Long Winter Nights

Little light, except as reflected off snow, and almost no color -- color comes further down.

 

We are past the winter solstice, so each night is shorter than the night before, but somehow in January it doesn’t feel that way to me. Daylight skies are grey, and cloud cover continuing through the night hides moon and stars, making darkness deeper, colder. Theoretically and no doubt actually, cloud cover would make night warmer if there were warmth to hold in, but that if is a big one. And daylight is not exactly a relief, either, when it means having to bundle up and go out in the cold, one of the few minuses of having a dog in winter. Or maybe it’s a plus, that having to wade through knee-deep snow and breathe cold, clean air, but, like the gradually shortening nights, it’s often hard to feel the positive aspect. 

"Are you putting on your coat?"

Beginning with the end of December and continuing through March come also for me difficult anniversaries. The Artist and I had to say goodbye to a dog we had all too briefly, and only weeks later came the Artist’s first trip to the local ER (we were in Arizona at the time), quickly followed by a jolting ambulance trip to Phoenix and, finally, major surgery. At first, that January two years ago, after successful surgery we thought everything was taken care of and were happily, if briefly (as it turned out), planning the rest of our life together. Respite from worry was short-lived. More trips to the ER, more surgery – and ultimately, the end of our earthly adventures together, March 2, 2022.

 

Scenes from those emotionally intense five to six weeks of my life are burned into memory, and while I can set them aside during the long, sunny, birdsong-filled days of spring and early summer and the busy, colorful days of late summer and fall, the dead of winter brings them all to the fore again. It isn’t that I reach intentionally for the most difficult remembrances. Hardly! When I wake with those scenes crowding in on me, I try to put myself back to sleep with happier memories, such as September walks in the grassy, hollyhock-lined alleys of Grand Marais, our dreamy travel through France another September, or the most ordinary summer Sunday spent mowing grass and moving cars and boats around the yard here at home. All those scenes and more I would welcome in dreams!

 

Meanwhile, in my waking hours, I take refuge in books.

 

Over the years, the Artist and I put together quite a little collection of books having to do with rivers and boats, and the one in which I sought solace during the season’s first massive storm was Henry Van Dyke’s Little Rivers, a collection of travel and flyfishing essays first copyrighted in 1895 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and first published in 1903. Van Dyke, an American cleric, writes of boyhood fishing and later travels with father, friends, wife, or by himself to various flowing waters in Canada and Europe, always with bamboo rod and “fly-book.”

 

His fishing was for trout and salmon or grayling. (Here I pause, because I have always thought grayling was a trout, not, as he describes it, some lesser, bottom-feeding fish, and now, looking into the matter, I see it is a salmon and considered very good eating.) But the most prized of all, for Van Dyke, is the ouananiche, “the famous land-locked salmon of Lake St. John” and other Canadian lakes. Don’t you love that name? Ouananiche!

 

Any fisherman would delight in Van Dyke’s description of waters and fishes and the stalking and hooking and landing – or sometimes losing – of piscatorial prizes. (Piscatorial: that’s the kind of old-fashioned language of this book from over a century ago.) For my own pleasure, I am equally pleased by his knowledge of wildflowers and birds and noting which appear in each season along the rivers he walks and fishes.

 

Even that is not all, however, as the book is a collection of memories, and as the author looks back on his happiest vacations his thoughts are colored by what Susan Cain calls bittersweetness, sometimes even recalled from the happy times themselves.

 

And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever. 

 

Our Paradise, the Artist’s and mine, encompassed happy hours in a variety of places: A little trout stream in southwest Michigan prosaically known as the Mentha Drain; another unbeautifully named river, the Sucker, in the Upper Peninsula, its mouth meandering an always-changing watery path through woods and wetlands to Lake Superior; Leelanau County’s lovely Crystal River (despite the leeches that clung to us after we waded out); and our own little hidden-away, no-name creek, keeping its secrets until we followed it upstream after a storm to a miniature waterfall. There were the Allier and the Alagnon in France’s Auvergne region, rivers whose names we had never heard until our wandering brought us to their banks. And of course, principally – because of the many times we explored various stretches, never encountering another vessel or explorer – Van Buren County’s Paw Paw River, the “Little River” that gave that name (Little River Cafe) to a restaurant friends of ours had for a while in the town of Paw Paw.

 

During this lifetime, none of us ever “stays” in Paradise, but if we happen upon it now and then, we can count ourselves fortunate, and those are the memory scenes that I court during these long, dark, cold winter nights. Also, dark eventually gives way to daylight, if not always sunshine, and I have a ever-eager companion in the outdoor cold.

But my dog, while great, isn’t news, and I do have some very good news this week. On Tuesday, (one of my two by-chance-or-appointment days -- BCOA -- along with Monday), I came to the bookstore in hopes of a UPS delivery, and sure enough – my order of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters came! You can just imagine how happy that made me, and I know it will make many of my customers happy, too. In fact, one local woman walked in just after I had photographed the box of books and said immediately, “I want one!” And we’re off!

The books are here!

First one out the door!

I Am Ten Years Old

I'll explain at the end.

Ten! Not my bookstore. Dog Ears Books is (only!) 24 years old. And not me personally (and never mind about that number). No, it’s “Books in Northport” that is officially ten years old today, September 13, 2017, marking a complete decade since my first blog post.

Who would ever have imagined it a decade ago? David and I did not even have Sarah yet! It’s possible her actual birth occurred on this very day, though I use September 10 as her birthday, since when we found her at the Cherryland Humane Society and adopted her on January 10 we were told she was four months old. But the blogging bug had bitten me earlier, back at the beginning of the autumn of 2007.

In September 2007 I set out on an experiment. Looking back now, I’m glad to have taken advantage of this modest form of self-expression because, thanks to a decade of entries, I can look back not only at words but also at images from my life, from random sights I would otherwise have easily forgotten to carefully planned personal or community events. My “Books Read” lists, visiting authors and family, friends old and new, vacations, rambles (mental and physical), and more than a few rants (though belatedly I set up “Lacking a Clear Focus” for the least bookish of my opinions and other life flotsam) – all these form the log book of my journey over the past ten years. I did not, in 2007, imagine ten years of blogging. But neither did I foresee, in 1993, 24 years of bookselling. “I always wondered,” someone said to me once on a very different subject, “how it happens. And now I see. It happens one day at a time.”

A notion that fascinates me is a little pop meme going around, to the effect that each of us has a “true age” that captures our essence. You’ve heard it said of a toddler or a puppy, “She’s an ‘old spirit.’” Certain individuals seem to be born wise beyond their years – or prematurely middle-aged – while others of us retain a certain childishness (not to put too fine a point on it) clear into old age. No doubt there are self-tests one can take to determine one’s “true age,” but as soon as David and I understood the idea, we needed no tests to know that he is 14 years old and I am 10.

Ten years old. Fourth grade, crazy over Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, suffering the pangs of transition from child to pre-adolescent. Socially awkward, physically immature, intellectually curious, and quivering with secret fears and dreams, at the age of ten I was more comfortable exploring the natural world of the world of books on my own than venturing into “society.” This has not changed, but I have come to recognize shyness and uncertainty in others, and when they enter my bookstore world I try to make them feel welcome and comfortable.

And now “Books in Northport” is as old as I am (or as my soul is). Back in the mid-20^th century when I was born mankind knew only handwritten diaries, but guess what: these very words that you are reading now in Bookman Old Style font on your lighted screen first came into the world on the yellow pages of a legal pad, scrawled in pen, in the pre-dawn hours of a cool August morning (I was planning ahead), as a ten-year-old girl disguised as an aging woman sat on a porch light near an open window, dog by her side.

Will I ever grow up? Doubtful. Will I live forever? Impossible. But we are here now, you and I, on this beautiful, crazy, cruel, and miraculous planet, and I am glad for your company. Thank you for your company on my journey.

That horse up there at the top of the post? Well, you know, I am still a cowgirl in my dreams!

And for those who like counting, this is post #1721.