“Locals’ Summer” Is Underway

Friends of the heart

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

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

Lunch without dogs, can you believe it?

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

 

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

Faint pine cone only clue....

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

 

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

 

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

Only the first page of the lists --

 

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

Happy dogs off-leash in the yard.

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

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

 

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

 

Wednesday:

 

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

 

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

 

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

        - John Dunning, Booked to Die 

 

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

Object of bookseller obsession

.

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

Books in the Car

On the trail, looking up --

Over the weekend, although we traveled no farther from the than Willcox (14 miles north-northwest), the Artist and I had, as always, books in the car. I set out Saturday morning with The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, by Craig Childs, only a few pages left unread. The Artist had two or three books with him, but having begun Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (not for the first time but for the first time in many years), he stuck to it faithfully from beginning to end, knowing that his other car reading selections, books that could be picked up at any time and opened anywhere, would wait patiently as long as necessary.

Already, however, I have so far glossed over the “books in the car” story as it unfolded on Saturday. 

 

You see, I was picked up by a neighbor and carried my book with me in a bag, while the Artist drove to town separately to be about his own business while I was meeting with a group of “ghost town ladies” (my name for the group; they refer to themselves as “the riff-raff”) for lunch, our first gathering in over a year. What fun! It didn’t matter that our orders took a while to arrive, because we had plenty to ask of and say to one another, and when a call came on my phone from the Artist as we were lingering over our checks, there was still no hurry, but it was agreed that Edna would eventually drop me off at the Friendly Bookstore, where David and I would rendez-vous and ride home together.

 

Full disclosure: There was a big book sale going on at the Friendly!Although prices were dirt cheap, we exercised massive self-restraint -- and only filled a single box to load into the back of the car! One slim paperback I kept out of the box, a book to follow that of Craig Childs (so soon to be finished), was Wendell Berry’s Life Is a Miracle. 

Berry’s subtitle to this small volume, published in the year 2000 and still pertinent and not widely enough read today, is An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Perhaps (and I say this in full recognition of the fact that making a big splash is not Wendell Berry’s way of being in the world) the book would have made a bigger splash, garnered more media attention, had the subtitle read: An Essay Against E. O. Wilson’s ‘Consilience’ – because while Wilson is not the only target of Berry’s criticism, Wilson’s notion of what he calls ‘consilience’ and his advocacy for it give a sharp focus to Berry’s larger criticisms of a materialist culture that values market efficiency over all else. And that’s fine with me, both the general and the more specific “against” targets, as I find arguments for materialism self-defeating and have always found Wilson’s know-it-all posturing annoying in the extreme.

 

Wilson’s book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, makes an argument. In roughly 150 pages, Berry carefully analyzes the argument to lay bare its contradictions and basic incoherence. Wilson knows a lot about ants, but he falls dismally short as a philosopher (shoemaker should have stuck to his last), and I confess to a devilish delight at Berry’s skewering of Wilson’s straw man argument: 

 

In his chapter on “Ethics and Religion,” he has “constructed a debate” between “the transcendentalist” (a straw man) and “the empiricist” (a stuffed shirt).

- Wendell Berry on E.O. Wilson in Life Is a Miracle 

 

Touche! Berry’s well-aimed arrow here is only an opening salvo in his lengthy and detailed critique, which I will not review in its entirety but urge you to read for yourself in Life Is a Miracle, particularly if you consider yourself an admirer of or apostle for E.O. Wilson’s “unity of knowledge.” 

 

My delight in other pages was more generous, delight not only in Berry's ideas and statements, but recognizing that he and I share admiration for other writers. Encountering a quotation from Stephanie Mills, a writer from back home in Leelanau County, Michigan, someone we know personally, made me happy, as did a paragraph on the work of Jean-Henri Fabre, “the Homer of the insects” -- and one of my favorite nature writers.

 

Maybe you would have preferred a photograph or two of the new stacks of books that made their way from sale tables to back of car to shelves and stacks in our ghost town cabin? I’m sure one or two of them will find their way into this blog in future posts. One, I’ll just hint, was about horses….

 

For now, as the Artist has read the last page of his Steinbeck, closing the book with a great sigh of satisfaction, I’m wondering -- will one of his next car books be Cannery Row? I’ll leave that one on top of the stack on the little table between our reading chairs and see if it gets picked up and carried along in the next day or two.

The Place of Place: “Do I Stay, or Do I Go?”

regionalism. Emphasis on regional locale and characteristics in art or literature. Regionalism was a significant movement in Canadian literature early in the 20^th century. Other national literatures also had periods in which regionalism was emphasized. 

Midwestern Regionalism. American literary movement of the late 19^th century that is characterized by the realistic depiction of Midwestern small-town and rural life. The movement was an early stage in the development of American realistic writing.
  

- Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, 1995

[Don’t ask me why the EOL capitalizes Midwestern Regionalism and not regionalism. I have no idea.]

In the last couple of decades, the term sense of place has become ubiquitous in American discourse; whether the topic is fiction or the visual arts, sense of place is often highlighted and extolled. It is a sensibility that has come to pass over and against an earlier aesthetic, in which historical period dictated what was considered important or beautiful. And yet, oddly, while sense of place has become a dominant theme, the label “regional” tends to limit the audience for arts or books. Why this disconnect? Given the definitions above, situating regionalism in the historical past, the view from the critic’s chair is clearer.

But where does that leave us? The sense of place aesthetic is at odds with postmodern criticisms that locates regionalism in the been-there, done-that category. We live in a “global” world, we’re told. Is our fascination with sense of place, then, nothing more than nostalgia?

I’m not setting out today to advocate for or against regionalism but to explore what this sense of place discourse means to us, as Americans, and what place place holds in our individual life stories. What is the place of place in your consciousness or mine? In the arc of our personal narratives?

Re-reading some of Jim Harrison’s essays from over two decades ago, I am struck not only by the way he responds to various places – to Leelanau County, the U.P., New York, France, Montana, and Arizona – but also by a general question he poses as it relates to food, a question that could also, easily, relate to geography – or anything else: Is it more desirable to climb a hundred mountains in a lifetime or to climb one mountain a hundred times? Being a man, Jim naturally sees a parallel in the question of marriage vs. the life of a libertine. Surely he has also thought about the parallel question of where one makes a home, where one spends one’s life, given that his own life has been lived in multiple places but also, in each of those places, on terms of intimate knowledge of each place.

As I reflect on that, already I am seeing “100 mountains” or “one mountain 100 times,” even as an analogy, to be a false dilemma. I’m seeing a wide and fertile middle ground. But I don’t want to assume it from the outset and have not yet explored far enough to have made a case for its existence.

For many writers, one particular part of the world or of their native country remains home for all their lives, whether they remain in that place or leave it and never return, and all of their important writing lives there, in that place where it is at home. For Sarah Orne Jewett, “the country of the pointed firs,” rural New England seacoast whose name she gave to her most important writing, was that place. For Ernest Gaines, home is Louisiana, the part where country people live. Eudora Welty’s world was Mississippi. Ivan Bunin’s fiction is set in the Russia of his childhood. We associate so many writers with New York City that the list would take more room than I want to give to it – but for some reason, fiction set in New York and infused with its streets and sights and smells and patterns of speech is not considered provincial. Why not? Surely the locale and characteristics of the city are vital to many New York stories. Well, I’ve always wondered but don’t want to follow that side road today.

One of my favorite writers who has chosen to climb the same mountain over and over is Wendell Berry. His poetry and essays and fiction are unimaginable apart from his life as a Kentucky farmer, and in choosing that life he also advocates for it.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
― Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge

This past week I read a book that came to my attention because the author is from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I lived for many years. In fact, before my years in Leelanau County accumulated, I had lived longer in Kalamazoo than anywhere else, from South Dakota to Illinois to Michigan and beyond. So, not surprisingly, here is the passage that struck me on Thursday evening:

Evolutionary cul-de-sac. That was how I thought of the streets of Kalamazoo. There were a lot of good things about Kalamazoo, and even some great things, like my family. But I’d already lived 19 years of my life there, which was too long to spend in any one place. And when I went to the grocery store or to work, I ran into people who’d known me since I was a kid, and most of them still applied their old knowledge of me. Even though everything was different now, it was hard to escape the powerful orbit of history, the inertia of the past. 

-               Joelle Renstrom, Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature

Wendell Berry finds a meaningful life only in returning and staying in the country where he grew up, the country of his family history, whereas Joelle Renstrom’s return, initially necessitated by her father’s fatal illness, becomes problematic after his death. As she puts it, “I needed to continue evolving.” She sees staying in Kalamazoo as the end of her personal growth.

This is where I need to address the question of my own life, if only because my life is the reason the question arises for me at all.

Wendell Berry has his answer: his part of rural Kentucky is his place in the world. He belongs there, his life and work and art inseparable from the place. Joelle Renstrom’s answer, insofar as she has formulated it at this stage of her life, seems to be that each place she lives has a certain expiration date. Vancouver was home for a while, and then its time was over. She had a New York era. She came back to Kalamazoo but needed to move on.

I have a dream life akin to Wendell Berry’s, but my actual life has been much more like that of Joelle Renstrom. There were 17 adult years for me in Kalamazoo (I arrived at age 22), and there have now been 24 years in Leelanau County, but I grew up in neither place, and no earlier generation of my family called either place home. And what to say of two years in Cincinnati? Repeated returns to Paris, France? Or winters on Florida’s Gulf Coast, or, more recently, last winter in the high desert of southeast Arizona? Is northern Michigan less important to my life because I have loved other places? Is loving more than one place some kind of disloyalty? And if I say no, have I begged the question from the start, doing nothing other than try to justify my own life?

Some ways of life have little to do with the place in which they are conducted. Someone can move to a strange city and spend all day at work or (if a student) in classroom and library, go home after a few beers, and collapse in an apartment. I knew people who lived like that in graduate school, but it was not my way. On foot, on public transportation, in a borrowed car, I ranged as far afield as possible – other parts of town, public parks, surrounding countryside, and beyond. Those habits had been strengthened by a month alone in Paris the preceding spring, but even in Kalamazoo, my long-time home previous to graduate school, I never tired of exploring. Back in Michigan now for a long time now, out in the woods with my dog is one of my favorite places to be, but the truth is that many roads continue to becon.

Here I go back to Jim Harrison. No one who knows Jim or his work could deny that he has always had both a very active life of the mind and an insatiable appetite for the outdoors. When Jim lived in Michigan, he was connected to Michigan, engaged with it, eager learn all he could about it by intimate acquaintance. Later he approached Arizona and Montana the same way. He would probably be the first to admit he will never know the mountains or the desert as does someone who has lived an entire lifetime in mountains or desert and nowhere else. But as for those multiple places, truly being, as fully as possible, where he was when he was there – that has been his way of life.

Down on the Illinois prairie, post-Cincinnati, my yearning for the woods and waters of Michigan practically made me ill with longing. “In the abstract, then, you could be happy living in Wisconsin,” someone told me. In the abstract? Home is not an abstract question! Place is not abstract space! Nothing against Wisconsin, you understand, but my overflowing treasure chest of northern memories is full of time in Michigan.

On the other hand (and back and forth I swing!), my love of place is not singular but is, rather, a love of places. There must be, as I mused earlier, a middle ground between commitment to one place and promiscuous serial residences without attachment. A place can be a beloved lifetime friend without being a spouse. It cannot be disloyalty to love more than one place, can it?

What of Renstrom’s question of personal growth or evolution?

Here too I must insist upon more than one answer and say the answer will vary from one person to another. Born in South Dakota, which I only recall from a family vacation there years later, I could not wait to leave Joliet, Illinois, at the age of 18 and could never imagine living there again, yet my youngest sister has made a very full and rich and satisfying life and career without ever leaving the town in which she was born. The third sister has a life history of cities: New York, New Orleans, Chicago. “San Francisco,” she told me once when there on a business trip, “is your kind of place!” But I’ve never seen California.

In Leelanau County and its small villages, clear labels are given to differentiate “natives,” “locals,” “summer people,” and “tourists.” Those who move here from somewhere else are questioned closely about where they grew up and just how many years they have been here (or, for summer people, “coming up here”). It would be hard to find someone here who doesn’t love this place, but who is entitled to claim it as home? Home, here in the county, often seems a vigorously contested category.

Some people live entire lifetimes in one place. Others return later to childhood homes. Still others lead ex-patriate lives until they die, perhaps in one place, perhaps in a series of places. But how can anyone think the quality of a life is determined by the number of places one lives?

-- Serendipity has come to my rescue once again! Searching back through pages of The Raw and the Cooked, looking for the essay in which Harrison put forth the mountain/mountains dilemma, I happened on this:

The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering. -               “Just Before Dark,” 1991

It’s worth taking time to read that sentence more than once and to think about it for a while. It took me several readings to think about the part played by the difference of the urban world and the natural world in the place or places we choose to call home.

One of the most jarring things about returning to a city or town where one grew up or lived long ago – for me, Joliet, Lansing, or Cincinnati would be examples -- is the disorientation brought about by changes in the landscape. An old city hall is gone, along with the old movie theatre and bowling alley. An entire neighborhood was demolished for a freeway. One’s memories have been erased from the material world. And it’s no better out in the suburbs, where subdivisions and malls have replaced farms. What has become of one’s old landmarks? They are all gone. And so, while the city is full of ghosts from your past, many of them waft about unanchored. All these changes, along with busy traffic, distract from “proper remembering.”

True, deeply rural landscapes change, too, of course, but usually not so abruptly, and even where there is abrupt change it somehow feels different. You drive an old logging trail in the U.P. and see where forest fire swept through the year before, a fire you heard about on the news. Now you see miles of charred trees. It’s shocking, yes, but somehow it makes sense in a way that miles and miles of big new houses where you used to build tree forts with childhood playmates can never make sense.

Climbing one mountain over and over, whether for years (as Wendell Berry has done) or only for a matter of weeks (as I did on each visit to Paris or as David and I did every day we drove from our high desert ghost town to the little cow town 14 miles away), if one is living in a place and paying attention to it, brings the realization that it is never the same mountain two days in a row. You cannot step into the same river twice? Neither can you visit any natural setting more than once, because the woods, the lakeshore, mountains and desert, the playa – all are different every day. And because they are, they compel attention and at the same time leave room for “proper remembering” of one’s “normal life.” In the wild, we are able to look at our own life as another part of nature, rather than seeing it – no, feeling it -- as the center of the universe.

This post is far too long. I doubt I have held a single reader through every paragraph from the long-ago beginning to the (blessedly) now-approaching end.

I cannot see either staying forever or forever moving on as contrary and exclusive possibilities for personal growth. We can surely stay and stagnate, but it is closing down or failing to move forward, not staying, that determines stagnation. Just so, I’m sure that moving on can be either embrace of adventure or flight from self, thus growth or the inhibition of growth. Or, in both cases, I suspect (staying or moving), something in between. Periods of growth and periods of stasis. Life’s rhythms.

“Oh, the places you’ll see!” promised Dr. Seuss. We will none of us see them all. What counts, I do believe, is not flitting from one to another and vying to have the longest list but being as completely as possible in whatever place you find yourself in, at least long enough to know if it can be home for you or if you need to move on.

No one else can make the decision for you. And you yourself will make it over and over again, as long as you live.

A Time to Plant, A Time to Reap: From Winter Daydreams to Summer Work

A winter crop is the crop that a farmer grows in his mind while he sits by the stove in the winter. They are always perfect crops. They are perfect because no sweat has been shed in them, and they are safe from pests, human frailty, and bad weather. Summer crops are another matter.  

– Wendell Berry, “Looking Ahead” (1978), in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

There may have been a time when Wendell Berry’s work was known only to a small group of devoted initiates, but that day is long past. Berry’s essays, as well as his fiction and poetry, have brought him well-deserved recognition in his lifetime, as it should be. I was proud of my country when Wendell Berry was chosen to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you missed that lecture in 2012, it’s worth taking the time to read it (or listen to it) now, and if it’s been a while since you’ve read or heard it, it’s well worth revisiting.

Berry (a farmer and a poet, after all) is as sensitive to language as he is to land, nature, farming, society, and history. I flinch each time a visiting small town consultant uses the term ‘agribusiness’ instead of simply agriculture or farming. To Wendell Berry, the change in terminology reflects an enormous change in attitude and perspective.

Farming, according to most of the most powerful people now concerned with it, is no longer a way of life, no longer husbandry or even agriculture; it is an industry known as “agribusiness,” which looks upon the farm as a “factory,” and upon farmers, plants, animals, and the land itself as interchangeable parts or “units of production.”  

– “Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,” 1979

I also flinch at talk of our community needing to “brand” itself. Are we a “product”? In some ways, yes, you will tell me. Well, I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned. I don’t even seek to “brand” Dog Ears Books. I work hard to maintain the quality of my bookstore offerings and to get the word out (and the people in), but “branding”? In my book, that’s for breakfast cereal. Whole or steel-cut oats do not require an advertising campaign. I leave it to you to think of cereals that depend on brand-name recognition.

I don’t want “brand recognition” for my bookstore, just a good, solid reputation.

One of my village neighbor-friend customers recently asked me to order Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land for her. (Generally, I stock as much of Wendell Berry’s work as I can, but this time of year stock tends to run low and not get replenished until later in the spring.) She has many of his books already but was told that if a person had only one, it should be this one. So I ordered a copy for her and one for stock, and when she came in to pick up her order we both began paging through to find favorite essays.

Immediately I turned to “A Good Scythe” (1979), a short essay running only slightly over four pages. You see, I have a scythe at home in my barn, and I also have instructions for “hanging” it, i.e., adjusting the grips to my height and the length of my arms. I’ll need to sharpen (whet) the blade, too, this spring, and then, what’s to stop me from mowing my own meadow, without any noisy machinery at all? It will be a dream come true, working with that beautiful old tool.

Native grasses and wildflowers

The season of seedtime

After giving a list of the problems encountered with a power scythe and a contrasting list of advantages gained by using one powered by his own muscles, Berry adds two more differences he discovered, first, that he never took any pleasure in using the power scythe but always did with the hand tool, and second, that he experienced, if I may paraphrase, “the good kind of tiredness” after working by hand, rather than the strained weariness left him by the power tool.

Back in the 1970s (the Environmental Era, as I think of it) we had a name for tools like this. They were called “appropriate technology,” AT, which was to say they were technology suited to the job at hand rather than to an outsized vision of every farm being a thousand acres and every household task requiring electric "horsepower." For me, AT means washing dishes at home by hand. It also means, in every part of my life, reaching for books and magazines printed on paper, reading that can go from car to coffee shop to desk to bathtub to bed and never need batteries.

Well, what did you expect of me? If I were not already in love with the life of the senses, I’d have little reason to live in the country, and if I weren’t given to romanticizing my life (who will do it for me if I don’t do it for myself?), I’d never, ever have become a bookseller, so you will not be surprised, o my little band of readers, when I confess that my very favorite part of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was that section where Levin was out in the fields, mowing with the peasants.

Levin looked around him and did not recognize the place, everything was so changed. An enormous expanse of the meadow had been mowed, and its already fragrant swaths shone with a special new shine in the slanting rays of the evening sun. The mowed-around bushes by the river, the river itself, invisible before but now shining like steel in its curves, the peasants stirring and getting up, the steep wall of grass at the unmowed side of the meadow, and the hawks wheeling above the bared meadow – all this was completely new....  

... But Levin wanted to get as much mowed as possible that day and was vexed with the sun for going down so quickly. He felt no fatigue at all; he only wanted to work more and more quickly and get as much done as possible. 

 - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Winter daydreams are fine for a while, but getting outdoors to work is going to feel very satisfying, this year as always.

Comfort in Many Places

Hilltop trees jump to life in morning light.

Can you identify the trees?

Books come to me in many ways, and just yesterday I received one in the mail from acquaintances in Traverse City, lovely people I don’t know very well but met back when I had my bookstore on Union Street for a couple of years. The book they sent me is called Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Writers, by brothers Dave and Jack Dempsey. Among the famous are my beloved Bruce Catton and my equally beloved Liberty Hyde Bailey. Among the forgotten I read about Maritta Wolff and resolve to read some of her books. It was a comfort to receive this unexpected gift in the mail when I was feeling sad.

There are poets, too, in the book. One of them is Jane Kenyon, included by virtue of time she spent in Ann Arbor at, of course, the University of Michigan. And in her brief poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” I find further comfort:

I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. 

 Now there is no more catching one’s own eye in the mirror, 

 there are no more bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of course, 

no illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing 

 of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket.  

The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, 

 and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.

Our friend’s graveside service was held this morning at the little country cemetery on Horn Road, in the neighborhood (there is no town) unofficially known as “East Leland,” under a cloudy sky but with bright fall colors and loving hearts all around. Along with traditional Jewish prayers, there was Woody Guthrie music and this poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me  

and I wake in the night at the least sound  

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,  

I go and lie down where the wood drake  

rests in his beauty on the water,  

and the great heron feeds.  

I come into the peace of wild things  

who do not tax their lives with forethought  

of grief. I come into the presence of still water  

and I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Good poetry comforts without misrepresenting either life or the world. A poem about death, Kenyon’s “Notes from the Other Side” is, in fact, a litany of some of the large troubles and small, troubling anxieties the poet faced toward the end of her life. The “first clod of earth [that] hits the casket,” hard as it is to see and hear, is the ushering out of all those woes. Wendell Berry seeks peace and beauty in nature to counter his middle-of-the-night despair and anxiety, knowing – don’t we all realize it as we read this poem? – that he will have to go again and again to the wild things for comfort. I love his use of the personal pronoun ‘who’ at the beginning of the line explaining why the wild things are so peaceful.

In times of grief, it is often the small, unexpected phrase or image that clutches at the heart. At the request of one of the daughters, as mourners were taking turns dropping shovels-full of dirt on the lowered casket, the rabbi began to sing “This Land is Our Land,” and, quietly, many of the mourners joined in, smiling. I was taken by surprise by the line about the “No Trespassing” sign. It jolted me because of a sudden, vivid association with the last walk I’d taken with my friend. We were on one of my favorite back roads, walking by the roadside as it runs along private posted land, my dog on her leash, and my friend suggested we walk out into the field. “I don’t think anyone would mind, do you?” she asked me with a smile, eyes twinkling, adding, “under the circumstances.” The circumstances were her imminent death and what turned out to be our last country walk together, but yes, the memory is comforting.

Our dog, my constant companion, is always a comfort to David and me.

Sarah is so patient! And much cuter than my poor drawing of her.

Last hawkweed?

As it was for my departed friend and is for Wendell Berry, nature is a comfort for me, too. Colors are bright even under cloudy skies, and there is color in small dabs as well as in panoramic scenes. Not only trees but also leaves of asters and goldenrod and forsythia give color to warm us before winter's cold arrives.

Surprise fall color radiates from neighbor's forsythia.

A close look shows goldenrod foliage turning, too.

Even without color, lines are fascinating.

Teapot

I find peace and comfort in my drawing class, in the practice of drawing, and in homework for the class, even when the assignment is to draw an old shoe. The instructor selected a shoe for each student. We had to take the shoe home Wednesday night to finish the drawings and will return with drawings and shoes next week.

Athletic shoe (my drawing, but not my shoe)

Adored husband, dear family and friends, familiar and lovely surroundings we never take for granted – another day of love and beauty, the value of these blessings is only underscored by difficulty and loss.