My Own Personal "'Hamlet' Back-&-Forth"

 “What kind of boat is she?”

 

An embarrassing question; for it was suddenly apparent that this small craft could not be classified. She was neither sailor nor steamer; she was not a trader, still less a yacht. A roof, the width of the beam, had been raised over a black, flat-bottomed hull; small square-paned windows had been cut in, and a short mast raised above. Space had been left in the bow for anchor and ropes; in the stern a tiny deck gave just enough room for the sweep of the tiller.

 

“She’s a—well—she’s a painter’s boat.” 

 

The San Luca, by Cilette Ofaire, book’s title taken from the name of the boat in the travel narrative, was on a bookshelf I was looking through at home. I wondered why it hadn’t been on the shelf with the houseboat books, where I would have found it months ago when moving those books from living room to office. Although the “painter’s boat” was not exactly a houseboat, they did live aboard for years, the husband and wife, both of them painters. (It should really have been called a “painters’ boat,” with the apostrophe indicated plural artists.) In any case, the subject matter moved me to set aside a novel I’d planned to read at bedtime in favor of traveling aboard the ‘San Luca.’ 

 

They begin in Germany, with the plan of giving up cheap apartment hunting and the dreariness of even cheaper hotel rooms in the years following World War I, to take to Europe’s canals, living and working in their waterborne vessel. 

 

Charles had found her in a partly drained canal in the dreary marshes bordering the Elbe between Hamburg and the sea. She made us think of a peddler’s booth abandoned after a fair, or a broken-down circus wagon left by the roadside. On her prow she had carried the carved wooden head of a dragon, set off by daubs of green and yellow, and along the sides of the hull had been painted wings which ended in a sort of tail vanishing into the rudder. We could not help smiling at her absurd, helpless air.

 

Charles and Cilette did not have Harlan and Anna Hubbard’s drifting voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Sometimes they had an opportunity to moor in some lovely pastoral backwater, but just as often they were towed from one city to another in a long “train” of barges, a tugboat the motive engine of the train, past factories and cranes and sad little remnants of pathetic, bare-limbed trees. And in fact, being towed by some other vessel seemed their primary way of moving, from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Holland and beyond, in a world of customs officials, police, required permissions, and rules.

Intermission in Northport

I left my reading at the end of Part I to begin another day, first outdoors with dog and then indoors at bookshop. Part I of the story had ended sadly, with the suspicious disappearance of their little dog in Amsterdam, suspicious because neighbors on hand had complained about the boat being moored on “their” canal, and one had falsely claimed to the police that the quiet, sleeping dog “barked all night.” 

 

After a couple of early customers, the shop settled down to a dead quiet until, one by one, friends trickled in. Even before being introduced to one another (those not already acquainted), lively conversation ensued. Books were purchased and ordered, recommendations made, questions asked, until the talk ranged far and wide from Waukazoo Street, ceasing only a few minutes after closing time. It was a good day in Northport. And the next day, Saturday, would be Independent Bookstore Day! 

 

But first, back home to Sunny. In the rain. A short walk under an umbrella, dinner preparations, and then an hour of relaxation, the momma with her book, Sunny with her bone. 

 

Back to the Boat

What a surprise awaited me at the beginning of Part II. Charles and Cilette sell their boat! Right in the middle of the book! The new owner, a friend of theirs, gives it a new name, and C&C purchase another boat and christen it ‘San Luca’ to continue their voyaging, now through Belgium and on to France. 

Early in the story, we were told that Charles “knew how to create an atmosphere of intimacy out of the barest of materials” and thus transformed the droll, abandoned, dragon-headed boat into a waterborne home and studio to two wandering artists. Charles’s ingenuity is exercised once again on the new boat, a “lamentable figure” when first they see her, “streaked with rust” and further disfigured with “ugly red paint.” As soon as they found her,

 

…Charles began to draw up plans: taking her to pieces, putting her together again, modifying her to fit all our needs and our wishes. 

 

“The entry here,” he said aloud, “will become the living-room.” He shut his eyes and Cilette knew that he was building the wall over in his dream.

 

The Artist's houseboat in Leland, Michigan!

Oh, what memories such passages evoke for me! The Artist whose life I shared was a boat dreamer, also, and could not see an old hull anywhere on land or a smart vessel in harbor without making elaborate mental changes, sometimes even committing plans and sketches to paper, and so whenever we would read aloud to each from books such as this one, he could not bear to rush through descriptions of renovations and would often say, if I were the one with the book in hand, “Wait. Read that last part again. I didn’t quite picture it.” 

 

Daydream material

Sketching a remodel....

Then Back in the Bookstore

On Saturday, April 26, the sun came out in Northport for Independent Bookstore Day!!! More importantly, probably, from a traditional Northport point of view, it was the day of the annual Scott Brow Fishing Derby for families of young children up at the millpond. Some people came for both books and fish, though, and that worked fine.

 

Discussing movies and TV series with a customer-friend from Cedar, I needed to check on the date of the 19^th-century establishment of the town that became the ghost town where the Artist and I spent several contented winters. Imagine my horror, in looking up my own blog post from 2015, to discover that I had mistyped the date for the first Dos Cabezas post office! It was, of course, 1879, not 1979! All this time, and of all the people who had read that post (a popular one because of its subject matter), no one had corrected me! It’s kind of a hassle to make a correction to a post that far back in time, but I persisted until victory was mine.

 

Two dogs visited the bookshop on Saturday, Charlie and, later, another little dog about the same size but held in the owner’s arms. Friend Lucia also stopped by (though she had bought books only the day before) to wish me a Happy Indie Bookstore Day! 

Always good to see Lucia!

My bedtime book on Saturday was, once again, Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, my go-to comfort book, the one that soothes my soul in troubled times and strengthens my resolve.

 

An excerpt from one of my favorite books

 

…It was hard to say who the “real” people were. She didn’t have anything against most of the new people, not the retirees or the summer people or tourists or even the snowmobilers, not on a case-by-case basis, except that they tended to expect too much, to assume too much. But they paid their taxes and kept their lawns mowed and volunteered at the school and spent money in the local stores and had as much right to be here as Gladys did, she realized that. And McAllaster had always been a tourist town, a resort town; her own parents had made a living off that fact. 

 

But things were changing fast now. Too fast. Half a dozen new summer places got built on the beach every year, and no one was content with a regular house, everyone had to have a mansion. At this rate she wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes on the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years….

 

-      Ellen Airgood, South of Superior

  

On the road!

 

Last time I went anywhere farther from home than Benzie or Grand Traverse County? Last fall I ventured all the way to Cadillac, and in late spring of 2024 I made it up to the U.P. once. 

 

My spring road trip 2025 took me to Reed City, the halfway point a friend from Kalamazoo and I had chosen for this season’s rendez-vous. 

Always good to see Laurie!

We did no sight-seeing, and so I have no album of photographs to share, but I did stop to hover a few moments at a little farm village called Chase, where I mailed a postcard to a friend in the U.P. and used my phone to capture a couple of old buildings, the first because it must have been very important at one time in local history, the second because it made me think of how often I have meditated on hiding out in some out-of-the-way place where no one would ever find me. Why such an idea? Don’t you have occasional fantasies of leaving everything behind?

Faded glory

No one would look for me here.

Now, in closing, another excerpt

A somewhat strange book came into my hands. The title is King Noanett, the subtitle A Story of Old Virginia and the Masssachusetts Bay, the author’s name on the title page given as F. J. Stimson, but in parentheses below that J.S. of Dale. The main character is a young man of Devon, who meets a lass and falls in love – an old story, so far. This particular story, however, is set in the time of great conflict in England, and as the young man’s grandfather is a Parliamentarian and the young woman’s grandfather a royalist, the lovers are star-crossed. And here I must reveal that the young man’s unusual name is Bamfyde Moore Carew.

 

Let me here skip ahead in the story. Carew is convicted of giving aid to the royalists and sentenced to “transportation” (i.e., deportation to the colonies) and several years’ servitude (I forget how many), but eventually he and an Irishman who had shared the same transport vessel escape their masters and join an army. Horrors of slaughter and dissipation drive them from that life, also, and they carry away with them a girl whom neither of them wishes to marry (because the Irishman, like the Devon man, is in love with another) but whom they cannot leave to the life of the camp. 

 

Enough of background. Of this convoluted story, I only want to leave you today with a speech the Irishman makes to his friend:

 

“Beauty is given man, the good kind of beauty to enjoy, the bad kind to tempt him and teach him strength. In this way even pleasure hath its place—and a Puritan is but a suicide that thrusts him, like a blubbering child, away from the fires that are to try him! Let monks renounce—a man is here to live, and touch and try the lives of others; to feel his life and use it to the full, and then to give it away—to the first cause, maybe? Men to be brave and true, maids to be brave and gentle—and both their highest duty to be kind.” 

 

“Their highest duty to be kind.” Isn’t that a noble thought for the day? 

Quietly spectacular hellebore

A Different Kind of Summer

Different in What Way(s)?

 

Somehow a new blog post hasn’t been coming together for me this past week. I started one around the theme of “Falling Down on the Job” (since I was having so much trouble accomplishing the job of writing a post), but though I cranked out several sections, wandering around among local and personal job-related topics, what I got down into a file seemed uninspired. 

 

My heart wasn’t in it, I guess. As is true for my puppy, Sunny Juliet, my attention has been rather scattered of late. Other than my bookstore and my reading, I focus pretty exclusively on Sunny Juliet and my flowers. 

 

“Who will we meet today?” the Artist used to ask sometimes in the morning at the start of a summer day. Our Northport summer last year was about the busiest we’d ever seen, with books and paintings practically flying out the door, and in the course of any business day we would have countless conversations, some with old friends, but many also with people we’d never met before. Long, interesting talks sometimes took place only in the Artist’s studio, others stayed in my bookstore, and still others spilled back and forth between our separate spaces. Right next door to each other all day, however, we might only have five minutes together on some days while at work. The separateness of our days gave us a lot to share in the evenings, relaxing during supper on the front porch or taking a slow county cruise out for ice cream -- though sometimes we were too tired to talk much, and that was all right, too. 

 

This year is very different. There are still conversations during the day, out in the world, but the puppy and I have a pretty nonverbal relationship. Sunny Juliet can be vocal, of course, when she has a point to make, but my admonition to her to “Use your words!” only reminds her that she is supposed to nose the bell hanging from the doorknob, not bark, to let me know she needs to go outside. And in general my chatter to her is unremarkable. Telling her over and over that she’s a good girl and that I love her is not exactly small talk, but it’s certainly repetitious, while my stories about her “daddy” or her predecessors (Peasy and Sarah and Nikki) can’t mean much to her at all. Obviously, I’m really talking to myself….

But she always listens.

Book Stuff

My front porch book at present is Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. The book has been a bestseller since its first market edition in 1880, but if it opened a lot of minds, it certainly failed to change policies. Everyone on the political spectrum, it seems, finds something to love and/or something to hate and fear in George’s ideas. Fascinating reading, nonetheless. I’m almost ready to say I don’t want to discuss economics at all, even narrow questions like affordable housing, with anyone who hasn’t first read Progress and Poverty. 

 

…When we speak of labor creating wealth, we speak metaphorically. Man creates nothing. …In producing wealth, labor, with the aid of natural forces, but works up, into the forms desired, pre-existing matter, and, to produce wealth, must, therefore, have access to this matter and to these forces – that is to say, to land. The land is the source of all wealth. 

 

And thus George traces economic depressions back to material progress, because it is progress that increases the value of land, which in turns leads to land speculation. Land is withheld from production, forcing prices for available land up, checking production, finally throwing people out of work, when demand for goods must fall because though people still desire to buy, they have not the ability to pay.

 

In the bathroom (doesn’t everyone have at least one book in the bathroom?) I have In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus, an edition with a lengthy and entertaining introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon (author of, among other things, The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery prize winner, in the year 1922) and delightful illustrations by same. Any book with van Loon illustrations is a book I will pick up and begin to read – wouldn’t it have been wonderful to receive illustrated letters from him? -- and it’s about time I got around to reading Erasmus, anyway.

 

I’ve been reading Empire of the Summer Moon off and on at bedtime for what seems like forever because, I must confess, I have set it aside numerous times for something else. My latest detour (Friday night) was a 1953 nonfiction book by Robert Gibbings, a wood engraver as well as a writer, whose books display both talents. The most well known is probably Lovely is the Lee (I say that because it is the Gibbings title I most often see among used volumes), but the one that came into my hands this past week is called Coming Down the Seine, and obviously, were my own Artist still with me, this is a book we would have been reading aloud to each other. The Seine! Magic memories!

 

These were tranquil days in the boat. There were mornings when, casting off at dawn, I drifted through long cool shadows, watching the sunlight on the trees creep down to meet the water, hearing no sound but the tremolo of the aspens, seeing no one but a chance sportsman and his dog. There were noons with cooling breezes when the forest rang with bird song and the river was a sheet of moving glass. There were nights when, looking skywards, the passing clouds seemed like new continents and islands marked on the inside of a mighty globe.

 

Neither is everything description. There are digressions into history and observations on what an artist must know.

 

I incline to think that one of the earliest and most important lessons to be learnt by any art student is the recognition of those qualities most suited to his particular medium, or alternatively of the medium most suited to the qualities he wishes to express. 

 

As a wood engraver, Gibbings finds little he can use in the “lavender haze above the water … typical of many dawns.”  Precise lines and contrast of light and dark are what an engraver needs. He tells of refusing a commission once for a stone carving because the subject “could only have been carried out in bronze.” 

 

Gibbings, an Irishman, author of many river books, is buried on the banks of the Thames, another river David had a chance to explore years ago. All in all, I can’t help feeling it not quite fair that we never had a chance to enjoy this book together, but such is life.

 

The library has been presenting their summer author series this month, and I’ve gotten to the second and third events. Betsy Emerson talked about her book, Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, and the next week Karen Mulvahill interviewed Gregory Nobles, author of The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. The fourth and final event in the library series will be next Tuesday, with Soon-Young Yoon and her book of memoir essays, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the U.N. Quite the stellar line-up this season! And it looks as if I may get around to a book launch come September, so stay tuned for exciting developments on that front. 

 

About Jobs

 

Here’s a question unrelated to anything in the rest of this post, a leftover from the post I’m not publishing. Have you ever quit or walked out on a job? If so, why? What to you makes the difference between a good employer and working conditions and something unbearable?

 

The Artist Remembered in Arizona

 

Before I left to start back to Michigan at the beginning of May, one of the owners of Source of Coffee, our hangout in Willcox, Arizona, asked if I would bring in one of the Artist’s hats so they could have something to remember him by. This past week the coffee house posted a photograph of the resultant memorial, the work of hatmakers Josh and Theresa – and I need to get a more complete reference for Josh and Theresa’s business. Must add to that to my to-do list.... But I love, love, love that our friends in Willcox are thinking of David and remembering him with love!

Dana in background; presumably Theresa in foreground

 

Finding Friends Along the Way

My new equine friends above belong to one of my sister’s friends, and Deborah and Sheryl have been wanting to get me out to meet the horses for a long time. Oh, the darlings! They are (clockwise from lower left) Lucy (Alpha mare), Flicka, Traveler, and Blackie. When Deborah and I got out to the stable on Tuesday evening (well, late afternoon, but darkness had already fallen), the horses were in for the night, their stalls full of fresh bedding, and, just finishing their dinner, they were ready to be brushed and fed their bedtime apples. Those horses were no happier to be brushed and given treats than I was to curry their coats and hold out a flat hand with chunks of apple, first to Lucy (since she’s the boss) and then to the others in the order their names are given above, sweet, patient Blackie waiting the longest — last but hardly least in my book, he was such a sweetie! 

Nor were horses the only excitement that day in Springfield, Illinois. (I have to backtrack in my account of our trek west so as not to leave out these important events.) My sister and I also visited a venerable downtown Springfield bookstore with the wonderful name Prairie Archives. 

Prairie Archives, housed in the former J.C. Penney building on East Adams Street, lives up to its wonderful name. Books of and for all ages, maps, art prints -- intoxicating atmosphere! For nearly half an hour I was too giddy to do little more than wander from one room to the next, exclaiming (quietly, to my sister) my admiration for my surroundings. 

At last I settled down in the foreign language room long enough to find a couple of Simenon paperbacks. Next some sweet, tiny books in the children’s room called my name. By then, growing calmer, I was at last able to breathe normally, put on my professional bookseller identity, and ask for books on Michigan. The owner’s son and a couple of other staff provided friendly assistance. What an enchanting place!

When I went up front to pay for my purchases, owner John R. Paul and I got into a discussion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and where to find the best pasties. If I lived in Springfield, I would be making weekly visits to — and purchases from — Prairie Archives!

Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas — the immensity of the American plat pays, especially the High Plains, still amazes us, though we have journeyed through it before. This post would wander far from its theme, however, if I were to backtrack visually and verbally across the vast interior spaces of the North American continent. Instead I am compressing my account to focus on a few stops, leaping now from Illinois to New Mexico.

Tucumcari, New Mexico, bills itself as the “mural capital of New Mexico,” and as we admired some of the first examples we came across, the style seemed very familiar. We wondered if the artist could be the mural painter from Benson, the one we’d first met with his wife on top of a mountain (Masai Point) in the Chiricahua National Monument. We looked for a signature but didn’t find one at first.  Not all the murals in town are by one person, but we were interested in a certain style, one we recognized. Then, around another block was the artist himself, at work on a scaffold, and it was Doug Quarles! 

Talk about serendipity! We enjoyed the chance to catch up with Doug and Sharon (they have moved from Benson to Tucumcari since last we saw them), while Sarah made the most of an opportunity to stretch out on a sun-warmed sidewalk, quite a relief after sub-freezing temperatures and a 60mph wind the night before in Liberal, Kansas! Here is some more of Doug's work, but you should really stop in Tucumcari and see it all.

One more night on the road for our pack, in Alamogordo, and then our last day’s travel took us through Las Cruces, Deming, and Lordsburg to the Arizona line. I was eager to reach the state line and catch my first sight of the Dos Cabezas peaks, but when we ducked off the road for a coffee in Deming and saw this pretty little bookstore — so inviting! — there was no resisting. And we were so glad we didn’t try!

Readers’ Cove is owned by Margaret Fairman and Dan Gauss, and we wandered from room to room in delight, encountering a bookstore cat in the first room we explored. Later, in another room, the Artist made friends with Ziggy, the bookstore dog. 

cat on rocking chair

dog making friends

Margaret, bookseller on duty, was as friendly, open, and welcoming as her shop, too. 

She and the Artist and I had book talk, dog talk, Michigan talk, and more. I could have settled in for the entire day, if we hadn’t been almost at our destination. But Deming, NM, isn’t that far from Willcox, AZ, the Artist noted. It could be a day trip (though a long day). Or perhaps an overnight, combined with a jog up to Silver City, which people tell us is worth a visit?

Yes, my bookstore is closed for the winter, but I am still mindful of my calling, because a wonderful part of being an independent bookseller is the collegiality of the business. Colleagues, we are, not competitors. We leave the killer instinct to the behemoths — and whose dream would you rather feed -- world domination or neighborhood welcome? If you would keep treasure islands like Prairie Archives, Readers’ Cove, Dog Ears Books and others on the literary map, you must be a frequent visitor and a regular paying customer. Nothing less will do it. 

So wherever you are spending the winter, at home or away, to visit indie bookstores — and do not leave empty-handed! I did not leave this bookstore or Prairie Archives empty-handed! How could I, when I must practice what I preach, and when I am an incurable lover of both books and bookstores?

Thus today's lesson: Visit independent bookstores. Buy books in independent bookstores. And visit horses, too (and dogs and cats). Bookshop proprietors will be happy to see you, and when you go to visit horses, apples or carrots will assure you of a warm welcome there. 

Stables and bookstores: some of my favorite places! No, the Artist and I do not make the drive to Arizona nonstop, and yes, we do get worn out, but the beautiful scenes and lovely people along the way make every trip rewarding and memorable.

New on Waukazoo Street Now

What makes a book special varies, of course, from one reader to another, but whenever I put in a new book order to fill specific customer requests, I add a few titles “on spec,” choosing what I hope will be irresistible not only to me but to bookstore browsers, too. Approaching winter holidays are a great time for these special items. Buyer’s remorse may follow purchase of an expensive exercise machine or clothing that’s the wrong size, but who can regret buying a book? As I remind readers every year, books are easy to wrap, eminently shareable, and serve as magic carpets to carry us to other worlds.

Plotted: A Literary Atlas, by Andrew DeGraff, with essays by Daniel Harmon is perfect for literary readers with a taste for maps and quality graphic novel illustrations. DeGraff was inspired by teachers, maps, and history, as well as by classic literature, short stories, and fantasy novels. In this quirky book you will find his visual rendition of Homer’s Odyssey,  Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and the castle Shakespeare imagined as the setting for Hamlet. Mark Twain is here, as are Kafka and Melville, Frederick Douglass and – surprise! – Flannery O’Connor. What would the book authors make of this book? Give it to an English major and pose the question! Hardcover, $24.99

Lynne Rae Perkins first called my attention to Maira Kalman when she asked me to order one of her books. Warning: this author/illustrator’s works are addictive. And how could I not order a book with Beloved Dog for a title? Kalman has my number.

You, reading this book, mostly likely have, or had, a dog. You certainly know that your dog is, or was, the dearest, funniest, lovingest, loyalest friend you ever had.

You will meet many dogs in these pages, dogs of all sizes and kinds. You will also take a walk in New York City, stroll through Paris, France, and find yourself in Washington, DC, in cherry blossom time. If you haven’t met Maira Kalman before, now is the time. Hardcover, $29.95

This one is as quick and simple as its title: Big Bear, little chair, by Lizi Boyd, is a book for young children that explores the world of BIG and little, with examples taken from different natural objects and human artifacts. Some are surprising. Would you think a big zebra would wield a little broom? This book is just plain fun! Hardcover, $16.99

Then, do we ever outgrow Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol? This new edition begins with historical background and goes on to give us every word of the familiar story, beautifully and memorably illustrated by Australian artist Robert Ingpen. The pictures somehow make the story seem brand-new, while at the same time transporting me to Victorian England, where I am encouraged not only to enter the characters’ lives (all good books do that) but also to dwell lingeringly on the daily details of the way they live. Magic! Hardcover, $24.99

Another familiar classic appearing in new guise is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The 150^th anniversary edition illustrated by Salvador Dali, the first “affordable” edition with Dali’s art, is as psychedelic as any Sixties flower child could possibly wish. 

I love the semi-abstract illustrations rhr remind me of the first “abstract” art I ever saw, dreamy watercolor illustrations in the two-volume book club edition of Kipling’s Jungle Books. There is also a description of Dali’s mathematical interests, the “math connection” between the artist and Oxford mathematician Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. In other words, this book has in it something for every age and every interest. Hardcover, $24.95

Art and literature combine again in Sunlight on the River: Poems About Paintings / Paintings About Poems, edited by Scott Gutterman, pairing over fifty masterpieces of art with poetry from across the ages. Charles Wright meets Paul Cezanne, Jane Flanders and Anne Sexton both dance with van Gogh, and many other poets and artists are brought together in sometimes surprising juxtaposition. Hardcover, $34.95

Finally, we leave the realm of literature and art for memoir, but the new memoir I have in stock is also a travel book: The Only Street in Paris: Life on the rue des Martyrs, by Elaine Sciolino. Moi, je connais la rue des Martyrs. I would never have claimed it as the “only street in Paris,” but neither could I resist revisiting la rue qui monte (the street that climbs) de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette au Sacré-Coeur. Alas! I learn that the famous Poissonerie Bleue, one of the premier Paris fish shops, closed three years ago. But there is still some of the best food shopping in town on the rue des Martyrs, and the book makes me long again for the wonderful cheese shops of the unfashionable but lively 9^th arrondissement. One merchant complains to the author that foreigners sometimes come in and don’t say Bonjour. (And then they think the French are rude!) Ah, yes, that is the Paris I remember! Would you like to make the trip? Hardcover, $25.95

So there you have it, this week’s sampler of new titles newly available for in-store purchase at Dog Ears Books, an island of treasures, where every day brings unexpected encounters between people and books.

There will be cookies today, also, at Dog Ears Books, and horse-drawn wagon rides -- free! -- through our sunny little village, and when darkness falls, lights will appear on the big Christmas tree on Nagonaba Street, and carol-singing will follow. 'Tis the season. Bundle up! Come and enjoy!