, like my Dog Ears Books, their business has been around for over a quarter of a century. Julia Brabanec and Susan Odom are neighbors of ours -- at least, as country people measure neighborhoods. Barb Tholin’s son and one of our grandsons were kindergarden friends back in St. Paul, Minnesota. And so on.

Other of the women I have met only casually, and two or three not at all. Yet, I should add, because part of the joy and great privilege of having a bookstore is meeting in person people whose stories, true or fictional, I have loved between the covers of books. Emita Hill and I met for the first time only in 2019, after all. But right away, when she described her book to me and said that Wayne State University Press was the publisher, I was ready to buy it sight-unseen.

-- Fast forward to spring of 2020, this strange spring of COVID-19, which finds me sheltering in place in southeast Arizona, where my husband (the Artist) and I came for the winter, as we have done three or four times previously. I’ve had Northern Harvest on my to-read stack for several weeks and have picked it up many times to read a few pages. A couple of times I read paragraphs or whole pages aloud to the Artist. But I have been rationing my reading of this book, careful not to read too fast, since our return to Michigan and the re-opening of my bookstore are as uncertain for me as the future is for everyone these days, making these visits with friends back home no insignificant part of my current pleasure in the book. But enough about me. I want and need to tell you about the book itself.

First, the stories in Northern Harvest are not just about people I know and places I love, nor will they be only that for other readers. This is important: they are also stories about the growth and convergence of several social movements in the United States in recent decades and the roles played by women in the realization and coming together of those movements. The particularity and specificity of the northern Michigan setting authenticates the larger social picture, since every large social picture happens first to individuals at a local level.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Cheryl Kobernik and her husband are farmers who grow cherries organically. Cheryl comes from a background in sociology and counseling but says of her Up North life,

Not growing up in agriculture, it’s an honor to be accepted into the agrarian community. I know there are good people everywhere, but … I have never met people with such integrity in my life.

Although Jenny Tutlis, of Meadowlark CSA, and Julia Brabanec, organic apple grower for decades in Leelanau County with her late husband, John, started out life in art and drama, respectively, both take pride in years of growing healthy food for local markets. Says Julia,

This was our life, and we loved it. We worked very hard, and in later years when we would think back and talk about all that we did, we would say, “How on earth did we ever do that?” 

Julia and John began their farming life in late middle age, and part of “that” was planting over a thousand trees by hand and pruning those trees year after year. Jenny came from a different beginning, inspired by stints in the Peace Corps and time at Innisfree Village, a community in Virginia. 

It may have been inevitable that certain words and scenes would jump out at me from each story, especially at this time in the world’s history. When Anne Hoyt, for instance, talks about the crucial importance of hygiene in cheese-making, she mentions training workers in her business on cleaning and sanitizing:

From silly things, from handwashing. You would think – everybody thinks they know how to wash their hands, but they actually don’t. It’s understanding what’s dirty and what’s clean.

Today, in the spring of coronavirus, the “Wash your hands” mantra on everyone’s lips, with all of us told to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Happy Birthday to You” as we scrub, I think of Anne as being years ahead of that learning curve – although ‘curve’ is another word that has new and vivid connotations at the moment….

Anne’s story, however, is in for the most part a happy one, that of a dream come through -- by dint of very hard work, of course, which is what it takes for most of us to make our dreams come true and keep them alive. 

Other Northern Harvest stories more often tell of career paths revealed only after a winding trail had been blazed. Carol Worsley of a B&B called Thyme Inn in Glen Arbor says of the cooking classes she teaches, “It certainly wasn’t my plan. I never had a plan.” 

(Sorry. I don't have any photos of sheep!)

Barb Tholin’s original plan, after apprenticing at a Vermont farm affiliated with Sterling College and earning a bachelor’s degree in agronomy, was eventually to have her own farm. A sheep farm, she decided at one point (like Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, you must pardon me for thinking). Instead Barb went from working in a macrobiotic restaurant in Chicago for “a couple of years” to managing the produce department at a food co-op in St. Paul, Minnesota, for 19 years, and finally founding the magazine Edible Grande Traverse, which she continues to edit today as partner with her former husband, who manages the advertising accounts. 

Madagascar Vanilla Rooibos

The women who work in and/or have their own businesses in catering, restaurants, and non-farm food production-- developing and perfecting recipes and products, marketing and filling orders, pleasing customers -- fill me with awe. Angela Macke’s story of her Light of Day tea impressed me so deeply that I put the book down, got right online, and ordered tea from her then and there! (Delicious Michigan came to me in the mail!) Angela studied and practiced nursing and traveled extensively before the family settled down near Traverse City, and her herbal teas are the result of 

… not exactly by trial and error, but it was just doing my research first, and then making up a small batch … and tasting it, and paying attention to the effect on my own body.

She worked with food labs at Cornell University and the University of Nebraska, and her tea farm, which she did not initially think of as a “business,” is now the only certified and Demeter Biodynamic tea farm in North America. Still, in order to farm and produce her teas so that they meet her personal high standards, Macke works 80-90 hours a week from April to November.

Mimi Wheeler, born in Denmark, founded Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate in the village of Empire and operated it for a decade before she retired and sold the business to Jody Dotson Hayden and her husband, who continue the business today. Mimi’s working life began in social work, fueled by a passion for social justice. Coming to the U.S., she worked in community mental health and school counseling, but the dream of having her own business – something related to food – was always in the background. 

Since I had made chocolate desserts, made souffles, cakes, truffles for a number of occasions over many years and had gotten a lot of praise for this, it dawned on me that chocolate was what I had to start doing as a new career. 

Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate put the village of Empire on the national food map. Appropriately, social justice was a concern shared by the people who took over the business when Mimi decided to retire and focus on her grandchildren. Jody Hayden and her former husband, Chris Streeter, were founders of Higher Grounds Trading Company, a coffee company devoted to paying farmers, in places like Chiapas, a fair price for their crop. Chris continues to run Higher Grounds, and when Jody and her present husband, a Traverse City native from a cherry orchard family, bought Grocer’s Daughter in 2012 they continued in the spirit of the founder, sourcing local dairy products, honey, maple syrup, cherries, and blueberries.

We could make more money if we sourced everything more cheaply. And that’s what a lot of chocolate companies do. But our first ingredient isn’t sugar … we do chocolate first and foremost and then we add really great ingredients to that.

Supporting local community – that is another important belief and practice in the lives of these northern Michigan women.

Who works harder than a chef, pastry or other? Susie McConnell worked in various nodes of the food network the women in Northern Harvest represent. With a start at the Leland Lodge and Sugarloaf, she went on to work at Hattie’s Restaurant in Suttons Bay, for Carol Worsley at Thyme Inn in Glen Arbor, for Martha Ryan at Martha’s Leelanau Table in Suttons Bay, and finally three years with Angela Macke’s Light of Tea tea farm, learning about biodynamic agriculture, before retiring to her own home and garden and kitchen.

Farm market shoppers in line for 9 Bean Rows bread

Then there is the farm-to-table group: Jennifer Blakeslee at Cooks’ House in Traverse City; Jennifer Welty of 9 Bean Rows Bakery (that deservedly famous sea salt fennel bread!); Martha Ryan of Martha’s Leelanau Table in Suttons Bay; Amanda Danielson of Trattoria Stella in Traverse City; and Donna Folgarelli, known far and wide for her family business in Traverse City, Folgarelli’s Market and Wine Shop. As I was reading the stories in this book, just when I thought I’d read about the hardest-working woman in the food world, I would turn to the next and find another. This is certainly not a world for high-maintenance princesses who need to be coddled!

In the “Chefs and Restaurateurs” section, Martha Ryan is the woman I know best, but I learned much I hadn’t known before about her. I knew the Leland School and Stonehouse Bread Café parts of her story but not that she was from Kalamazoo or that she lived in ethnic neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, or that she attended Michigan State University. And how had I never heard of her 11-week backpacking trip through France, Spain, England, and Ireland, with special focus on France? If Martha and I ever have time in our busy northern Michigan lives to talk about that trip, I’d love to hear more! 

(And, by the way, as an example of how incestuously entwined northern Michigan lives are – in a good way! – Martha’s Leelanau Table has its home in “the red house” on St. Joseph Street in Suttons Bay, which is owned by and was completely remodeled under the direction of architect Judy Balas, wife of the very Bruce who has been my part-time bookstore volunteer [“bookstore angel”] at Dog Ears Books for – how many years now? Maybe two decades? Is that possible?)

Rose Hollander

In the “Writers and Teachers” section, in addition to Barb Tholin and Carol Worsley, you’ll find Patty LaNoue Stearns, Nancy Krcek Allen, and Rose Hollander, and here again a northern Michigan web of many strands connects us all. I first met Patty when I was working part-time for Arbutus Press, publisher of The Cherry Home Companion. I took prepaid advance orders for that book, and we had a fun and successful book signing. Rose Hollander’s late husband, Stu, was our family attorney for years. And one winter Rose and Newbery winner children’s author-illustrator Lynne Rae Perkins hosted a dinner party in their Suttons Bay homes for local booksellers and librarians -- dinner chez Rose, followed by a group walk down dark, silent, snow-muffled streets to Lynne Rae’s house for dessert and a visit to her studio. Memorable evening! 

I loved reading this statement by Patty LaNoue Stearns: “I was a terrible high school student.” I am always amazed by adolescents who have a clear idea of what they want to do in later life. Those of us who stumble into our calling, as Stearns did with journalism, are more the norm, I believe – or the lucky ones. 

And I am eager to try out Nancy Allen’s Thai Coconut Curry Base – because what I neglected to mention earlier, in my excitement, is that each story in the book begins with a photograph and short bio and ends with a recipe. 

CSA field

The final two chapters (in “Two Homesteads: Preserve the Past and Celebrate the Future”) bring us back to farms, which is where we began. Susan Odom’s introduction to 19th-century growing, cooking, and living came with her job as an interpreter at Greenfield Village. Similarly, Emily Umbarger learned old ways when she and her grandmother began as volunteer gardeners at historic Fort Michilimackinac. Odom now makes her home and her living at Hillside Homestead in Leelanau County, Umbarger with her husband and sons at Hearth and Harvest Homestead outside Interlochen. In both these women’s lives, education continues as a passion alongside farming. Says Odom,

I am re-creating the sort of little nineteenth-century farm and trying to do things the way they used to be done on a small scale. I think I’m particularly good at explaining that to [Farm Stay] guests and visitors. … There is limited use for that in life. Being a good interpreter. In museums, yes, but sadly the thing is that nobody ever makes much money in museums. So I’m right at home on a farm because you don’t make much money on a farm either. 

At the time of her interview, Emily Umbarger was working for pay as a counselor at Interlochen Arts Academy and also working as a volunteer in a not-yet-funded program at Interlochen to grow food for its kitchen and compost as much as possible, involving students in the entire process. She was also pretty much running the family farm business, since her husband’s job had necessitated a move to the night shift. In her oral history, Emily said she doesn’t think about the number of tasks she faces each day but rather... 

“What are the cool things that I can do [today] with my kids? What are the cool things that I can do with my husband? That we can do as a family? And how is that going to enrich our life?”

She also notes, “The heart of the educator in me is always at work, even with my own kids.”

Because, for all these women, it is never just about making enough money to pay the bills. It’s about love and respect for earth’s bounty, providing healthy food grown in a sustainable manner, community building and support, stewardship of natural resources, a passion for learning and the fearless daring to make mistakes, educating all ages for a healthy future -- and plenty of uncomplaining, unremitting elbow grease. 

I make no apology for the very personal nature of this post. These are women from my home, and I share their beliefs and principles. And while far from northern Michigan at present, I do believe that "we are -- truly -- all in this together,” wherever we are. 

Author Emita Hill holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University. Her previous work includes Bronx Faces and Voices (2014), oral histories of sixteen men and women who rebuilt community after suffering crime and blight. Dr. Hill divides her time between New York City and northern Michigan.

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming offers delightful stories, hope for the future, and is a most timely contribution to the literature and history of a beautiful region of our country.