Arrivals and Departures (because I couldn’t think of any appropriate title)

My constant companion, here all along!

 

Fall Hours? Don’t Ask!

 

I thought I had fall bookshop hours figured out, but now I just don’t know. I’ll be here Tuesdays through Saturdays whenever I can get here, until 4 p.m. if possible, but you might want to call first if you’re making a long drive solely to visit Dog Ears Books. So let's say,

Tuesday, 11-3

Wednesday-Friday, 11-4

Saturday, 11-5

CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!

And truly, if we're being honest with ourselves, isn't this all we can ever say about where we'll be at any particular time? “CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!”?

 

 

My Recent Reading

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “Books Read” list, so I’ll do that in the near future, someday soon when it’s time to get something new here on the blog and other inspiration fails. Back early in the summer, overwhelmed by a number of aspects of life in our 21st century world, I binged a private detective series, The Sanibel Island Detective, by Ron Base. More recently, looking for a multibook getaway, I took home the Rabbi Small books that had been sitting on my mystery shelf for far too long, waiting to be discovered—not that I hadn’t mentioned those Harry Kemelman titles to browsers, adding that they were some of my favorites, but no one took up the recommendation. Fine! I re-read all four books with pleasure!

Having loved This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, I’m now reading another novel set in the same rainy Irish village, The Year of the Child. Our Leelanau weather this post-Labor Day week is appropriate to reading of life in Faha: wild and woolly, windy and wet. I would find it difficult to live in such a consistently rainy part of the world, but I love the slow, loving, detailed descriptions Williams gives of his characters and their homes and relationships and interactions. 

 

Readers looking for fast-paced action need to look elsewhere than in the pages of Niall Williams’s novels. His belong to a category I call “slow books,” the kind you sink into and wrap yourself up in, coming to view his characters as old friends. Also, if you are an impressionable kind of reader, you’ll want to have plenty of tea on hand (in the village of Faha they brew it dark and strong), although I’ve been making do with hot cocoa these chilly, windy, rainy September evenings.

Wet, windy, wild and woolly September!

(And yes, here in my bookshop, customers must bear with my listening, once again, to Rosanne and Johnny Cash singing “September When It Comes,” a haunting song that moves me almost to tears. And yes, I have linked it in previous years.)

 

 

My Suspicious Mind

 

We all have our suspicions, don’t we? Especially when it comes to the thinking of those with whom we disagree. Some proponents of gun rights have actually claimed, publicly, that liberals are happy when there is another school shooting incident, because they see it as strengthening the argument for stricter gun control! How could anyone believe and say such an outrageous thing, that anyone could be happy to have schoolchildren terrorized and killed? And yet, people who say they love “freedom” so much have said such vile things against proponents of stricter gun control. I would search for an example to provide here but would rather keep my blood pressure in a safe range.

 

The NRA claims that “gun control doesn’t work” (and when you've read that article, you’ll want to read about the NRA and guns in Ryan Busse’s book Gunfight: My Battle against the Industry that Radicalized America), but clearly they are using a different set of data than that cited by the editors of Scientific American, who say “The science is clear: Gun control saves lives.” I won’t give a long list of links here, but do a search yourself for “gun control arguments” and see what turns up. 

 

The gun issue, though, is tangential to my most recent suspicion, so I’ll leave you to make a connection if you see one. What I’m thinking these days is another school issue--the state of Florida’s plan to end mandatory vaccinations. I won’t comment on the ridiculous parallel between mandatory vaccination and slavery! I mean, really, people! What does strike me is the likelihood that more families may decide to keep their children out of public schools for fear of infectious diseases, and if that happens, shrinking enrollment would shrink school faculty and support staff and possibly close some schools—and isn’t that just what the privatize-everything people would love to see happen? Another thought: those who count on creating an ignorant electorate would be overjoyed to see American public education destroyed!

 

My Parallel Lives

How many lives do each of us live at one time, and how many of them do we share with others? 

 

I have, obviously, what you might call my mundane life—the everyday, ordinary, recurring circle of days that each of us has. Much, though not all, of my mundane life is public, since I am not retired but still work in my retail bookshop for a living, and so I go most days to that bookshop in the village of Northport, Michigan, where I regularly meet year-round locals, seasonal residents, visitors from other parts of Michigan, and travelers far from home. I also meet authors of books, some established and some just starting out, and that's always interesting. And then there are also the insatiably curious. For instance, I am often asked, “Where do you get all your books?” and I tell people the truth. “They come to me.” After 32 years in business, people know I am here, and they think of me when  pruning their home libraries and/or rehoming inherited volumes. 

Clean and desirable, worthy of shelf space

My place of business is also a place of personal friendships and meaningful conversations, and it includes too the frequent indulgence of a latte from the New Bohemian Café, as well as walks to the post office, library, bank, and grocery store, and so in all these ways, although I have lost my beloved life partner and although I work in a small village, I am far from isolated, and in that I am most fortunate.

But then I have, as do we all, a less public mundane life in which I maintain my home and land, work and play with my dog, and face the challenges of widowhood and aging, along with all manner of smaller challenges that come with the materiality and machinery of existence, but in this, too, other people come in and out of the scene, thank heaven! I text daily with sisters and friends, put notes and letters in the mail and rejoice to find notes and letters in my own post office box, occasionally share a meal with someone, and generally draw comfort from my little circle as we trade recipes and laughter and stories of our small personal worries and triumphs along with larger, global concerns, serve as listeners or advisors to each other when needed, and in general bolster one another’s morale. “O, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” 

 

Living, we spin webs of connection.

In my less public mundane life I follow gruesome political news, write letters, and take my small stands with like-minded others. And so the life of the mind, as it is often called, obviously overlaps the mundane, or at least it does for me. Political (as well as literary) concerns are essential to my work and to most of my relationships, and yet these are also part of my private, solitary life, the life I wake to in the dark. It may seem paradoxical to call political concerns private rather than public—and as I say, the private and public do overlap in the life of the mind—but those middle-of-the-night wakings, when I remember once more, all over again, with a shock, that the nightmare of American political life is reality, not merely a bad dream, then although I know I am far from alone in such awakenings to dread, I feel most alone. What do others do? What I do is reach for a book. Because what else can I do in the middle of the night except try to calm my soul and return to sleep?

I remember all too well the night of September 11-12, 2001. The Artist and I lay awake in the dark, listening to the radio, taking what comfort we could in each other's presence as our minds wrestled to understand what had happened and worried about what would follow. Then sometime in the dark of morning, long before sunrise, he got up and began moving about. “What are you doing?" I asked. “Packing,” he said. “I think we should go to Grand Marais.” It was what we had planned to do on September 12, but the events of the 11th had left us shaken and unsure. 

That was the first time I ever crossed the Straits of Mackinac without my heart lifting, but we took up residence in Room 11 of the old lumberjack hotel and a day or two later joined the community in a memorial service in the tiny little Lutheran church, and it felt right to be there. Together.

 

The name of the rose continues to signify.

Now in sleep occurs my most private, most solitary life, the unsharable life of dreams. In the best of them I am reunited with the love of my life, and then it matters not what we are “doing” in any dream sequence, because whatever we are doing or talking about, whoever else might be in the scene, wherever it takes place, what matters is that we are together again, I see him again, talk to him, hear his voice, and I wake very reluctantly from the most ordinary dream scenes to a world from which the Artist has departed.

 

Obviously, all these strands I have called “parallel” are not separate (and so not really parallel at all) but braided together, some strands visible to others, friends or strangers, some shared only with those closest to me, and the dreams my purely private life that no one else living can share.

 

My Home Comforts

 

Ambition in the kitchen has taken a back seat in the September slow-down. Although I still have berries in the freezer, so eventually more jam must be made, there is no urgency, and I didn’t buy a large enough quantity of peaches to warrant canning, only enough to enjoy with yogurt and blueberries and then, with the last few, in a small rustic fresh peach tart. So there we were on the porch again, I with my peach tart and hot cocoa and Niall Williams novel, Sunny Juliet with a fresh beef bone, rain beating a tattoo on the metal roof. I must say, life was pretty cozy at home that evening, despite raging insanity in the world at large. Whatever comes in the future of my small life or the large, crazy world, I am right now a lucky woman.

Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

She Took No Books!

On Sunday I woke up crabby. The heater had gone off in the middle of the night, and the house was cold. Getting up to deal with that, I remembered another reason to be crabby: my coffee house in Willcox is closed. Not “on vacation,” but closed, its future dim with mystery. Source of Coffee, my David place in Willcox! The name, Source of Coffee, soon had me thinking about the Marcel Pagnol character Jean de Florette and his back-breaking and ultimately fatal trials in  Provence [movie review here but note an error in the telling: Ugolin is not Papet's son but his nephew]: When conniving neighbors block up his spring and all his farming efforts fail, he rages against God. It was, after all, the livelihood of his family, he had struggled manfully to succeed, and then, to be deprived of his source (spring)! All right, I know, I know – his deprivation and mine are hardly equal, but it was not yet 5 a.m., and I’ve already admitted to crabbiness.

With heat back on and fresh, home-brewed coffee in mug in hand, my livelihood not facing any new or unusual threats during seasonal retirement (just for the winter: I’ll be back at work in late spring), I felt better when I took Sunny Juliet out on her leash in the dark and saw a perfect moon preparing to set in the west and heard, at the same time, a mockingbird singing in the dark, not even waiting for sunrise to begin rejoicing in the day. 

 

It was early. I was up. But not in a reading mood. Scanned through a few Facebook posts, listened to a little news on the radio. I was probably as impatient as Sunny on Saturday to get outdoors for our morning walk, so once the sun was up, we started out east on the range. East from the cabin means uphill, then down into what I call Peasy’s Gulch. Then we usually go north to the wash and follow it east. 

It’s a fine walk, one that can stretch to an hour easily, what with investigations along the way (mine mostly visual, SJ’s mostly with her nose). But I was in the mood for a change of scenery, and Sunny is always amenable to a change of plan, as long as we’re still having a good time.

 

 

See the arrow in the image above, pointing to a little tree on the distant slope? Doesn’t look very high, does it? Not much of a challenge? Actually, there is no simple and direct path, and while the tree is much higher than it looks from afar, I’d always had it in mind as a destination “someday.” This, I decided, would be the day. 

 

My morning preparations for the walk had been nothing more than the usual list: leash, treats, water, keys, phone, hat. That’s it. I added gloves, since it had been chilly when we started out, but camera stayed home, as did all field guides. No books on hikes! One thing I learned about field guides when I hiked the Dragoons years ago with a friend is that they become increasingly heavy with every step. I can’t live without field guides – don’t get me wrong – but I’ve learned to photograph whatever I want to identify and look it up in my guides afterwards. Sometimes I carry a camera, as on New Year’s Eve for the Town Hill climb; otherwise, my phone has to serve camera duty.

 

In Dos Cabezas, in the mountains, foothills, and the ghost town itself, everything (as my hiking partner noted one day as we were driving the straight, flat Kansas Settlement Road) is “up and down.” In summer, when monsoon rains come to the Southwest, water floods the washes and carries downstream rocks, trees, and anything (or anyone) else that it catches up in its torrential flow. On lower ground, the washes in winter are broad, sandy, and relatively clear of obstacles, as if designed for walking, whereas on higher ground and steep slopes, the story is vastly different. There a wash originates as a gully, and there will be several gullies to every slope. Moreover, there is loose rock everywhere, along with shrubs with thorns and spines. -- And I'm coming back to add that there are also gopher holes, holes made by rooting "pigs" (javelina), and now, another neighbor warns me, abandoned mine shafts!

My destination that small dark tree to the northwest

Dark shade is first gully, from the destination side.

 

Having gone farther east than necessary before making the decision to climb, I had two major gullies to clamber down into and up out of on my way to that tree. Sunny negotiated them easily, but then, she has four legs and four feet and is only a year old. The second gully, in particular, gave me pause. (No, not paws! Please!) Could I do it? Without falling? I put on the gloves I’d taken off when feeling too warm in order to be able to grab handy branches along the way. On the upside of the gully, there was a cow path (quite surprising how good cows are at climbing steep slopes), and I made cautious use of their bovine wisdom. 

For reference: cows on a different hillside on a different day

For scale: same cows as above without the magic of zoom

On Saturday: my cowpath, up out of the second gully

 

My report, in brief: The climb, la montée, ça en valait la peine! Definitely worth the effort! The view of my little ghost town down there in the distance – even, between two local hills, a view out across the playa to the Dragoon Mountains and Cochise Stronghold – was worth every cautious, foot-dragging step that got me there, and it was very satisfying to stand under a tree I’d been looking at from my winter back door and imagining meeting “in person” since 2015.

View attained.

Tree up close.

From my new, lofty vantage point, I could see an easier route to take down than the one I’d used coming up. I’ll remember that for the next time I climb to the tree. I have also installed an altimeter on my new phone now, so when I make the climb again I’ll know exactly how much higher the tree is than the cabin down below, which stands at a mere 5,030 feet above sea level. – Not quite a mile high, the cabin, but that almost explains our freezing temperatures during these winter nights. 

 

Yes, a very satisfying adventure – and I rationed the water supply carefully so that a certain energetic little doggie would not have to go thirsty, either. We had a terrific time!

 

Smörgåsbord Grazing of the Bookish Variety

Happy holidays with (a few) jingle bells!

 

…There is an “idea” boat that is an emotion, and because the emotion is so strong it is probable that no other tool is made with so much honesty as a boat. Bad boats are built, surely, but not many of them. It can be argued that a bad boat cannot survive tide and wave and hence is not worth building, but the same might be said of a bad automobile on a rough road. Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat – builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors….

- John Steinbeck, The Log From the ‘Sea of Cortez’

 

I wanted to title this post “Smörgåsbord of Books” and have that title in Swedish. Alas! Search as I might for a Swedish translation of the phrase, all I could come up with was books of recipes for a smörgåsbord, and it isn’t tasty food tidbits that is my subject today but a mode of reading that some of us get into from time to time, which consists of dipping into one book for a few greedy pages and then moving on to something entirely different, until one has bookmarks in half a dozen or so books.

 

This happened recently (once again, I should say, because it is no rare occurrence with me) because – I went to a book sale! Oh, more than that! I went twice, on the first day and again on the third and last day. I took my camera, thinking I might photograph the sale, but what was I thinking? Do I forget who I am? Of course I could do nothing but look at books, pick up books, make piles of books, until I had filled – well, never mind how many boxes! 

 

(How will I get all these books back to Michigan? The Artist and I had already accumulated so many books here in Arizona that the question was hardly a new one, and so, by my logic, it mattered not at all how many I added to an already-problematic collection. I’ll worry about transporting my treasures when the time comes.)

Winnowed through and rearranged #1

Before attending the sale, I was halfway through A Southwestern Utopia, by Thomas A. Robertson, the story of an experimental colony established in Mexico in the latter 1800s, based on Albert K. Owen’s principles of “Integral Co-operation,” but from my Thursday morning haul, I couldn’t resist slipping into the first few pages of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies. Irving made his expedition from the East Coast of the United States to Buffalo, New York, and from there to St. Louis and eventually into what is now Oklahoma, land that had been designated as “Indian country” but was already then, in 1832, being subjected to President Andrew Jackson’s infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Winnowed through and reorganized #2

Thus I was deep in the nineteenth century of North America, with two different books competing for my attention; however, my Saturday’s repeat foray into the gigantic book sale overloaded my table of bookish temptations, and one little paperback in particular, the one quoted from at the head of this post, stole –and broke! – my heart from the very first page. 

 

The Artist and I were both, we had discovered early in our acquaintance, fans of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and found the character of Doc especially enchanting. So imagine my mingled delight and heartbreak to find the first 70 pages of the little volume in my hands devoted to Steinbeck’s reminiscences of Ed Ricketts, the friend on whom he modeled the character of Doc! And then – he and Ed, a.k.a. “Doc,” are going on off together on a boat! The Artist, a self-described “stone Pisces,” although never a sailor, loved boats! Houseboats and rowing boats, mostly, though he didn’t turn up his nose at a quiet trolling motor. 

River Rat's summer abode

But he would read about any kind of adventure on any kind of boat, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to Melville’s Moby Dick, and I am finding it almost unbearable that he never had a chance to read this book that would undoubtedly have had a prominent place on his shelf of favorites. So when I wake up at 2 a.m. and reach for the little volume, I am reading it for him as much as for myself. 

An Arizona friend had a request, though, and I turned my mind to that on Sunday afternoon. She wanted “something light” for her holiday flight back east to visit family in Michigan. When I found two different Laurie Lee titles at the sale, Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, my first thought was, Perfect! But then I wondered. Maybe that wouldn’t exactly be my friend’s cup of tea. I know that when she reads novels, she focuses more on action and dialogue than description – in fact, she confesses that she sometimes skips over long passages of description. So with that in mind, I went back to my shelves, and when a little paperback edition of The Borrowers, by Mary Norton, whispered, “Take me!” I thought, yes, that’s a good choice. Still playing it safe, however, I went to my Southwest corner, where Lisa G. Sharp’s memoir, A Slow Trot Home, seemed another likely winner. There! Three books – and all together, in volume and weight, less than many a hardcover novel. This way, whichever book she tries first, if it doesn’t suit her mood, she will have backup. But then, naturally, I had to read the first few pages of both the Laurie Lee books! 

 

It was 1934. I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far. As I left home that morning and walked away from the sleeping village, it never occurred to me that others had done this before me. 

    -  Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Also, since I had a lot of work to do, what with de-acquisitioning and rearranging books to make room for those recently acquired, naturally I was looking into several of those “new” books and couldn’t help reading a couple of chapters in Edmund Wilson’s Red, Black, Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations, which reads more like a detailed travel narrative than a sociological tract, I’m happy to say. 

Minimally rearranged; cannot eliminate much from this corner.

Tucked away -- but not completely out of sight like the 17 books in a box in the closet!

 

Well, Sunday was a grey day. Overcast. Chilly. I’d thought I might drive to Willcox for fresh-roasted coffee beans but decided to stay put with puppy and private library instead. Sunny Juliet and I did some more “work” on identifying her various toys (rabbit, skunk, kong, ball, bear), although she would have been just as happy or happier to have me throw the tennis ball from one end of the house to the other, over and over, if we were going to stay indoors. 

Not a reader, but I love her!