Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Wherever They Are to Be Found

 

“We’re always buying books,” the Artist used to tell people who wondered what we did all winter. We felt it as a big loss when all three bookstores in Benson closed (one because of death, one due to retirement, and one when the owner moved out of the area). The only independent bookstore I know of in Cochise County now is down in Bisbee, and getting to Bisbee always seemed to take a lot of planning, so much so that we hadn’t been there since spring of 2021. And why would I go without my husband, who loved to read the New York Times at the library in Bisbee (only library in the county to carry it) and to enjoy a generous bowl of pho at the little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant? 

at Bisbee library

Awaiting lunch in Bisbee

As for where to find used books, there are still thrift shops and little shops run by various Friends of the Library groups in Cochise County. The Friendly Bookstore in Willcox even has an outdoor 10-cent book table, which the Artist and I have perused for years on a regular basis. (That reminds me of someone who came in my bookstore in Northport to ask where my 10-cent books were. Nowhere, sorry! I am working for a living, not on salary or pension!) Books on the table remain outdoors night and day, in all kinds of weather, enduring baking sun and punishing dust, and in the event of rain (a rare occurrence), soaked volumes are hauled off to the waste transfer station down the road and the table refilled with a “new” lot of used books. But on my own in recent weeks, I haven’t been doing much book shopping. It isn’t the same by myself, we have plenty already in the cabin, and I can borrow books from the library. 

 

The other day, however, a shady parking spot was available across the street (shade for puppy), so I stopped, and a glance through the 10-cent books turned up a little paperback I figured had to be worth gambling a thin dime. Author Stephen Levine’s book, Meetings at the Edge, had a subtitle that began Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying…. Now, I do not think (or feel that) “the Universe” put that book out there for me to find. On the other hand, the subtitle did speak to my situation. 

 

Each chapter begins with someone calling “the Dying Project,” a free telephone consultation service provided by Stephen and his wife Ondrea (1979-82) for the “terminally ill and those working closely with a death.” Some callers had cancer, while others had family members who had received a terminal diagnosis or were already near death. One woman’s daughter had been murdered. There were occasional professionals who worked with dying patients and had a crisis of their own at the same time.

 

A family member wrote to me recently that “when we open ourselves to love, we open ourselves to pain,” and reading that it occurred to me that the briefest way I can describe the lessons in Meetings at the Edge is that the author gradually brings his callers to see that they – and that is, we, all human beings-- must be open to pain and loss and even to death in order to be fully open to love and to be truly alive, because if we fight against what is, we cannot be fully alive in the world as it is.

 

Disclosure: I am not a Buddhist. (In fact, I am so not-Zen!) And this book is saturated with Zen metaphysics. But just as I find the way people treat other people much more important than anything they say they believe, so as I read this book I set the metaphysics to one side and focus on the practice, which is not a turning away from or attempting to cover over grief but a sitting with it, acknowledging it, with all its pain, in order to get beyond pain to a core of – Levine calls it “undifferentiated,” “eternal,” or “universal,” -- I’ll call it undying love.

 

In my last post, I quoted myself as follows: “There is no shortcut to a long relationship.” Similarly, there is no shortcut through grief. There is no spiritual pain pill, no bromide, no set of magic words to clear away the clouds of bereavement once and for all. 

 

I have written about the deep gratitude I feel for my years with the Artist, for our rich life together, along with gratitude I have for the support and love of family and friends, attentive neighbors, and even a very demanding puppy that gets me out of bed one morning after another. And all that is true and real, and the sun is shining here in Arizona (even as it snows again in Michigan), and I realize I am a very fortunate woman in many, many ways . But if anyone thinks my heart is not often heavy, that my throat does not ache and that my eyes don’t fill with tears as I drive down the highway, then I have painted a very, very misleading picture. 

 

How to wrap up this post? Perhaps I won’t even try. It is early yet in my journey….

 

Summer morning light, northern Michigan

We Always Thought We Would Go Back

 

Apalachicola: laidback, dog-friendly, on the Gulf

…[W]hen you wander it is hard to believe that you will not one day revisit the places that have captured your imagination and struck a chord of sympathy.

 

- Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

 

 

The Artist and I did not imagine that the trip we made to France in the year 2000 would be unrepeated. Dreamers, both of us, we imagined returning every September, not only to Paris but also to the Auvergne, to spend perhaps a week or more in the commune of Blesle, and certainly to visit the home of Jean-Henri Fabre ("the Homer of the insects") in Provence, a particular wish of mine that was thwarted when we found the home closed for renovations that September.

 

For my 50^th birthday, David’s present to me was a road trip to Montreal – and again, we were so enraptured by that cosmopolitan city that we pictured ourselves renting an apartment there someday. 

 

Over the years there were smaller, less obvious, more intimate discoveries, too: a dirt road leading to an old iron bridge over a pretty little river in southwest Michigan, with nothing around but farm fields; a bend on the Little Rabbit River, I think it was, where we sought refuge in a storm and were regaled with Depression-era stories of turtle fishing from a lifelong inhabitant; a mom-and-pop bakery café in a small, dusty north Texas town, where we talked cattle ranching with the caterer’s husband while she was off on another job; the dog park in Florida that our Sarah loved so much she began warbling with anticipation when we came within a couple of blocks of the place, hoping her “boyfriend” would be there! We made a lot of trips to the dog park but only saw that iron bridge, only met the turtle-fishing oldtimer, only visited the bakery café once, though we always thought we would revisit those places we remembered so clearly.

 

There were many places we did visit more than once. When living in Kalamazoo, we were drawn west repeatedly by Paw Paw and South Haven on weekends, the former for summer flea markets, the latter to walk on the beach of Lake Michigan. During our years together we traveled regularly to Grand Marais, Michigan, our home away from home, and more recently we had begun repeating visits to inland Mio and to Tawas on Lake Huron. A few winters found us on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where one of our favorite day trips was Tarpon Springs. Lately, of course, Cochise County, Arizona, has come to feel like a second home. 

 

Then in the past couple of years he started to ask me, “Do you think we’ll ever go back to France?” And now David and I won’t be making another trip to Tucson together, let alone Sérignan-du-Comtat. The places we always went, I will now go alone or not at all. The places we saw only once and thought we would see again together, we will not. Trips we didn't make – to the Pacific Northwest, to the Black Hills of South Dakota, to Italy!!! -- will never take place. Saying all this is not self-pity or ingratitude. It is simply stating facts.

 

Other facts, though, just as real, are that my love and I made many wonderful trips together and had all manner of wonderful travel adventures, majuscule et miniscule. So yes, I am grateful -- and can you wonder that I would want to revisit them over and over in memory?

Being silly in Paris, Missouri. We were often silly on the road.

 

Books Read Since Last List

 

It’s a short list. 

 

39.      Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Strange Pilgrims: Stories (fiction)

40.      Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes (nonfiction)

41.      Shapiro, Elena Mauli. 13 rue Thérèse (fiction)

42.      Brougham, Rachel. Widowland (nonfiction)

 

You might wonder about #s 40 and 42. Why in the world would I want to dwell on death in my reading? Wouldn’t escaping thoughts of death be preferable? 

 

Ah, but you see, not only is death one of life’s biggest mysteries, but there are also times when escaping thoughts of death and dying and hitherto unimaginable loss is impossible, so you might as well face the music and dig in. 

 

A very good friend sent me Widowland, after first telling me about it and asking what I thought about reading it, because she is a sensitive person and did not want to give me more pain than I already have. She described the memoir as “pretty raw” and “extremely honest,” which you might think would give me pause, but no, it inclined me to say yes. (Hallmark “happy talk” about lessons learned – that I don’t need. I don’t need to be told to “count my blessings.” I do that every day. And the pain is still there.) My friend Karen also knows Rachel, the author, and knew Colin, Rachel’s late husband, who worked for Karen’s husband, and all of these are Michigan people, so there was added incentive.

 

I read the book in a single day. I cried through most of it. I skimmed some chapters that were not pertinent to my particular situation but appreciate having the opportunity to read Rachel’s story and am grateful to her for having written it. 

 

Here’s an old memory some of the pages brought back to me: My first husband and I (centuries ago, in another lifetime), ages 21 and 18 (children!), having received a wedding gift from the parents of a good friend of ours, were determined not to respond with clichéd thanks, so when we visited the older couple, we went on and on and on about the wonders of their gift. I don’t remember now what it was. The key to my anecdote is that neither of us uttered the words “Thank you.” To our idealistic young ears, the phrase “Thank you” would have sounded trite. Later we were told by our friend that his parents had been rather put out that we never thanked them for the gift! All our original and personally worded appreciation went for nought.

 

Why this memory now? Because more and more I have come to appreciate formal phrases. I no longer see them as clichés but as appropriate and recognizable responses to situations we all find ourselves in sooner or later.

 

“I’m sorry for your loss” means more to me than the question of how I’m doing. People want to make other people feel better, Rachel Brougham writes, and so they say things intended to encourage positive thoughts. (I won’t quote things people said to her but just note that my friends have, in general, been much more sensitive!) What I like about “I’m sorry for your loss” is that it acknowledges the loss. 

 

The other formal phrase I find meaningful is “May his memory be a blessing.” A friend whose mother died only days before my husband says he’s been thinking a lot about those words lately. For myself, I hear it as a blessing in itself and also as a wish that the bereaved person might find future comfort, despite present pain. A blessing, a wish – these are not predictive statements. Again, without pain and loss having been explicitly addressed, they have been acknowledged. 

 

Rachel Brougham also writes that many people will avoid mentioning the recently deceased, as if doing so would “remind” the widow that he has died – as if it might have slipped her mind! What meant a great deal to her, on the other hand, was hearing stories about her husband from people who had known him, and I have to say that I love that, too. Also, I don’t wait for others to tell me stories or ask me about the Artist: I talk and write about our life together every chance I get. And today I even managed to work a book into my post, didn't I? 

Neither Rachel nor I chose to travel to Widowland. The place came to us, and there is no leaving once you’re there. Wherever you go after losing your husband, widowland will be an integral and inescapable part of your life’s landscape.

 

Once again, then, the book is Widowland, by Rachel Brougham.

 

All my love forever --