It Can't Be August Already, Can It?

This busy past week, as time came to turn the calendar page from July to August, I did the following (a partial, not an inclusive list):

Observed Cherry Harvest in Progress

You can’t help observing it if you’re out on the roads this time of year. Cherry shakers and haulers, crew and tractors, are on the move throughout the county, and orchards enclose our home on all sides. My own farm dreams don’t involve fruit trees (a few chickens, a couple beef cattle, a field of alfalfa, and I’d settle for half a dozen chickens and time for a productive, well-tended garden), but I like living in a region of working agriculture and having farmers for neighbors.

Got in a Bunch of New Books for Young People

Some of them, for young adult readers, were recommended to me. Others, like the Beezus and Ramona books (and others) by Beverly Cleary, were my own personal brain wave. Oh, the bright, happy colors!

Started Reading a New Book

World War I began a hundred years ago this past week. (Not such a happy thought.) It isn't a war that gets a lot of play in bookstores, where customers much more often look to the Civil War or World War II than to the “Great War” (WWI) or even the Revolutionary War. Why is that? Too long ago? But not as long ago as the Civil war. It's a mystery to me.

My own horrified fascination, beginning with Elliott Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, focused for years on the interval between World War I and II. More recently I have found myself reading further back in history, back into the 18th and 19th centuries, but having received a review copy a few days ago of David Laskin’s The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century (now out in paperback), I plunged right in and on Thursday morning reached Chapter Eight, “First World War,” coincidentally with the historic anniversary. A review will have to wait until I’ve read the entire book, but the story is gripping, especially with the Eastern Front bisecting the Pale....

Had a Beautiful Friday in Northport

Last Friday morning, after home chores and country dog walk, began in town with the farm market, where I bought bread, croissants, lovely red onions, little striped purple-and-white eggplant, fresh fennel, two kinds of goat cheese, and some irresistible organic beef. It continued in the bookstore, selling out of the second printing of The Ice Caves of Leelanau, and wrapped up with Music in the Park, for which I was a co-sponsor, this time around, of the Claudia Schmidt Funtet. It was a “good day from morning ‘til night,” but I was too busy and relaxed—yes, sometimes both at once!—to photograph the passing hours.

Thought a Lot More About Writing

William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction is so lively, as well as helpful, that once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop, so I was glad to find it’s still available in paperback. Much of what he writes is applicable for fiction as well as nonfiction. After all, good writing is good writing (as bad is bad), so any writer can learn from good advice about the craft, whatever its genre focus. I’m ordering this for my bookstore, along with books on writing by Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and Anne Lamott. Any other suggestions for books on writing that have been important to you?

Started Reading Another Book

The Family is my morning book. At night, before sleep, I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things. Fiction, history, botany – all in one book. Only thing is, the edition I’m reading is LARGE PRINT, and I’m finding the LARGE PRINT makes me read differently. It’s very strange and more distracting than I’d thought it would be, but I’m persevering.

Took Note of Spotted Knapweed in Bloom

I know, I know! It’s a horrible, nonnative, invasive species, and it doesn’t do our fields and meadows any favors at all. The feeling I most associate with the blooming of this plant, however, is a sense of poignant urgency, coming from my knowledge that we have now reached late summer. After that, of course, comes summer’s end. But before the end come waves of lavender and gold, soft living colors threaded through the green, and my breath catches in my throat. Is this a response to beauty or to the passing of a season that is never long enough?

Invited Four Friends for a Dinner, al Fresco

It can be hard to find time and energy for entertaining during the summer, but in other ways summer is the best time for inviting people, since we don’t have to be crowded into the tiny rooms of our old farmhouse but can stretch and spread out under the black walnut and basswood trees. But the weather was unsettled on Sunday, and as I was driving home dark clouds loomed. I found David in the yard, scanning the sky and making dubious noises about the dinner plan. Those clouds were going to clear off, I told him confidently. The sky cleared for a while, then more dark clouds came; in the end, however, we were able to have our dinner outside under the trees, with just a little breeze and a question of rain in the air but no falling drops.

Baked a Lemon Polenta Pound Cake

This recipe was from The Cake Chronicles, and I think the author said there that she’d gotten it from some other book, but I’m at the bookstore now, and the copies I ordered to sell are still on back-order. Anyway, heavenly smell! Heavenly taste! A bit overdone on top, but the nice lady who brought me a whole quart of fresh-picked black raspberries, after I mentioned that I’d only been able to harvest a handful from my yard – she’s the one who made this dessert a real glory! Now, the next time she comes in, I’ll have to get her name! Nothing like the excitement of raspberries distracting me while bookselling to make me forget the basics. Well, I did say “Thank you,” but that hardly covers it, do you think?

Felt Deep Gratitude

I love our old farmhouse and the surrounding farm neighborhood. I love all of Leelanau Township. I feel so very fortunate to live here, so blessed, so thankful for my life. I’m also feeling grateful for friends old and new, present and distant, young and old. And I can feel that our dog, Sarah, shares all these feelings. Sarah loves her home! She loves company! She loves the yard! She loves her life!

Seedtime -- Harvest in Preparation -- Time Rushes On

Pumpkins

Acorn squash

Pumpkins are ripening in my higgledy-piggledy garden, and good-looking acorn and butternut squashes are taking shape. To us they are winter food, but to Nature they are nothing more than giant wombs, shelters for the seeds nourished within. 

Butternut squash

Alongside luscious blackberries, thistles flourish, and the purple and gold of a month ago has turned to brown and beige in the fields. All around us, as summer segues into fall, seeds are ripening.

Blackberries

Thistles

Box elder

Seeds are quieter than flowers. The latter are display, the former potential. But there is nothing “mere” about floral display, since it is necessary to attract pollinating insects that enable plants to make their seeds. To every thing there is a season. Again and again, all we need do is look around to see that truth. Turn, turn, turn....

We had a busy week leading up to the busy holiday weekend, and I'm still way behind with book news but hope to catch up soon. Visiting family, a birthday dinner, evenings of laughter and love -- all that took precedence, and then there was the holiday, with a busier Labor Day than I expected at the bookstore.

Gold in the fields is not all gone, as there is goldenrod everywhere, and soon there will be the purple of asters. So maybe I can still work in that purple-and-gold poetry post, after all. We'll see. So many books -- and you know the rest....

Goldenrod background for grass seedheads

If I Could Figure Out How to Blur This Title, I Would

Summer is always a blur --

Every year, come fall, whenever people ask (as they always do ask), “How was your summer?” I answer, “It was a blur!” Because every year that’s just what it is. The blur is a reliable phenomenon for those of us who work through the Up North summer.

Take the long, 4-day (this year) 4^th of July weekend. People in business in little tourist towns always feel that the 4^th will never arrive, and then – suddenly! already! -- it is upon us!!! This year the pace began at the beginning of the week and continued heavy through Saturday, easing off by early Sunday afternoon as holiday-makers began heading home. The Motovino/Lelu people mounted a four-day music festival, “North by Northport,” the first in Northport history, with music at various venues throughout the village. Music began before noon each day and continued until at least midnight, sometimes beyond. Could this be our little town? Wow!

In the woods, under beech canopy

Leek flower

I managed to get into the woods with Sarah each morning for restorative quiet, where, thanks to our late, cool, slow spring, jack-in-the-pulpit had extended its season into July, overlapping with wild leeks reaching their flowering stage. It’s been a good strawberry year. Looks to be a good year for bramble fruits, too. Sweet cherries are (already!) being shaken, but I don’t want to count the little green plums on my tree, for fear of jinxing the crop.

Canada anemone

Along the roadsides, coreopsis has come on gangbusters, black-eyed Susans are starting, and the first chicory added a few lavender blue notes. Giant catalpa trees (not my volunteer “baby” one, which must not have reached its sexual maturity yet -- can anyone tell me if this is the reason it lacks flowers?) have bloomed. Some are hanging onto their orchid-like blossoms, while others have let them drop to the ground, where white lakes of bloom have formed in the grass. In Northport, by the creek, it’s the time of the Canada anemones. What else? Oh, little yellow flowers are appearing on tall spires of mullein, and most farmers got their first cutting of hay baled and in the barn before Sunday night’s rain.

It seems ages since I started writing a post – not yet finished -- about contemporary short fiction, and then I got completely sidetracked and started writing about “valley fever” and soil erosion and haven’t finished that, either. I’m reading letters by Carl Van Vechten, a book about his grandfather by Peter Singer, Thomas Egan’s story of the American Dust Bowl, a tale of French cheese, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street, and I can’t remember what-all else, bouncing from one book to another whenever I can sneak 10 minutes from other tasks. And so my reading life has become a blur, too.

That being the case, it was a relief to have a rainy Monday and to have Bruce spell me at the bookstore so David and I could pretend we were “on vacation” for a few hours. Sarah missed a morning play date (called on account of rain), but she didn’t know it, so there was no whining. There would be more pictures today if my camera battery hadn’t run down too far. Maybe a vacation from the camera was good for me, too. As you may have noticed, all the images today are very quiet and calm, so they are not at all representative of the past week.

But that's it: only one week of July is past, I remind myself. Really, summer has only just begun. Please, tell me it’s only just begun!

Delicious berries will appear here

A Berry Obsession, Part II, or, Hawthorns, Continued

(If you missed Part I, you can find it here.)

More like it! In the line drawing of hawthorn above, from Illustrated Guide to Trees and Shrubs, by Arthur Marmount Graves, published by the author in 1952, look at those leaf edges with their nicely rounded lobes! The fruits look flatter than mine, more like blueberries in form, but this is a generic drawing, not meant to represent exactly a particular species. Next, in Avril Rodway’s Wild Foods (1988), with illustrations by Zane Carey, I found another promising line drawing:


Wild Foods also has full-page color illustrations, and here are a couple details from the hawthorn page, looking very like my specimens.



Finally—wow!—Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, by F. Schuyler Mathews, published by Putnam’s with an author’s copyright date of 1915, gives a dizzying array of hawthorns, beginning on page 211 and going through page 253, although this is only a sampling, according to Mathews, who begins his introduction to hawthorns as follows:

An extremely difficult and complex genus separated by botanists into many divisions comprehending about 200 species. The subtle distinctions of leaf-form, anther-color, number of stamens, and character of fruit, etc., are more or less precarious....

A visit from my botany guru, Chris Garthe of the Leelanau Conservation District, however, confirmed that my leaf and berry samples--and we can now refer to the berries as haws--are definitely hawthorn. I showed him my photo of the little tree, too, which nicely conforms to the description given by Mathews:

The Hawthorns are mostly flat-topped trees, irregular in limb and branch, the shrubby form generally showing ascending and the tree form spreading branches, but no rule is possible in this direction.

“No general rule” seems to be the general rule for hawthorns. Is this why I love them, other than their having been featured in the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past? That’s where my initial obsession with hawthorn trees began.

[Pause while bookseller combs house from stem to stern, searching for first volume of Proust. Does not find. Only final volume surfaces. Must go to press without relevant literary quote here. Rats!]

Hawthorns go back centuries in the Old Country, whether in France, England or Ireland. Sometimes fairies figure into the lore, but legends of all kinds abound. Here is a paragraph from Rodway:

The Holy Thorn . . . at Glastonbury in the west of England, which legend has it, sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, blooms in winter – on Christmas Day, or near it – and cuttings from it flourish in both Britain and America. In fact, reverence for the hawthorn has crossed the Atlantic and many of the same feelings for the tree exist in both Britain and the United States.

(The reason for my ellipsis in the paragraph quoted above is that Carey writes of the "Crataegus family," and there is no such family. Crataegus is a genus within the family Rosaceae).

Now for the disappointing news. Chris and I tasted a couple of haws.


The texture is mealy, taste bland, and each little haw contains a big, hard pit. Turning to new books, I find in Tree & Shrub Gardening for Michigan, by Tim Wood & Alison Beck (Lone Pine, 2003), I find this notation:

Hawthorn fruits are edible but dry and seedy. Some people make jelly from them, or ferment them and mix them with brandy.

Before I tasted the haws, I had imagined making jelly, but now I think I’ll leave them for the wildlife. Anyway, I enjoyed the collecting, the mystery, the literature search and finding a solution. That was plenty of satisfaction for a November day.

A Berry Obsession--Help Requested From Botanists!

First, here's just how beautiful it is this morning in Northport! We may have snow sometime this week, but today is sunny, warm, colorful, gorgeous--it just feels so good I "can't help singing," as the old song goes, but that's a song about April and love, so maybe I can be content to smile.

[11/11 Addendum: This post is still getting so many hits that I'm inserting a link to the following post, which contains the solution to the mystery.]

But now, for the morning's obsession. That's what David is calling it. I told him I thought it was a good obsession to have, and he said everyone thinks that about their obsessions, and I said no, I'm sure some people feel imprisoned by their obsessions and would love to shake them off, but this is not that kind at all. It's berries. Specifically, a mystery berry I'm trying to identify. So first, here's the small tree (or large shrub), with Sarah standing near it for scale:


There are thorns, and the berries have that rosehip look that makes it perfectly reasonable to think of calling them thornapples, apples being in the rose family and thornapple being another name for hawthorn.



Here's the problem: the leaf. The leaf does not have the sharp teeth that is characteristic of hawthorn. No, it has rounded lopes that look more like gooseberry leaves. But the fruit looks nothing like a gooseberry! So I go back and forth, from berries to leaves, from one page of my field guide to the other. Here are the mischievous leaves:



Deepening the mystery is the well-known fact that hawthorns hybridize wildly, and even the experts find it hard to identify varieties. My question today for those experts--and for anyone else who has knowledge to share--is this: can hawthorns and gooseberries hybridize? Could this possibly be a cross between a hawthorn and a gooseberry? Or am I grasping at straws here? (Probably!) I'll be consulting other botany books and later in the afternoon will visit a friend who is my resident botany guru to see what he makes of my samples. I haven't tasted the fruit yet. Here are some more shots of berries and leaves taken indoors under light (but not edited for quality). Would you throw caution to the winds and chew up a handful?