Hardly Modern But Grateful To Be in Touch

Good morning! 

Confession: The Artist thinks I’m “modern” because I have a Facebook account for the bookstore and maintain this blog. You know better! I tell him that blogs are old-fashioned now and that if I were truly up-to-date I would be appealing to busy, nonstop scrollers and their short attention spans by tweeting, but what would I have to say to the twittering flock? As it is, I spend a certain amount of time online but basically continue to live life in the slow lane and have no desire to be pushed onto uncongenial platforms. As Popeye always said, I yam what I yam.

 

One might wonder why a book-reading, letter-writing dinosaur would bother publishing an online blog at all. Part of the answer is efficiency. It simply makes more sense to put my impressions of books read and trips taken and life observed on the web than to compose multiple individual e-mails and still leave out too many friends and regular customers. Because "Books in Northport" has been going since fall of 2007, I have some customers I’ve never met at all, people who order from me (instead of the behemoth) books I’ve written about on this very site.

 

Then there is that whole business of espressin’ myself. I have been a writer since that first story, in first grade, about a robin family in their nest and am myself largely via the written word.

 

Finally, habit. After almost 13 years, it would feel strange not to keep up my blog. It has become a natural part of my life.

 

Here, though, is something I realized only the other day. As far as how “natural” it can be called to throw these virtual messages-in-bottles out into the public ether, with no knowing where they may wash up, the truth for me right now that in the summer of 2020, with friendships constrained by 6-foot distance, bookstore encounters masked, hugs exchanged only within households, much of “normal” life is no longer [normal], but while personal visits and bookstore interactions are very different, exchanges not done face-to-face are unchanged, and I don't know about you, but I find some comfort in that. 

 

When my son and I converse by phone, our conversations are not constrained by concerns about distance. There are miles between us, but our voices are in the same space. Coronavirus hasn't changed that the way we talk to each other.

 

When I find a handwritten letter waiting in my post office box, reading it now is as pleasurable as it was one year or 10 years ago. I still have letters and postcards from 10 years ago, too! Like books, they can be revisited and enjoyed again and again, even after the writers have passed on. 

 

My daily texts with my sisters, sporadic e-mails with family and friends are as unconstrained as ever, too. I don't eschew all aspects of the technological world, by any means.

 

So while my blogging subject matter in 2020 has reflected and will continue to reflect this year’s unprecedented concerns (and the virus is far from the only one), the forum itself remains the same, and my relationship with those of you who comment continues to be what it has always been, and I'm grateful for that. For me, it's a little island of normality in the constantly changing, often stormy sea of our life today.

 

Like most of you – and I don’t exclude possible saints, since we know that they too had their dark nights of the soul – I have my down times and occasionally share them here. On the other, brighter hand, when life feels like something to celebrate, I share that, too. "Books in Northport" has no destination: we’re all "traveling between the eternities,” and I find comfort not only in sharing the journey but also, in the year of coronavirus, in having an unconstrained avenue we can travel together. Hope you do, too. 

As always, thanks for reading.

Snippets From Township and Village -- “in these uncertain times”

It will be August in only one week! Cherry harvest is underway. Nursery stock has begun to go on sale. In the wild, chicory and Queen Anne’s-lace are joined by spotted knapweed, that invader of Leelanau hills and fields that is, however, not despised by bees. No big festivals this year, nor small ones, either. Even the Thursday Evening Author series at Dog Ears Books is not taking place in this strange summer of 2020. We do, thank heaven, have farmers market in Northport on Friday mornings, something to anticipate eagerly all week long.

Northport marina parking lot on Monday morning

Farmers market. on Friday morning

My bookstore is open Tuesdays through Saturdays. “You’re risking your life to sell books,” one local customer friend remarked yesterday in mild tones. Was he chiding me? Expressing gratitude? Did he feel his life was in danger when he came in to buy a local author’s memoir? I don’t know. These days, with all of us concentrating on wearing our masks properly, sanitizing our hands, maintaining correct social distance, and conducting business transactions as expeditiously as possible, I don’t get into many deep discussions in my bookstore.

Bruce Catton: Civil War books

My customers, however, continue to be cooperative and pleasant. They appreciate being allowed again into bookstores and libraries. And we readers are reading a lot these days, more than ever. I’m finally reading one of Bruce Catton’s books on the Civil War. 

…During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices—made the debaters should more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation. - Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

Long a fan of Catton’s memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, and his Michigan: A Bicentennial History, until now I have avoided his multivolume Civil War works, because, open almost any book on the Civil War and you are confronted with more dates and battles than you can shake a bayonet at. Officers are continually changing rank and assignment, troop movements are given in what a friend called, years ago, “penetrating and remorseless detail.” (The friend was talking about something else, but his instantly memorable phrase entered our household memory bank then and there, to be pulled out whenever an occasion calls for it.) History fascinates me, but it’s ideas and politics and journalism and people’s daily lives I want, not military strategies and campaigns. Strictly military history is not for me.

But I should have known that Bruce Catton could not write history that I would find boring! 

Old favorites, highly recommended

American society was in turmoil in 1860. Underlying much of the turmoil were big changes in world economics and technology. Cottage industries were giving way to large-scale manufacturing that threatened the self-sufficiency of small farmers and villagers, and what was for so long a quiet, local American economy was becoming a global web, its threads set vibrating by events faraway and out of sight of workers. Whole populations were on the move. The North viewed immigrants from Europe with suspicion, while the South, clinging to their culture of slavery, saw their region’s dependence on imports spelling out eventual doom. 

And in the midst of all this uneasiness, 1860, like 2020, was an election year. 

The Democrats could not agree on Stephen Douglas as a candidate for the presidency – as Catton put it, “the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South hated him because he liked it too little” – and finally the party split in two, with Northern Democrats running Douglas and Southern Democrats settling for Breckenridge. Everyone in the country, including William H. Seward, viewed Seward as a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, but somehow in the end the nod went to “gawky frontiersman” Abraham Lincoln. A fourth party brought forward yet another presidential candidate. Long before votes were cast, however, Southerners were planning state conventions to decide whether or not the expected election of Lincoln would be sufficient cause for them to secede from the Union.

The Artist likes to quote what he says is an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” My own feeling is that there cannot have been any time on earth when life was not interesting, but I understand that he takes the saying as a reference to times of crisis and catastrophe, fascinating in retrospect but frightening and sometimes life-threatening as one is living through them. The year 2020 has certainly given us “interesting times” already, and it’s doubtful the year will grow any less interesting or anxiety-provoking as November approaches. Again, in our own time -- corporations shipping jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets or replacing workers with robots to boost the bottom line -- as in 1860, immigrants and racial minorities serve as political footballs.

Times of social upheaval, with technological and/or social innovations throwing a market for employment into disarray, have always put human beings at each other’s throats. Choose the particular hill on which you are willing to die, conveniently setting aside other complicated issues, and you have chosen your enemy -- who may well be your next-door neighbor. The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial described attendees at the convention in Charleston as “screaming like panthers and gesticulating like monkeys.” 

Sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, recent rain swelled and split local cherries. Not good. Creeks and lakes rise to destructive levels in many places. The sun shines on a regular basis to bring the annual parade of wildflowers to blossom, each in turn, and as Northern Lights waver tantalizingly overhead the comet Neowise hangs in the evening sky, and the International Space Station circles the earth. Here in the northwest lower peninsula of our state, we view the sky over Lake Michigan. Elsewhere in the country Americans scan for heavenly bodies and activity over fields of wheat or mountains or deserts. 

And as the summer flies past, most of us, at least in Leelanau County, continue to take precautions against COVID-19. The future’s not ours to see. It never has been. But we should probably slow down and think about it a little more dispassionately. Talk less, listen more. Be slower to anger. Register to vote.

Of Little Girls and Cocktails, of Dogs and Hotels

June roadside, northern Michigan

With my first cup of Saturday morning coffee, I finished the last few chapters of A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, a runaway bestseller when it was published in 2016. I have yet to read the author’s first novel, another bestseller, Rules of Civility, so how the two may compare I will not be able to say. As for A Gentleman in Moscow, the impression I had early in my reading of the novel remained with me to the last page. It is this: that although Count Rostov carries out a complicated plan for the story’s dramatic finale (actually, two plans -- one for himself, another for Sofia), the real main character of the book is the hotel.

The Hotel Metropole, in the heart of Moscow, “was a residence hotel par excellence, an oasis for the worn and weary.” In June of 1922 [June – the very month in which I am reading the novel] Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who grew up on a country estate called Idlehour in Nizhny Novgorod and who has been residing at the Hotel Metropole for almost four years, is declared by the authorities to be a Former Person and sentenced to permanent house arrest at the hotel. If he is caught setting foot outside the door, he will be shot. The only reason he is allowed to live at all is because of a poem published under his name, a poem for which he is still regarded as a hero of the pre-revolutionary cause by certain high-ranking Party members. While under house arrest, Rostov, with an intrepid little girl in a yellow dress as his guide, manages to invade every nook and cranny, from cellar to attic, a Former Person spying on others much more than anyone ever spies on him, and as he explores the hotel the reader is introduced to it in loving detail.

That hotel! It is a whole world! Rooms, suites, restaurants, bar, ballroom, barbershop, florist. Rather than being obviously part of Moscow between the two world Wars, the Metropole seems to exist not in Russia at all, perhaps not even on earth, but in a land of fantasy, with its continuous, smooth-running operations, elaborate menu offerings, and seemingly inexhaustible cellar of fine wines. Another realm altogether!

In the novel the years 1929 and 1930 come and go without desperation or even any serious scarcity visiting the hotel, and from the beginning political horrors are so muted as to seem very distant and abstract. Intelligence, quick thinking, urbane wit, and instances of timely good luck dispel danger and conquer petty annoyances.

Apple tree, pruned and blooming

[It has been interesting to read this book in the time of coronavirus and protest demonstrations, while we are self-quarantining at home for 14 days after a harrowing five-day drive across the country. Self-quarantine is hardly equivalent to house arrest, but there are some similarities, the most obvious being the constraints on movement. But also, I must admit, a sense of safety and almost luxury in isolation, very like what the Count enjoyed at the Hotel Metropole. It is hardly prison, after all, being confined to one’s home with plenty to eat and, in our case, honeysuckle and apple trees in bloom.] 

How, though, I keep wondering, is the count paying for all those meals and all those bottles of wine? Surely he was not producing one gold coin after another from the hidden compartment sin the legs of his grandmother’s tea table! That would have brought the authorities down on him instantly to demand the source of the coins! So what is he doing for money? In real, historic Moscow, such a question would have to be asked and answered. In a fantasy hotel, it does not arise.

[The Artist and I, on the other hand, are very aware of financial resources, bills to be paid, provisions to be purchased, and limitations on what we can spend, with future income so uncertain.]

Nine-year-old Nina comes suddenly into the Count’s life.

“Where did they go?” she asked, without a word of introduction. 

“I beg your pardon. Where did who go?” 

She tilted her head to take a closer look at his face.  

“Why, your moustaches.”   

The Count had not much cause to interact with children, but he had been raised well enough to know that a child should not idly approach a stranger, should not interrupt him in the middle of a meal, and certainly should not ask him questions about his physical appearance. Was the minding of one’s own business no longer a subject taught in schools?

[At home, at the moment, I have both the burdens and the luxury of isolation. Luxury, because I was not ready on Monday morning, the first of June, to re-open my bookstore or to answer again and again the curious questions of friends and strangers. “Were you gone for the winter?” “Where did you go?” “How long were you gone?” “What do you do out there?” “How was the trip back?” “Are you glad to be home?” One person at a time I can handle. Thinking of more, I feel overwhelmed. Because ever since early March, when businesses closed across the country and shelter-in-place orders came down, we have all been living in some kind of alternate reality, riding an emotional rollercoaster in limbo, separated from one another by much more than 2,000 miles.] 

First comes Nina, a child. Then Anna, a beautiful woman. Later, Sofia, Nina’s child who gradually becomes his own. (And finally?) 

Besides these, the Count becomes a member of "the Triumvirate" when he joins the ranks of hotel employees as headwaiter, responsible for careful seating arrangements to ensure frictionless dining in the hotel’s premier restaurant. In a word, he has close friends and important relationships, although he can meet his friends only within the confines of the hotel.

[I have seen three friends since our return. With one the conversation was conducted with my car between us on the street. Another visit took place in my yard, with the friend in his car while I stood at a distance. A third visitor came onto our front porch, but we sat so far apart that we often had to repeat parts of the conversation that the other had missed hearing.]

And now, permit me to leave the more important aspects of the novel for a tangent. Willowy Anna, the actress, first appears at the Metropole with two borzois on leashes. The dogs do not play a large role in the story as it continues – theirs is but a cameo appearance – but these lines jumped out at me:

You may accuse a dog of eating without grace or of exhibiting a misplaced enthusiasm for the tossing of sticks, but you may never accuse one of giving up hope. 

The hope of the borzois in the passage quoted is that they may have a chance (they do not) of catching the one-eyed cat. 

Sarah, back in Michigan, in the front seat again

[Our dog, Sarah, was with us all winter and spring and traveled twice across the country in a very small space in the back seat of our small car, with never a complaint. When one motel clerk would have turned us away, saying they did not accept dogs, the Artist said simply, “We can’t live without her,” and she was allowed to share our room. She has impeccable motel manners, by the way: never a bark, never an accident. Sometimes we think about dogs that spend their days chained or fenced without companionship of any kind. How does a dog survive that kind of isolation? I contend that the dog’s undying hope is what gets it through each day, the possibility that at any moment life might change for the better. But how can a dog bring about change? Its repertoire and opportunities are dreadfully limited.] 

We human beings are more fortunate than dogs in the exercise of our free will and self-determination. What we imagine and desire we can often bring about.

And that’s where I want to leave you today, with a suggestion author Amor Towles gives us from the movie “Casablanca,” that 

… in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t [Rick] also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?

Radish sprouts, tiny but determined

We Are Home Again. But We Were Always Home

We Came Home to Apple Blossoms

It seems much longer than a week since we left the little Arizona ghost town where we spent the winter and, as it turned out, spring. Five days on the road (by the calendar) felt about a month long. In light of what was happening in cities across the country, we abandoned the plan to travel I-80 and instead took old U.S. highways, mostly through farm towns, back to Michigan through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, and we arrived at our old northern Michigan farmhouse after sunset last Sunday evening. 

Only six days ago? Is that possible? Those six days feel as if they have been a second long month, maybe two months. -- Now my sister tells me today is Friday, not Saturday. It was only five days ago. Even harder to believe....

As we initially prepared to leave Cochise County, Arizona, crossing the country in the time of coronavirus had been our most serious concern, and that never went away. (With restaurants closed, we made the trip on granola bars, trail mix, dried fruits, apples, and string cheese, with a couple treats of chicken from gas stations and one day a bag of fast food cheeseburgers obtained via the drive-through lane.) But we waited until after Memorial Day to leave, with Wednesday the designated departure day after a Tuesday of laundry and packing the car and cleaning up the cabin, and then the murder of George Floyd occurred on the evening of Memorial Day, which was already the strangest and most surreal Memorial Day in living memory, due to coronavirus….

Important demonstrations. Legitimate protests. There were also, in and near some of the crowds of protesters, opportunistic looters and even outsiders who came into Minneapolis or New York or Chicago bent on destruction. There were bursts of violence from more than one source, and while it was sometimes hard to know what was happening, it certainly seemed that the country, already as politically divided as it has been short of the Civil War and already strained by imposed isolation and shuttered businesses in an attempt to prevent the spread of a global pandemic, was now falling apart altogether. No, not falling -- imploding. 

So while the Artist was at the wheel, as busy as I was consulting the road atlas, I was just as often busy on my phone, looking for news or texting with family, especially family in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and when it was my turn to drive he kept trying to find a clear radio station with news. Had we been here before? In 1964? 1967? 1968? 

Then our little car began to run badly. It is still running badly, but it got us home, limping across the prairies and up along the Lake Michigan shore. Just one more thing to worry about.

So, a stressful trip? But friends, we had it easy! Eating gas station chicken in a parking lot somewhere on the Great Plains, we recalled American history and the days when Black Americans had to travel with the Green Book in order to plan their routes to be assured of finding meals and lodging at all. “And there was no food in gas stations back then,” the Artist remarked. As for staying in motels along the way, we are sometimes challenged to find one that will accept our dog (with or without an exorbitant added fee), but we are never turned away. No, we have it easy there, too. 

(In case you’re wondering, motel clerks were usually masked and gloved, but almost no one else was, in motels or at gas stations, once we left New Mexico behind.)

And we are not homeless. We don’t have to live in our car or in a motel. (One motel where we stayed seemed all the home many people there had.) Our mild ordeal was only five days long, and we are home now.

Friends congratulate our safe return -- by e-mail and text and phone, of course, not in person. Because even alongside demonstrations and protests and political commentary and speeches and outbursts there is still coronavirus, and so we must self-quarantine, which means we remain dependent on others to collect our mail and pick up groceries for us. But we have it easy in that respect, too, with more volunteers than necessary offering to help us. And the weather is lovely, perfect for working outdoors, always my solace in times of stress.

Yes, we are tired. Stress, lots of it. Utter exhaustion. But I know we are not the only ones feeling it because it has to do with much more than five days on the road.

While few people were crossing the country by car last week (on larger highways, trucks seemed to outnumber cars by at least an 8:1 ratio, but traffic was still light), all across the land a relentless tidal wave of news and the weight of our country’s entire history bore down on us all. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” 

“I’m tired of the hate,” one Facebook commenter wrote. I believe, from other things she said, that she referred to hate she feels is directed toward the occupant of the White House, not to hate coming from the White House, which is what disturbs me the most. If only we had a calm, encouraging captain at the wheel of state! But we don't, and what we have there is exhausting, too. The current president, when asked difficult questions, calls the press “enemies of the people” and – well, let’s not review all the name-calling and finger-pointing from the White House. Let’s just remember that it is part of the job of the press to ask difficult questions, and it is the job of the president to deal with that, whether he likes the questions or not. 

When you are president – pretend for a moment that you are -- and you are the one in the Oval Office, the buck stops with you. You don’t shift blame by pointing the finger in every other direction. The buck stops with you. That is the job.

But yes, we all get tired! Overwhelmed! And we are tired of feeling angry and defensive and misunderstood or ignored and insulted. Tired of feeling outraged. The never-ending onslaught of news and the cacophony of Facebook posts is sometimes just too much. There is an exhaustion of spirit, discouragement brought on by repeated failures of a country we love. 

Reminder: There’s nothing wrong with turning off the news for 24 hours. Take a break when you feel overwhelmed. No law requires any American to watch and/or listen. And surely, even acknowledging the addictiveness of scrolling through Facebook posts, you have absolutely zero responsibility to follow that on an hourly or even a daily basis. Or at all!

I received a text the other day from one of my sisters that former President Barack Obama was going to be speaking on MSNBC, so because we don’t have television here at home in Michigan (gave it up years ago), I used my phone to make a hotspot and got online and watched and listened, and it did me a world of good! You can watch it on YouTube (or other places, too, if you missed it last night.) President Obama is an encourager, not a blamer or a punisher. He is calm. And he is optimistic! Good heavens! No one can accuse him of being a Pollyanna -- he gives reasons for his optimism, and as I listened I began to smile, and I thought again, yes, we can. We can be better. I really needed his encouraging, inspiring words.

Because here’s something else that occurred to me yesterday. I’d just read an essay from 2016 by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, a black woman, answering a white male friend’s question about what constitutes white privilege. And then I read comments elsewhere (not on that post) from people who are tired of the news and/or fearful and/or certain there is no hope for the country or the world. And two ideas – the question of what constitutes white privilege and the idea of giving up hope – came together in my mind, and I realized that giving up and retreating to one’s own little world is the supreme white privilege. Not everyone can do that. 

Let me be clear. I’m not saying anyone needs to be out on the barricades every day -- or even at all. You don’t have to join a public demonstration. There are countless ways to make a difference.

And who doesn't need a break now and then?

So when you feel the need, turn off the radio or television or whatever device connects you to the news. Take a break. Eat ice cream. Take a walk. Soak in the tub. Whatever helps you relax.

But don’t give up hope, and don’t stop looking for whatever small ways you can find to contribute to fulfilling hope’s promise. Because we cannot afford the luxury of some self-indulgent, extended period of mourning. There is too much that needs to be done.

It is not saintly to be hopeful or to try to make a difference. It’s human – at least, it’s the better nature we need to summon up in ourselves if we are to deserve at all the gift of life on this planet. Because this is our home, this earth. For Americans, this country. Our home. We are many different peoples, with many different ways of looking at the world, but we must share our home if it is to survive.

I Am in Mourning For Our Country

In Minneapolis, many bookstores were already closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now more have been damaged in rioting following demonstrations over the brutal murder of George Floyd, but you will not find self-pity in the words of these booksellers. As one of them acknowledged, property damage is the "least tragic" aspect of the story. So while I feel sympathy for bookstore owners and employees, most of my sympathy has to go to the murdered man's family -- and to our country at large.

Since March, we have been reeling under a global pandemic that reached our shores. One hundred thousand Americans died of coronavirus. Businesses across the country closed, and people lost their jobs. High school and college graduates had no graduation ceremonies, and children's birthdays had to be celebrated with drive-by parades of friends waving from their cars. That alone has been difficult. A long haul. Unprecedented, to use a word that has never been used so many times in so short a period in my lifetime.

The absence of meaningful national leadership has been appalling and tragic, but unsurprising. Who could have expected anything different or better, given the last three and a half years? Queen Elizabeth, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and past presidents George Bush and Barack Obama stepped forward with calm words of comfort and encouragement. We could have used comfort and encouragement on a daily basis, but we did not get it.

Then came the murder of yet another black man by a police officer, murder committed by someone pledged to protect citizens, murder captured on video for all the world to see. Rage is understandable. Don't you feel it, too? "Violence doesn't solve anything," many people say -- but tell me, what has? Peaceful demonstrations? Cases of brutality and murder brought to the courts? More extensive police training? Body cameras? 

[Update: Here is what we got from the White House today, since this post first went up.] 
[Update 6/2: Houston police chief weighs in.]

I am in mourning for this country. 

I understand the rage. I understand the impulse to destruction, even knowing it "won't solve anything." When nothing reasonable has worked, what is left?

And yet -- from so many credible reports, much of the destruction was not caused by demonstrators from the Twin Cities but by outsiders who came in for the sole purpose of, it would seem, discrediting legitimate protest. What could be more reprehensible? I do not understand that.

And I do not understand disrespect taken to the extreme of causing death. I don't understand how it is allowed to go on and on. I don't understand why so many white Americans fail to get the message of "Black Lives Matter," misinterpreting it by inserting an "only" that was never there. Black lives matter, too. How can anyone not see? I don't understand the lack of understanding.

Another thing I don't understand -- and some of you may disagree with me on this -- is why the launch of a rocket into space is supposed to fill us with hope for the future of our country. "The heavens are opening"? Great! So now we can go mess the heavens up, too? While the mess here on earth worsens? How is that supposed to make anyone feel good?

I am in mourning for this country. My country. Your country. Our country.

But mourning by itself solves nothing. It is a luxury we cannot afford.

How Green Is My Desert

Flowering shrub is bird-of-paradise

The Artist and I have never stayed in southern Arizona this late into the spring before, never seen the desert so green, and every day the change from bare, dead-looking winter trees and shrubs becoming vibrant with leaves and blossoms astonishes us anew. “Are there many deciduous trees where you are?” my son asked me on the phone this morning. Oh, goodness, yes! The mesquite is often more of a large shrub than a tree, but it is ubiquitous, and it is deciduous, and some individuals reach tree size and can have beautiful shapes, and right now all are leafed out, providing shade for cattle and hiding places for birds to build nests. But mesquite is only the beginning. In the photograph just below, looking past the bird-of-paradise and down into the wash, there are at least four more large, green, deciduous plants, three of them trees. At the far right top (back corner) is a walnut tree. 

Nogal in leaf and bloom

The walnut tree’s leafy crown dances in the afternoon wind, and suckers sprout at the base. For five years I’ve been wondering what kind of tree this was, and how I see another farther back behind the neighbor’s fence, and down the road just past another neighbor’s house I’ve spotted a whole row. I don’t know if this is the Arizona or the Texas walnut, but either one goes by the Spanish name nogal, the plural of which is nogales. It’s walnuts that give the name to that Mexican border town, and I am happy to know this beautiful neighbor tree by name at last.

In the center background (and not sharply in focus) of green things growing along the wash is a netleaf hackberry tree, a tree I've written about before. In winter there have always been enough dried berries and dead leaves on the hackberry that I have been able to identify it almost from the beginning of my desert stays, but it looks very different now, clothed in green. 

Center left of that composite shot but not all the way to the left, the light green tree you see is desert willow, another newly learned-by-name tree to me and one that charms me in every way. Since learning it, I’ve found myself photographing the desert willow at different times of day. It is not, you should understand, a true willow. It is a different genus and member of a completely different botanical family from the willows along the no-name creek just north of my Michigan farmhouse. 

Flowers on the desert willow below the cabin have not yet opened, but when we went for a little ride down Chiricahua way, I was happy to spot a desert willow in bloom. 

Does that flower remind you of a catalpa blossom? Both trees belong to the Bignonia family, the desert willow’s flowers smaller and more colorful but very like those of catalpa trees back in Leelanau County, Michigan.

We have never seen the wash flowing with water, a phenomenon that arrives only with the summer monsoons, each flood lasting only a few hours. Over closer to the Chiricahua Mountains, though, where streams flow for much of the year, water-loving sycamores are found. Some are of magnificent size, although during the winter, when they look like ghost trees, it’s hard to believe they are alive. 

Arizona sycamore in winter 

Now look at the difference! It seems nothing short of miraculous. 

Arizona sycamore mid-May

Oaks are deciduous, also, but in this climate they hold onto their leaves through the winter and bring forth new leaves in the spring, at the same time that they begin to drop the old, gradually, with never a bare season to them. Oak trees near streams and in mountain canyons are peaceful places to rest the eyes all year-round.

Cochise County and I have been getting acquainted since January of 2015, but my desert is still full of surprises. Of course, what surprises me is familiar to those who have lived here all their lives. How can I call the desert “mine” at all? 

It’s true I’m a newcomer, but I do love it, more deeply each year, and this year – this strange spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, with stay-at-home orders in Arizona from mid-March until the end of April, being here in a whole new and unexpected way, I feel I have paid a few odd dues and earned at least a beginner’s merit badge in Arizona living. 

Our resident roadrunner has accepted us unconditionally. Bless his little heart!

We Are All on a Rollercoaster

This  has nothing to do with my subject, but she always calms me down.

How are you feeling? Where are you, emotionally? Contented? Restless? Anxious? Got cabin fever, or are you grateful for unstructured time -- or both in turns? Angry at fate and fearful of what’s coming? Counting your blessings? Downright depressed? Maybe confused about what you’re feeling?

A friend said she woke up a couple days ago and felt calm, and that worried her: Had she lost her mind? Had her brain ceased to function? Where was her usual, reasonable, familiar pandemic anxiety?

And it came to me, reading her messages, that we are all on a rollercoaster, every single one of us, but we are all at different points in the looping path on any given day or even at any given moment, so while no emotion any of us feels is inappropriate, we can sometimes be impatient with each other’s expressions. But the feelings themselves are perfectly (can I use this word?) normal. Given the times. All of them.

Gratitude feels good. Anger doesn’t. Sometimes we can shift gears to get from a bad feeling to a good one, and other times we just have to ride out a sickening stretch until we get to a smoother, easier section. Despair at night, joy in the morning – or the other way around, depending on your temperament. Fear, even terror. A blue funk. The sunshiny flash of unexpected happiness, the glow of contentment, or the sweet respite of calm – unless the calm brings worries of its own, as it did for my friend. 

“I’m just tired of it.”

“I want it to be over.” 

Me, too. I’d love to return to that old expectant (false but happy) sense of security I had in early winter 2019 when looking ahead to summer 2020, lining up Thursday Evening Author guests for bookstore soirées in the Artist’s gallery! Those days of planning now seem like some kind of long-ago lost innocence.

My philosophy of life in a nutshell, which is about all of anyone’s philosophy that most people want to hear, is simple: Everything is a double-edged sword. Or, as Joni Mitchell so memorably expressed in her song “Both Sides Now,” there is an upside and downside to everything. In her lyrics, the singer looks back to her past positive impressions, compares them with present cynicism, and concludes that she doesn’t “really know” clouds, love, or life “at all.” But listen to the song. What she can’t help believing in are her “illusions,” that is, the joy and magic that she isn’t feeling in the present moment. 

Can we believe in something when we’re not feeling it, or do our feelings overpower us and create our beliefs? More specifically, can we continue to believe in hope when we're feeling hopeless?

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I started writing these thoughts and had to set them aside for a couple of days. Was I depressed or just irritable and blue? 

Depression is a family curse, so I am familiar with it, but in my experience true depression is like interior weather (not situational or caused by something in the outside world), and there’s a horrible physical component to it. I describe it as being encased in a suit of dread. Imagine it as a rigid suit of armor that you’re locked inside. So, no, I wasn’t there, thank heaven! But neither was I enveloped by contentment or anything positive. I went for a walk and dragged myself along, hardly enjoying my surroundings or a pleasantly cool desert morning.

Quite frankly, while I have a lot of happy moments or even hours, positive moods can seem pretty fragile these days. Easily dispelled. Personal contentment can evaporate in an instant with a single blast of bad news, of which there is no shortage. Which brings me back to my rollercoaster theme and its limitations. 

When you go to an amusement park and ride a rollercoaster – when one rides, I should say, because I have never been on a rollercoaster in my life – my understanding is that (1) you know approximately how long the ride will be, (2) that you'll be safe, and (3) that the car will eventually stop and you’ll be able to get out right where you started. Well, right now, these days, on the coronavirus rollercoaster, we have none of these assurances. All we have is uncertainty.

Is it any wonder our emotions are all over the map? It's easy to say we should "live in the moment" and admit our powerlessness, not so easy to maintain that attitude throughout each passing day. 

I try to make most of my posts here upbeat, to brighten readers' days, and I'm certainly not trying to bring anyone down today with reminders of what you already know, that these are damn difficult times. I just thought it might help, if you're feeling blue, to know that you're not alone in that, either. It's okay to feel bad. We all have our private storm clouds.

But if you're not feeling great this morning, I hope you will feel better this afternoon or tomorrow. As for me, I think I've got my "second wind" and can pick up my feet and go on until the next storm hits -- wherever the hell it is we're going!

Into the unknown!