Wednesday
was busy. With my first author event of the season scheduled for 7 p.m., I was
up and out the door early, with many errands to accomplish in Leland, Lake
Leelanau, Northport, and back at the old farmhouse. All the silly fretting I’d
done about the weather, though, had been so much wasted energy. It was
absolutely a glorious day!
With
Bruce at the bookstore helm in Northport, I returned home early in the
afternoon to tend to cleaning, cooking, dog, and laundry. Then about 2 o’clock
I took a deep breath and decided I’d earned a break. Took a book out on our front –
what is it? a deck? a walk? – wooden walkway, where a couple of big wooden
chairs now invite lounging. Having already opened a cold beer, I sat down and opened my book. How marvelous!
Scolding
chipmunks (scolding Sarah, I believe, not me) had me looking up every few
minutes, as did birds singing high in the trees, and then I would notice all
over again the blooming flowers visited by bees and admire once more my pretty
dog lying in the grass and feel a shiver of delight to be sitting there
outdoors with book and beer and dog, chipmunks and flowers and sunshine and
green things growing all around. It was a distractingly beautiful day. I was
not, that is to say, completely focused on my book to the exclusion of the
world around me. But then, I didn’t want to be. The experience made a perfect
whole.
Were
those stolen moments? Was it a stolen hour? I could have been pursuing household
cleanliness more thoroughly, but I knew my houseguest, author Ellen Airgood,
taking a couple of days out of her very busy life to come to Northport, would
understand and condone my indolence. I trust her that much.
Ellen
has a hard time finding 10 minutes a day to spend outdoors, so when she arrived
her first request was to sit “in the sun,” and accordingly we moved from shaded
walk to sunny table, and there we enjoyed a few bites and sips before coming
back to Northport for Ellen’s reading and book signing.
What
can I say? She is a wonder – wonderful writer, wonderful friend, wonderful
worker. “Her books are about real life,” another friend of mine says with deep
appreciation.
That
appreciative, book-loving friend and others found time at the end of their own
busy days to come to Dog Ears Books last night to hear Ellen read (from her new
book, The Education of Ivy Blake, and from a personal essay in the new
anthology, Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) and to ask her
questions about her writing, her books, her characters, her life. It was good
conversation, relaxed and honest. Afterward, Ellen and I took the long way home
via my favorite back roads, and then this morning we had more time for quiet
conversation over leisurely breakfast and coffee.
I
thought again – actually, several times – how fortunate I am in my rich
literary life. Ellen says about her hard work at the West Bay Diner she and her
husband own in the U.P. exactly what I feel about Dog Ears Books in Northport:
“Without the business, look at all the wonderful people I would never have
met!”
Our
leisurely morning, time that could be seen as “stolen” for both of us, felt
good. I felt rewarded rather than penalized for having stolen that time. I hope
Ellen also feels rewarded having seized yesterday.
As
we sometimes say here in the Leelanau, “Seize the carp!”
