Summer Is: Flowers, Family, Friends, and Books

Color riot in my front yard!
 

When the Artist was still with me in our old farmhouse, for some years I aimed at subtlety in my plantings. One year, for example, it was all white and dusty green. Then I came home from Arizona without him in May of 2022, and all I wanted in my gardens was color, a preference that is still very much alive. 

Bright colors! I need them! Especially after a Michigan winter, which was easy going as far as snow was concerned but had the usual short days with overcast skies.

During my son’s recent visit, we were out walking with the dog when I commented to him that this – July – seems like “real life.” What I meant is that in Michigan we look forward all year to summer, so while it is only a small part of the calendar year, our lives expand then to fill the long daylight hours. This year I’ve been keeping a list (somewhat haphazard, not nearly as methodical as the lists of Thomas Jefferson or Henry David Thoreau) of what I see emerging or blooming for the first time each day, starting with wild leeks in the woods in April. Now the black-eyed Susans have begun, joining daisies and coreopsis, and trees get in the act, too. 

My catalpa at home (at what a friend calls “Frost Pocket Farm”) flowered later than trees elsewhere in the county but has blossoms now, and soon the basswood will flower, and its branches will be – I hope! – filled with happy bees. And this year there were local cherries for Cherry Festival!

Overcast Wednesday morning turned sunshiny before noon.

My hiking parter from Arizona visited with her dog, my son and his wife visited, and next come my sisters on their annual northern Michigan getaway, something they’ve done every summer for years, bringing our mother with them many times, providing memories that sustain us now that she’s gone. 

 

I’ll post my “Books Read” list for June separately. For today I'm giving you timely information about Leelanau Township’s Friends of the Library (FOL) events for this new month. First, this Saturday, July 6, is the annual used book sale at the township hall, beginning at 9 a.m. You might want an umbrella this year and a few plastic bags, but the book sale is only one day, so you don’t want to miss it. 

 

Then there is the FOL Summer Author Series, every Tuesday evening for four weeks, beginning the week after the 4^th.

 

Tuesday, July 9: Don Lystra, with his third book, a new novel titled Searching for Van Gogh, a coming-of-age story set in 1960s Michigan. Don is the first presenter in this year’s series. I will be interviewing this beloved local author and will have copies of his book available for purchase, which he will be happy to sign. (In fact, I will have copies of the books of all the authors in the series at their respective presentations.)

 

Tuesday, July 16: Joan Strassmann, a summer Leland resident, brings us Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard, and who could resist that? The COVID lockdown may be over, but our love affair with birds continues. Strassman, a well-known writer on animal behavior, is Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tuesday, July 23: Northport claims chef and author Abra Berens as one of our own, due to her history in Leelanau Township as co-farmer of Bare Knuckle Farm, established in 2009. After eight years as a farmer, she moved to Chicago to become a chef. Her two previous cookbooks are Ruffage and Grist; the new one is Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit – perfect for summer!

 

Tuesday, July 30: Traverse City’s Stephen Lewis, author of Murder on Old Mission and Stone Cold Dead, brings us historical fiction this year, with From Infamy to Hope, the story of a housemaid in 17^th-century Puritan Boston who is a victim of religious persecution, branded as a fornicator, and dresses as a boy to become a soldier in the colony’s war with the Pequots.

All events in the LTFOL Summer Author Series will take place at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street and will begin at 7 p.m. Admission is free. 

Note: On Summer Author Tuesdays, the bookstore will close by 4 at the latest, so I can go home to my dog for a while before returning to Northport for the evening event. 

 

It’s summer! Live it up! And Happy Independence Day!!!

Toasty Times Are Here

Beech leaves

First, fall color report: Red and orange and yellow are giving way to brown and gold. I’ve written here before, earlier this fall and in years past, that beech leaves in the fall make me think of buttered toast dripping with honey. Now that November is upon us, beech leaves are less yellow, more brown, and the oaks have turned a rich brown, also. Both oaks and beeches, especially the young ones, will hang onto some of their dark, papery leaves all winter.

 

Oak leaves in full sun do have a warm look, don't they?

The French have two words for brown: brun/brune (a hair color, for example) and marron/marrone,  used more often and also one of two names for chestnuts and the chestnut tree (which also goes by the name chataigner -- but see the blue box on this site if you want to increase your confusion), with marron also used as slang to refer to something strange or bizarre. C’est marron! If you want to refer to the color called 'maroon' in English, however, go for bordeaux in French. Like the wine. Oui, c'est marron!

-- Non, ce sont des chênes!

Lakeside oaks

Brown leaves, blue sky

With toasty colors outdoors, it’s time to reach for sweaters and comforters indoors, and I would willingly have sacrificed an hour of after-midnight dark on Sunday in order to have daylight seem to come earlier – I get confused by time changes -- but no! We were gaining an hour (of reading or sleep) to achieve the earlier morning light. (How we humans pretend! “It’s really 8 o’clock, but we’re pretending it’s 7 o’clock” is how I explain the time change to myself.) Earlier morning light is very welcome! Not so welcome is the increase in evening darkness, but next month we’ll turn the corner, I tell myself. It’s good that the equinox comes in December, so that each cold day in January and February we have a tiny bit more daylight.

There she is!

Meanwhile, only on Saturdays now is my bookstore open until 5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, if there’s no one browsing at 3 p.m., I turn out the shop lights, lock the door, and go home to my dog, staying until 5 only on Saturdays. My bookstore was so busy last Saturday! I was surprised and gratified by all the number of visitors, browsers, and book buyers. Most of first two groups were also members of the third group, I'm happy to say.

Last week we had sunshine three afternoons in a row, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – and then again for most of Saturday! Basswood and black walnut trees in my yard had dropped all their leaves and stood bare, letting the sun reach accumulated leaves on the ground as Sunny Juliet and I enjoyed light and fresh air along with exercise. Every sunny hour this time of year is a gift. Soon the silver maple leaves will fall, carpeting the ground, leaving bare branches holding up the sky. (Monday: I think today's bitter cold wind will achieve that result!)

Meanwhile, indoors next to my bed these books await my attention: History of the Rain, a novel by Niall Williams; Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America’s Legendary Racehorse, by Kim Wickens (this is a nonfiction account of the horse featured in the Geraldine Brooks novel); To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey From Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger; Meriwether: a novel of Meriwether Lewis and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, by David Nevin; and an ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, due to be released in January. 

I’m trying to save my reading of the Campbell book as a Christmas present to myself. Or maybe Thanksgiving weekend, if I can even wait that long.

The rest? I can’t say I’ll get through them all this month, what with the chance, as happens frequently, that something not in the stack will present itself and cut in line, so to speak -- an ever-present danger of owning a bookstore! After what seems like a lifetime of school and assigned reading, it still feels like a luxury to pick up whatever appeals to me at any given moment, and heaven knows we need little comforts and simple luxuries to keep us going, with winter’s dark and a strife-riven world pressing in upon us.

 

Previous post was my top fiction picks of 2023 from January through October, and next post will be top nonfiction. By the way, a handful of people left comments on my last post, but not a single one chimed in with a favorite novel read this year, and I know that some of you have read novels this year! One person left a new comment on a very old post, recommending a work of fiction from Scotland. Anyone else have recommendations? Anyone?

Another note, not about cold wind: If the only person who comes in the bookstore today was the one who wanted to tell me how much he loves Bonnie Jo Campbell's Q Road, my day was made!

 

Winter's Subtle Palette

Up North, the outdoor world in January verges on monochromatic. Bright yellow, green, and red colors appear only on signs (and, in the city, traffic lights), while in fields and woods the soft dun color of a dry, rustling beech leaf is almost shocking against the white of snow and black tracery of bare branches. The picture at left was taken before there was snow on the ground, so use your imagination to subtract that much brown, and see what remains.

(You can also click here for images of dun-colored horses and information on what causes the coloring and its variations.)

Several recent new offerings at Dog Ears Books sport covers with subtle palette colors:

NEW COLLECTED POEMS, by Wendell Berry (hardcover with jacket, $30)

THE RIVER SWIMMER (two novellas), by Jim Harrison (hardcover with jacket, $25)

THE GEOARCHAEOLOGY OF LAKE MICHIGAN COASTAL DUNES, by William A. Lovis Alan F. Arbogast, & G. William Monaghan (softcover, large format, $35.95)

Now in paperback: THE WINDWARD SHORE: A WINTER ON THE GREAT LAKES, by Jerry Dennis (pb, $16.95)

Friday was my sister's birthday. What did I send her? Recall that I am a bookseller and that we are a family of readers! Can I be more specific? Not without spoiling the surprise, in case the package hasn’t reached her yet. Were the cover colors bright or subtle? Definitely subtle. Will she find the book boring? Not on your life! It will transport her to a place she'd like to be....

The Other Fall Colors

The color yellow shouted to me happily this morning and would not leave me alone. It was everywhere. I didn’t mind a bit, since yellow is a color that always makes me happy.

The word ‘yellow’ probably doesn’t appear in as many book titles as ‘red’ or ‘black’ or ‘white’ or even ‘blue.’ (Languages that have only two color words sort into dark and light; languages with three color words give red its own name. Blue? Metaphorical for users of English.) The first yellow-mention title that came to my mind was A Little Yellow Dog, by Walter Mosley, the first Easy Rawlins story I came across. Then, jumping genres and ages, I thought of the yellow house on New Dollar Street where the Moffats lived. That’s The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes, of course. And Vincent van Gogh lived in the yellow house in Arles. But those are houses, not books.


So I started looking for more titles and quickly found...

Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis
The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O’Brian
The Yellow Fairy Book, by Andrew Lang
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, by Michael Dorris
Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
The Yellow House Mystery, by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Novel on Yellow Paper, by Stevie Smith

Obviously, this is the tip of an iceberg. Any favorites of yours belong on this list?


Fall is full of color, really a much more colorful season than summer, which can be as monotone in its green as winter in white, except for flowers. Autumn leaves command most of our attention, but fall has its own flowers, too, and I am loving my asters more than ever this year.


When I look closer, I see that the same asters that dance in the breeze are also a lunchroom for bees and caterpillars.