Is Spring in the Bag at Last?

Daffodils are in bloom and wild leeks aplenty pushing up underfoot in the woods. Sandhill cranes are back from winters in the sunny South, announcing their presence vocally in Leelanau (so far overhead that I haven’t had a glimpse of them yet, but they’re definitely here). Only last week we had another big snow, and it could always snow again; however, the air feels as if the season has turned the corner at last, not teasingly but sincerely. We shall see. I’m enjoying the increasing hours of sunlight, anyway.

 

Sunny Juliet and I have not yet resumed our agility work, except on an ad hoc basis in the woods, where a large fallen tree is an opportunity for her to “Walk it!” and “Table!” the signal for her to jump up on a stump. She is very happy, though, to have a new neighbor playmate and to tear around with Griffin while humans stand by and supervise. “A tired dog is a happy dog,” we tell each other contentedly. Then, “Watch out! Not right under our feet!”

[No new photos because their play date last night was cancelled.]

 

School is back in session in Northport following spring break, families back from their self-prescribed “cabin fever” vacations, and summer people returning to open houses and cottages for the nonwinter months. The annual migration holds once again, for cranes and humans alike.

 

One question bedeviling me occurred to a couple of friends, also, I learned when I mentioned it. We are struck by the number of fallen trees in the woods. It almost seems that there are as many big old trees lying on the ground, horizontal or nearly so, as there are upright specimens. Is this a misperception, or can it be true? And, if true, did the northern Michigan woods always have this appearance in the spring (and we are only now noticing), or has there been a recent massive die-off? Are all the fallen individuals perhaps ash trees and beeches, victims of recent pest invasions? Bottom line: Has the woods looked as it does now ever since county residents abandoned woodstoves for furnaces – or not?

Is there a forester out there with an answer to this question?

 

Three different people sent me the link to a story in The Washington Post (if you are not a subscriber, maybe a friend who is will gift you the article) about bookshops specializing in books that have been around the block before, and I appreciated most of the advice given in the article: Take your time; have a spirit of adventure; don’t crow to the owner when you find a book marked at a fraction of its value (just buy it and be happy, I say); look at the books and not at your handheld device. I loved the remark about small shops tending to be “zealously curated,” and I wanted to cheer at “Try never to leave a bookstore without making a purchase, if only a used paperback. It is the least you can do to support these defenders and bastions of civilization.” (Is that what I am? Not such small potatoes, then!) I was not as thrilled by “Bring a flashlight and expect to get dirty.” You wouldn’t want to eat off the floor of my shop, but then, it isn’t a restaurant, is it? 

In Northport, in addition to reorganizing subject areas in the bookstore recently to make room for new arrivals, I’ve also been planning for the future. Here are a few important days coming up on my calendar, which I urge you to put on your calendar, too:

 

Monday, April 22. Earth Day

 

Saturday, April 27. Indie Bookstore Day

 

Saturday, June 22. Visit to Dog Ears Books by author Bonnie Jo Campbell

 

In honor of the Earth Day 2024 theme, “Planet vs. Plastics,” and as a belated brag on 2023’s 30^th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, I will be offering beautiful new canvas book bags ($12), which will be no less appropriate on Indie Bookstore Day (always the last Saturday in April, and this year I’ll be here!) and perfect for carrying home your signed copy of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters -- plus, of course, any other treasures you find in my “zealously curated” collection on Waukazoo Street!

As we were in 2011 --

And Then, a New Day Dawned

I'd been up for three hours and outdoors for one before the sun came up over the eastern woods. What a gorgeous morning!

Sarah does not need to hear twice the question, "Do you want to go for a walk?" The girl is ready!

The wind had been up before us and working hard, stripping maples of their colorful leaves and and leaving them to stand naked in the new day's light.

Pockets of color, however, remain--popples, sumac, and dogwood here. Also, the gaily tinted autumn cherry orchard and--the best--beneath a giant, bare-limbed ash tree, new shoots of triumphant beech where the old patriarch fell a few winters back. 

Beeches, like oaks, hold tightly to their leaves, sometimes right through the winter. Leaves that are buttery-toasty now in October will fade and thin to dry, rattly parchment by January, but they will provide scraps of color, however pale, in winter's otherwise monochromatic woodland scenery.

At last we turned toward home. Sarah and I have been wearing a new shortcut path to our yard, and it's coming along quite well. I'm in hopes it will be discernible through snow for at least part of the winter. But for now, in late October, what a morning! It was gloriously bright and warm and windy and exciting morning outdoors, the best possible prelude to another bookstore day in Northport in quiet autumn. 

I was crabby yesterday. I admit it. Still October on the calendar, it was "a damp, drizzly November in my soul." Some days are just like that. But weathers of the soul, like the earth's weathers, are only passing surface events. The core is something else.  

...[E]ven so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets or unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. 

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

And sometimes the surface is joyous, too. Doesn't Sarah look contented? She does not turn up her nose at fleeting pleasure!

Ashes to Ashes

Ash trees are the supernumeraries on the autumn stage. Sugar maples, with their brilliant reds and oranges, are the stars, with supporting roles played by bright yellow birch and tamarack and the scarlet of sumac. Willows are not spectacular in color but commanding and familiar to us in size and form, so we notice them daily. Amid the showier species, the ash often registers only subconsciously, but if all the ash trees were to be subtracted from the stage, how we should miss them!

The beauty of the ash trees’ color lies not in traffic-stopping brightness but in subtlety and range. Autumn always seems to my eye the most deliciously edible of seasons, and ash colors beg to be tasted, from creamy butterscotch tones through toast brown to pomegranate red. There are purples as deep and rich as the skins of plums and aubergines and tropical fruit colors, too--banana, pineapple, persimmon.

Many, many years of my life slipped by before I noticed ash trees at all. Belatedly but suddenly, or so it seemed, one fall I began noticing certain saplings by the side of the road. What were they, anyway? So lovely! Once they had caught my eye, I saw them everywhere. It took a while longer for me to notice mature trees with the same leaves, the same exquisite autumn jewel colors, but now I see them everywhere.

I know what you’re all thinking, those of you already savvy about ash trees. The dreaded emerald ash borer! Will the borers be the death of the species? Will the stage of the future be missing the contributions of the ash? Gene Logsdon, in A Sanctuary of Trees, has a more optimistic forecast. He notes, in his own woodlot,

...white ash trees that are dying all over the place from the emerald ash borer. I have enough dead ashes in my woodland to supply all the firewood I will need for the rest of my life. But when foresters and landscapers tell me to kiss the white ash goodbye, I lead them by the nose into my woods. Right along the path to the barn, there are two patches of ash seedlings—scores of them. I exchange greetings with them several times a day. They are my good friends. The tallest of them is about five feet now, growing slowly in the partial shade, the top sprig nipped off last winter by a deer, but none the worse for it. It is three years old and still only the diameter of my finger. Obviously it is not yet old enough to interest a borer. It will take six to eight years anyway for these seedlings to reach borer-food size, during which time the borers, running out of bigger ashes, will start to starve. I hope.

Nature does not hold still. Life does not hold still. Even without human interference, the landscape would change constantly, from one season to the next, one year to the next. It is our miraculous and unearned good fortune to live for a while amid our contemporary species, all of us just here for a while.