Winter has arrived! Are you prepared?

Winter is all around us.

A friend of mine goes places in her car in winter in her indoor clothes, adding only a down vest. No gloves or mittens. No knitted cap. No heavy jacket. “I’m in the car!” she tells me. I ask her, “What if you had car trouble?” and she replies, “I would use my cell phone!” 

So wiper blades don't freeze to windshield overnight....

By contrast, I am not only layered up for driving but have an extra pair of work gloves with me in case I need to, say, open the hood—or get that shovel out of the back of the car to dig myself out of a snowbank—or whatever! Yes, I have a shovel with me. (No sandbags, but I figure I could use the car’s floormats, if necessary. Sandbags are very heavy.) Also engine oil, windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, flashlight, and jumper cables. The bottle of drinking water, for myself and my dog, if she happens to be with me, has to come in the house overnight, or it would be just a bottle of ice, and who needs that in an emergency? (Note to self: Put blanket in car!) I take my clue from the old Tom Lehr song, “Be Prepared!”

 

On the evening of the day of his state funeral, I began reading Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Keeping Faith, about his years in the White House. I have had the book for several years but hadn’t read it because, while I have always loved Jimmy, I am usually bored by political memoirs. Too many big names, too many dates, generally not much that is personal, not much to give me insight into the writer’s personality and character. 

 

I’m happy to say that Carter’s book is very different. For one thing, he wrote it himself. It isn’t the work of a ghost writer. For another, he begins at the end, leading off with the most painful episode of his presidency, the hostage crisis. How many presidents would ever have done that? In the first pages of his memoir, he shows himself at his most vulnerable. And, of course, by then he has already lost his bid for re-election, so as the hostages are being released, he is onstage at the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Hardly a moment of glory for Carter. But he had done the work, and the hostages were freed and came home alive.

 

He was never one to take shortcuts or “fake it,” in any of his life roles. He took the job of president of the United States seriously, writing of his preparation:  

 

From the beginning, I realized that my ability to govern well would depend upon my mastery of the extremely important issues I faced. I wanted to learn as much as possible…. (p. 57 of the Easton Press edition)

 

In his first campaign for the presidency, coming to national politics from the governorship of Georgia, Carter was so confident that he would win the White House that many called him overconfident. Yet he wrote that his “freedom to act and speak during the campaign was severely restrained by the same confidence.” What could that mean? How and why would confidence of victory restrain his freedom to act and speak? Precisely, again, because he took so seriously the job of president.

 

I ran as though I would have to govern—always careful about what I promised and determined not to betray those who gave me their support. Sometimes I irritated my opponents and the news reports by firmly refusing to answer to questions to which I did not know the answers. And repeatedly I told reporters, ‘If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president.’ Even during the earliest days I was always thinking about what would have to be done in the Oval Office after the inauguration ceremonies were over. (p. 65)

 

It drove reporters crazy that he would occasionally “I don’t know” to a question. What he needed to know, he worked to find out. What he couldn’t know ahead of time, he admitted. But always, as he campaigned for the highest office in the land, he prepared himself not only to win but to govern.

 

My life is ever so much simpler. I prepared for winter with snow tires, a new furnace, and a refill of my propane tank. Good thing, because in keeping with yo-yo weather patterns of recent months, our temperate winter weather over the holidays in northern Michigan has now given way to January temperatures in the ’teens, with single-digit wind chill (or “feels like”) readings. 

We have wind chill!

("When I was a kid," I used to tell my son, "we didn’t have wind chill!" That is, of course, we didn’t have a name for it. What would the word ‘rose’ name if there were no more roses?)

She doesn't mind snow or cold.

Dogs, though. A dog is like the legendary postman: Whatever the weather, out we go, and little does Sunny Juliet suspect how slight is her dog mom’s inclination for outdoor adventures in a punishing, sub-freezing northwest wind, sun perpetually hidden above low-hanging clouds of depressing gunmetal grey! I make my voice enthusiastic and let her watch me load my pocket with treats.... 

 

She doesn't mind at all.

Every day of our human lives, in one way or another, we are preparing for days to come, aren’t we? For me, Sunday was housework (an attempt to keep entropy at bay), Monday paperwork (getting ready for tax time), and Tuesday an early morning expedition, sans dog, to Leland to have a new (working) headlight installed, which gave me an opportunity while my car was at Van’s Garage to have coffee and breakfast in what was formerly the Early Bird (now Great Lakes Chocolate & Café) and to sit in the very corner where the Artist and I sat so many, many mornings in past years. 

View from the "bus driver's seat" --

The restaurant has not been the Early Bird for a long time, but after we moved from the village of Leland out to Leelanau Township in 2021, the Early Bird routine was no longer part of our lives, and more recent incarnations of the place never really registered on my radar. Anyway, the building has the same configuration, and the view from what the Artist used to call the “bus driver’s seat” (no booths now, but I hitched my chair around to face north) is pretty much the same. I should have been prepared for the flood of memories, but the emotions caught me off-guard. 

Then, home to books and dog! I am so lucky to have a warm, sheltering home and a lively, affectionate little companion! I still inhabit the life the Artist and I made together, and Wednesday will find me back in Northport, on Waukazoo Street, in my other little world, surrounded by books. 

Be prepared!

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!

¡Somos Llegados!

Groundhog Day. We are here at last in the cabin in the ghost town in Cochise County, Arizona. 

Choosing discretion over valor, we stayed over Wednesday night in Deming, New Mexico, rather than driving on to arrive and unpack in the dark, and it was a good decision. We had the rising sun behind us in the morning and reached Willcox before noon to pick up keys and get out to the cabin, where we spent the afternoon in nonstop motion -- unpacking, cleaning, rearranging, and generally getting settled. I was happy to find a couple traces of our stay here three years ago. No one had discarded my jar of "desert glass," and a thrift shop art find (unlike towels and pillows and can opener) had also survived interim renters. These little items increased my feeling of having arrived home.

From the looks of the mountains, I'd say it's been a warm winter here. The Pinalenos to the north of Willcox had snow on their peaks when we were here last, snow that lasted well into March. None this year. We'll see how the Chiricahuas look when we are refreshed enough from the cross-country trek to venture out that way. One thing I noted with particular pleasure is that the distinctive twin peaks of our mountains, las Dos Cabezas, are clearly visible from the New Mexico state line. I smiled to spot them and watch them draw nearer as we drove west.

West to Willcox -- where I had forgotten the extent to which mountains surround and dominate the town -- then south and back in an easterly direction as we climb in elevation to the ghost town. 

It was 6 a.m. when we first checked the time, 6:30 when I got up -- to challenge myself at making coffee without a coffee maker or even an appropriate pot but, more importantly, to watch the progress of the dawn. At first the sky was only somewhat light in the east (giving me plenty of time to wrestle with coffee makings), but gradually, as it always does, that light grew brighter until I saw that the sun would clear the horizon before 7:30. Watching the sky, watching the clock.... I don't know the official sunrise time today in Willcox, but here in Dos Cabezas it's coming up over the mountains to the east by 7:25. To Midwestern eyes, especially eyes coming from a northern Michigan winter, the reliability of the Arizona sun and its dazzling is astonishing.

It's cool in the cabin, but the afternoon and evening of our arrival were so warm that I voted not to turn on the propane heater, and we were warm and comfortable under the covers all night. Sarah took a while to get settled on her bed under the Artist's desk, and by morning she had figured out a cozier arrangement.

We are all doing fine; however, we really do need to buy a coffee pot and can opener. 

My reading, I'm sorry to say, has completely fallen off during the past week. A few nights I managed to read a page or two of House Made of Dawn, by M. Scott Momaday, but then sleep would overtake me. The week before, my morning and evening studies of Spanish had made inroads into any other reading: this past week, even Spanish has been neglected. But now we are here, and soon we will establish routines for our desert winter, including time for reading and study.

Comfort Books

The sheep shuffled themselves into a tighter pack in the field beyond. Her feet skidded on ice, scuffed on stones; trees stood bare against the starry sky, the pale shape of an owl swept overhead. She climbed up as high as the drovers’ road; she stopped there, on the crossroads, on the edge of everything she had ever known. The hillside stood wide and empty, and it seemed that there was nothing but the stars and nightbirds.
 -      Jo Baker, Longbourn

As autumn slips from bright warmth to colder, chillier days, days growing ever shorter, bookmarked by dark mornings and darker evenings, instinct prompts me to turn to the joys of reading again books I have enjoyed in the past. Taking down a well-loved book to read it again is like settling in for a good long visit with a beloved old friend: in the comfort of familiarity, there is space and leisure to discover what one has never seen before and to rediscover forgotten delights.

An inveterate re-reader of Jane Austen all my adult life, when I discovered Jo Baker’s re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of a maid in the household, I shelved Longbourn alongside the Austen original, anticipating re-readings of both.

Sarah took her orders, and went to gather up the needful equipment: her blacklead, vinegar, the jar of cold tea leaves, her rags and broom; at times like this, you just gritted your teeth and got on with it. She carried her basket upstairs, and, with Polly, got down on her knees to roll up the Turkey-carpet up. She swept out and blackleaded the grate, and then between them she and Polly dragged the carpet down the stairs.

Sarah is literate and borrows books from Mr. Bennett’s library, as well as from Elizabeth Bennett, but her life experiences have been narrowly circumscribed. She has not traveled far from home. Her little world has been bounded by the immediate countryside around Longbourn House and the village of Meryton. Also, her life is one of hard labor rather than moneyed leisure.

Jo Baker’s story lacks the sharp wit of Jane Austen’s. Well, of course! Clever, saucy Eliza Bennett is Austen’s central character, while Baker’s novel takes unworldly Sarah’s point of view – Sarah, who never so much as appeared by name in Pride and Prejudice. But while I will always love Elizabeth’s impetuosity and strong feelings, her prejudices and sharp tongue, as well as the loving heart she bears for family and friends, I am touched by hard-working Sarah’s ability to see beneath the social surfaces of those in all classes of life. Rather than take Mr. Collins as a complete fool, for example, as do Mr. Bennett and his daughters, Sarah sees the young man’s clueless awkwardness, and she pities him. Were Sarah to be cast as maid in the home of Emma Woodhouse, we feel sure she would understand the feelings motivating Mrs. Elton's behavior and pity her, also, rather than dismiss her from sympathetic consideration.

Pride and Prejudice at its inception began as a simple epistolary novel and grew from there, and even in its final published version the content of letters holds much of plot and character development. In Longbourn, not so. Entrusted with Elizabeth’s letters to mail, Sarah turns them over curiously in her hands on the way to the post office,

...lifting them to smell them, tracing the seals with a rough fingertip. They flitted wherever they liked, these letters. They darted back and forth across the countryside like birds.

Not like Sarah, who, when finally given the chance to travel to London, must ride outside on the carriage luggage rack.

She has dreamed of travel, though, this servant girl with rough, chapped and chilblained, work-hardened hands, and she is intrigued by James, the new addition to Longbourn’s servants, in part because she senses that he has seen faraway places. It’s true, James has been far from home, but there are places he has seen that he would like to see again, differently.

He sat on his bed, still in shirtsleeves, with a blanket over his shoulders, and a book of Scottish maps on his lap. This way of rendering the hard facts of landscape was new to him: the little upward flicks of the pen for mountainsides, the tiny clustered trees for woodland, the blue patches of lochs. He wanted maps of other places, he wanted maps of places he had been, he wanted to follow routes across terrain that his feet had trodden.

Will his life from now on be as narrowly bounded as Sarah’s always has been? As was the case with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Sarah and James begin their acquaintance with misunderstandings and irritability that we feel sure will turn in time to love. What we cannot anticipate in early chapters, however, is the number and depth of secrets that will be revealed in the novel’s rich course.

It is as much a matter of literary convention as of imagination, I’m sure, but Baker quite outdoes Austen when it comes to describing her characters’ world, whether indoors or out. In the kitchen we see the era's methods and materials of cooking and cleaning; outdoors there is livestock and fowl -- horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, domestic gallinies and hand-raised wild pheasant. Baker's descriptions provide details and nuances that transport a reader over two hundred years into the past and into a vanished English countryside.

She rubbed the mist from the window and looked out. Low sun now, after all the rain. The light was golden: it caught on the damp flagstones and made them brilliant.

Or this passage with Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, outdoors for a change:

She climbed a stile, and sank down in the lee of a hedge. There was wood sorrel growing on the bank, and harebells, and there were cowslips nodding in the meadow grass at her feet, and a young cow ambled over, head swinging low, considering her with a bulging eye. It blinked its long lashes, and licked its nose with a rasping sticky tongue.

Among the comforts of re-reading is that even bad weather can be appreciated in the pages of a book. Our own northern Michigan skies of late have been filled with dark scudding clouds, the sky “heavy and low,” bringing a “strange dusk” to mornings and afternoons, but indoors we have cheery firesides and electric lamplight and books in which to lose ourselves, shutting out the chill fall dark with pages of lively, vivid fiction. Leelanau County is bracing and wild as October draws to a close. It's beautiful. But the fireside has its own attractions, and as I scrub out my own egg pan and wipe down the stove, I think of Sarah performing her chores at Longbourn, and I look forward happily to joining her again this evening.

I Didn’t Guess – I Looked It Up

Lake Leelanau, hidden from sight

The weather. What else? Other conversational topics, one by one, drop by the snowy wayside. We still have a range of topics, don't get me wrong, but it's narrower, if you will. There's how cold it is, how much snow we have, how much propane we've burned, the price of propane, the cost of snow-plowing, how much longer the cold weather is going to last, how much more snow we're going to get, and so on and so forth. 

Driveway

Is anyone else out there old enough (actually, I know some of you are) to remember the slogan of our old grade school “Look It Up Club,” sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia? 

“WE NEVER GUESS – WE LOOK IT UP!”

Back when encyclopedia salesmen (as I recall, they were all men) came to a neighborhood, their first stop was the neighborhood school. Only after the school bought a set or sets of the beautifully bound, colorful volumes, and the pupils had signed pledges never to guess but to look up answers to all their burning questions, did the salesmen fan out to residential homes. My parents plunked down good money for the white binding. Why? I think it was more expensive than blue or red, and the information was the same, regardless of the binding, and my parents were generally very frugal and canny consumers (or shoppers, as we said then). The educational value of so much knowledge must have gotten in the way of the careful calculations they normally made.

Andrei Codrescu didn’t grow up in the U.S., but his wife did, and she was a member of the “Look It Up Club” in her day. Codrescu’s little essay on wasting time online – or, more to the point, having his time wasted online by others – only begins with mention of the Club and then goes on to more current concerns. Worth reading, though. Won’t take you long, either. Then -- your assignment, should you choose to accept it -- let me know what you think about what he says. 

What I set out to look up this morning online, though, wasn’t the old grade school “club” but snow and cold records for northern Michigan. (Dawn got me started.) I remember very clearly my first winter in Traverse City and how one had to enter intersections with the same caution necessary on Illinois farm roads in late summer. Illinois: tall corn. Michigan: tall snow. No visibility around the corner. No visibility until you were in the intersection. That’s how it was on the roads that winter. And the view from indoors? Snowing. Never not snowing.

"Seasonal Road" - love this designation!

Anyone who is dubious or skeptical and/or too young to have been around for the Up North winter of 1970-71 can look it up here, but if you don’t want to bother I’ll save you the trouble: 184 inches. What did I know then? I’d never lived so far north and thought that such a winter must be typical. Streets, sidewalks, and alleys were plowed around the clock, and life went on as usual, as people shoveled their roofs (I’d never seen people shovel snow from roofs before), and icicles grew two stories in length, descending from second-story eaves clear to the ground. There were a lot of “sword fights” among kids in the neighborhood.

My neighborhood is rural now

The coldest day ever in Leelanau County? We stayed overnight with friends one New Year’s Eve, and I swear the outdoor thermometer at their old farmhouse read – 40 F on New Year’s morning, but do you think I can find anything like that online? As I recall from the time (early 1980s?), the official temperature was not as low as their thermometer reading, but the air was definitely cold enough to chill lungs. We walked to the home of neighbors of our friends for New Year’s Day brunch (no way cars were going to start: ignitions just clicked when keys were turned and made no further effort) and were only able to do that because there was no wind whatsoever. No wind chill, but that’s how cold it was, children: The wind had frozen stiff and couldn’t move!

If you are interested in average temperature, snowfall, humidity, heating and A/C costs for Leelanau, you can find all that here, but I’ve looked up enough for one day. Time to read a little poetry. Or I could just close up shop and go ice-fishing. Time to toss a coin....

P.S. Karen has much more dramatic photos of mountains of snow on her photo blog. Check it out. 

In Which I Metaphorically Tread Water

A county hillside last week

"Treading water" can only be a metaphorical expression at this time of year. Treading snow would be more like it but doesn't make much sense. What I mean by "treading water" could also be expressed by the musical expression "vamping," in that I have a couple or three serious, substantive blog posts in process, but since, for different reasons, I'm not able to publish even one of those today, I'm improvising a shorter, lighter post. A place-holder, as it were....

Our household has been seriously challenged this year by weather and transportation issues, and we have spent many housebound days, some planned, some unplanned. In my last post, I mentioned darning socks. Catching up on laundry, cleaning out dresser drawers, writing letters, baking, and making soup are other good projects for such days, but reading always comes near the top of every day's list, so here's what I've been reading at home the last couple of days:

My "intrepid Ulysses group" is reading James Baldwin's Another Country this month, so I'm devouring that novel every morning, and it is just as I remembered --  beautifully written and with characters so true and so fully dimensional that if a reader didn't know the author, I maintain it would be impossible to ascertain if the writer had been male or female, black or white, gay or straight. As it happens, Another Country's author was male, black, and gay and wasn't hiding any aspects of his own identity. My point is not to deny who he was but to commend the imagination and genius that was able to get inside so many different characters different from himself in terms of gender, color, and sexual orientation. 

At bedtime, before falling asleep, I slow down with Sycamore Shores, by Clark B. Firestone, an American travel book from the 1930s (originally published in 1936) in which the author recounts various trips up and down the Ohio River and its tributaries at a time when steamships -- not as many as formerly but more than you might imagine -- were still taking passengers on Midwestern waters. Crew, roustabouts, fellow passengers, towns along the way, history (pioneer and Civil War) and natural history, and agriculture are all described in detail. Occasionally the author went further on foot or by road vehicle to reach upriver stretches not (or no longer) navigable. Hidden-away hamlets, bygone days -- very restful reading before falling asleep. Also, from the two years I lived in Cincinnati, childhood visits to Ohio relatives, and trips David and I took to and through Kentucky, much of the territory Firestone covers is somewhat familiar to me. What I love, however, is the time travel aspect of this book! Firestone explored rivers of the "Old West" before our beloved Harlan and Anna Hubbard built their shantyboat and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi, but much of the riverside life is similar to what the Hubbards experienced a decade or so later. 

Other places! What a siren song they sing to us in the middle of a brutally cold Up North winter! Cleaning out an old chest of drawers recently (re snowbound project list above), I unearthed a couple of little books of my own travel notes, trips made to the U.P. and up into Canada in 2005 and 2006. It was fun to re-read my sketchy pages and share them with David, almost (he said) like taking the trips together again. If winter lasts too long this year, maybe I'll share a few of these old notes. 

Who doesn't dream of carefree travel days when snowbound for days on end?