In Which We Visit the Past, Near Home

This is nothing to do with books.

David and I were coming back from a morning trip to Traverse City (Bruce was taking care of business for me in Northport) when we saw signs along Eagle Highway for an estate sale. Following the signs, we turned onto Alpers Road and found ourselves at an old farmhouse where we’d had dinner back in the early 1980s, when friends from Australia lived there and raised sheep. I didn’t remember the porch, and the dining room didn’t seem familiar, but when we walked into the kitchen the memories came flooding back.

Old “Pops”! On long visits to his son and daughter-in-law, Pops would hold court at the kitchen table. Mention a place anywhere in the world, and Pops would exclaim, proudly and with a big smile, “Oy bin theah!” His hobby was working on clocks, and he was happy to show them off. He was also renowned for his limericks, but I won’t share any of those here.

Before they moved to this farmhouse, our Australian friends had lived off another road, uphill from Lake Leelanau, and I remember another dinner party there, featuring fresh venison. “You’re eating Bambi,” a friend (not the hostess) told me with a meaningful look, but she was eating Bambi, too, and Bambi was delicious. Then she handed me a bottle of wine and an opener and told me to open the bottle. I said, “I don’t know how,” and without missing a beat she said, “Then it’s time you learned.” I think of Linda saying those things every time I drive past Les and Marina’s old house on Lake Leelanau Drive, so I think of her often.

At the Alpers Road farmhouse, however, apart from memories of Pops, what was clearest in my mind was going out to the barn to see the sheep. It was winter, and the sheep were crowded together like fish in a school, their breath rising in little white puffs as they bleated and baa-ed, each sheep voice with its own distinctive register and tone. I remember sinking my fingers into the wool on one animal’s back, straight down, all the way to the knuckles.

Besides memories, what I loved most at the sale were the old orchard ladders. There were so many of them, and they made such interesting compositions in front of and against the old barn. They are also mute testament to hard work. I'm trying to remember what the pay was for picking cherries back in 1970, when I first came to live in Traverse City. Seems to me it was 95 cents a lug for tarts and $1.15 a lug for sweets? Maybe the other way around. If anyone remembers, let me know.

Well, I didn't find a peening jig and hammer and whetstone (let me know if you have a source for those items, too), and there was nothing in the few books that I had to have, but David carried home a small garden tractor battery, and we agreed it had been pleasant to stroll around the grounds and through the old house again and relive memories of old friends -- an altogether lovely interlude.

Michigan Country Village Life in the "Old Days"

To my grandsons,

BILLY AND JERRY,

and to my granddaughters,

MARY JANE, SUSAN, AND JUDITH,

who can never know the joys of country living,

this book is tenderly dedicated

Millbrook was published in 1938 by Little, Brown and Company of Boston. Its author was Della T. Lutes. Born in 1872, Lutes tells in Millbrook the story of childhood as she knew it, growing up in a small southern Michigan country village outside Jackson, Michigan. 

The town of Millbrook was on a north-south railway line and also on the turnpike running east-west between Chicago and Detroit. It boasted two churches, Methodist and Universalist, and one resident atheist, a hired man who worked on a farm on the edge of town. There was a school, of course, drygoods store, meat market, drugstore, barber shop, blacksmith shop, and one tavern. The depot, of course. Small as the town was, however, only men might loiter on Main Street.

...Women and girls, in that day, didn’t loiter along the street – even little girls. If you had business at the stores, you transacted it speedily and left. If an errand led you along Main Street, you went decorously past all public institutions, -- even including Lyde Peters’s notion store, where news was dispensed as well as necessities, -- your eyes frozen to the path your feet must follow.

Imagine, then, the curiosity of a little girl newly moved to town from the country, with a new town friend her own age! And imagine the embarrassment of the two little girls when Cory’s new, wild and brash sister-in-law from Detroit leads them not into one store after another but actually into the barbershop!

We hung back. In our most curious moments we had never dreamed of entering the barbershop. Women never went into the barbershop. It was a rendezvous for men – sacred to their masculine needs.

But headstrong Clara knew no restraint, natural or inculcated by family. Why ever had William married her? And why had she married a farmer, when she hated farm smells and the unexciting life of the country? No one could understand it!

Delly and Cory learn about life by hanging quietly on the edges of adult conversation whenever they can avoid being noticed. Perpetual debate over the character of Quint Sharp, the Atheist, for instance, enlivened many a gathering of village women. Was he a danger to himself and others or a better man than many a nominal Christian? Opinion differed. Sex came into local gossip only rarely, but when it did –

My mother drew back, shocked, startled, dismayed, mingled fear and disgust on her face. 

“Hush!” she said sharply. “Can’t you see Delly’s here?” 

Clara looked at me, surprised, evidently quite unaware of my presence up to now.  

 “Well,” she said, rather sullenly, “she’ll hear of it.”

When Della Lutes was young “Delly,” there were no automobiles, not even bicycles or telephones, and yet news traveled around town fast.

About the middle of March, a postcard came from Gaby to Adelaide, addressed from Chicago, Lyde Peters [the postmistress] read it first and went out on the street and told every man in sight. Nell [Lyde’s daughter] threw a shawl over her head and ran to the drugstore to tell Ed Calkins. Ed said if Nell would go over and get Freda to come and tend the store he’d take the card right out to Adelaide. And by the time Adelaide had got her card the whole town knew its contents by heart.

Unlike citified Clara, Della and Cory found excitement plentiful in Millbrook. Spelling bees, pageants, picnics, visits from relatives, haying time, and the county fair were high points, but simple walks together and visits to neighbors provided interest enough for ordinary days. Berry-picking and meals were reliable pleasures. Della’s father took great pride in his strawberries, the best in town (though not quite up to those he had raised before on his larger farm). Chicken was the only thing to serve company, even though everyone had poultry of their own, and Thanksgiving wasn’t Thanksgiving without turkey, any more than dinner in general was dinner without pie for dessert.

The story of Millbrook opens with a description of the village (also given in visual form as map endpapers to which a reader can refer), and Lutes recounts the way she and her mother would sit out on the front stoop in the evening, looking down a gentle slope to the town to watch the lights come on, naming the houses as the lamps were lit.

Then, “That’s Miz’ Babcock’s,” we would say as the house on the corner mellowed with light. “There’s Adelaide’s” -- happily, as if a distant hand had waved a greeting.

Joy is mixed with sorrow and anxiety in Millbrook, as everywhere. There is William’s unseemly and unaccountable marriage to the dreadful Clara, when everyone expected him to marry Jenny Myers, the blacksmith’s daughter, with whom he had “kept company” nearly all his life. Even happy events produce a bit of tension, as when Della’s maternal grandmother comes from Detroit for what seems almost a state visit. But the shocking news that Nell Peters has been “knocked up” and is claiming Gabey Reed is her baby’s father sets the whole town on its ears. Gabey’s leaving town suddenly is the next shock. When an old woman is murdered with an axe by the young man she has taken in and formally adopted, it seems the last straw.

Nobody had died except old folks and nobody had got married unless maybe one or two couples that had just got married and nothing to it. There hadn’t even been any special visitors to anybody’s house for a long time. The town had just run along like any country town and then all of a sudden everything happened at once.

A reader is drawn in gradually to the life of the town and its families, eagerly following all these exciting developments as the memoir almost seems to turn into a novel, and yet it is the quiet tenor of the life of that period that remains the foreground. Work in the fields, a night hawk swooping at dusk, grass cut with a scythe, biscuits and gravy and mashed potatoes, fresh berry jam, all kinds of pickles, and picnics with real cloths spread on plank tables improvised for the occasion – sights and sounds and aromas and tastes are all here, lovingly remembered and recounted. The women sit and sew and talk –

... in their tight-fitting basques with many buttons, their full long skirts protected by full white aprons, their high-topped shoes, their ruches, brooches, breast pins, and thin old-fashioned wedding rings ...

and over and over, in chapter after chapter, Gran’ma Reed mourns the disappearance of her husband Gab’erl’s “Ledger,” in which he wrote every day’s happenings on their farm, beginning with the old log house built in 1835.

How will it all end? Well, of course it won’t, it didn’t, and it doesn’t. Generations of the families go on, and the land remains, despite changes wrought upon it. But what a gift it is, to have these memories of Della Lutes written down and published to allow us to visit life in lower Michigan over a hundred years ago!

Bookseller’s postscript: The morning I wrote this I also did a load of wash and hung it out on the line, cut rhubarb, watered plants, and hauled brush from major tree pruning my husband and I had undertaken the preceding evening. We have electricity, a telephone, cars (too many--don't ask!), and my business is in the village, but we live continue to live a country life, and for that I am deeply grateful – and never more so than on a calm, sunny, green and lovely morning in June.

In Which Snow Arrives

You expected maybe a snow scene?

From inside the house, in the night, darkness all around, one feels the cushion of new snow around the foundations and blanketing the surrounding fields. We were warned to expect the storm on Wednesday night, beginning at midnight, but in the dark of Thursday morning I knew before looking that it had not come. The wind’s sound was unchanged: it swept yet across bare ground. Gusts of blowing flakes came midmorning Tuesday, but little accumulated, and still the cold wind blew. The forecast was rewritten, moved off another twenty-four hours, and expected accumulation revised upward.

Waking around 4 a.m. on Friday, however, I felt the difference immediately. Utter stillness ... that sense of being wrapped ... soundless insulation. In the South, I thought, there would be quiet after big winds as live oaks, sea grapes and palms would cease their rattling, but it would be an empty calm, would it not? Up North, in winter, here the calm of winter’s first heavy, swaddling snow is dense.

I got up for to make my morning café au lait, anticipating the light that would reveal, in a few hours, a transformed landscape, but for the moment content with my books, beginning my day’s reading with the final chapter of The Swerve, reading the story of Montaigne’s copy of Lucretius, of Anne Hutchingson’s translation, and of Jefferson’s correspondence with John Adams. For the morning, at least, in the dark with an untouched blanket of snow wrapping my old farmhouse, I smiled to think of the social pleasures of reading – not only communion with writers distant in time and space but also contemporary conversations and correspondence with book-loving friends.

We are not isolated from one another, we readers. We do not withdraw from society when we go into our books. We are deeply social.

I reach for pen and paper to begin a letter to a friend.

*  *  *  *  *

Later. The snow was not as deep in the yard as I imagined it would be, but that scene (and the one here in town) may change in the hours ahead. Meanwhile, if you are up here at the north end of the Leelanau County and don’t usually see The Glen Arbor Sun, stop by and pick up a copy today at Dog Ears Books to enjoy the article on “Orchards and Orphans” by Kathleen Stocking. Also, please note that, by Kathleen’s own request, we are running a “blue light special” (minus the blue lights) on her essay book trilogy: $25 for all three, if you get in here fast enough! That’s practically like buying one book and getting the other two for free – and what a great holiday gift for a special someone on your list!

Airchair Travel, Time Travel, From Main to Nebraska

There are two books in today’s post. The more recent title is Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser, familiar to me as a poet (poet laureate of the U.S., 2004-2006) and more particularly, since I live in Leelanau County, Michigan, as a poet who collaborated with former county resident and poet Jim Harrison in a book called Braided Creek. The other title today is One Man’s Meat, by the iconic E. B. White, first published in 1942. For the story of this book becoming an American classic, follow the link.

The author of Charlotte’s Web (to name only one other among his many other writings) lived in Maine during the time he wrote the essays contained in One Man’s Meat, some of which were published originally in Harper’s and the New Yorker. Kooser, born and raised in Iowa, writes these days from Nebraska. Separated as their authors are by decades, the works of these two poetic essayists dovetail beautifully. Both write of memory and books, country living, farm neighbors, the natural world around them, and the larger social and political reality of nearby villages and the world beyond.

Kooser can’t help writing poetry even when he’s writing prose (thank heaven!), and so we get descriptions (these are of winter) like the following:

A maple, bare now but which all summer bent heavily over its leafy shadow, can scarcely hold itself back from human happiness under the least touch of the breeze. 

A dozen sparrows burst from a bush by the road, like somebody’s name remembered after fifty years.

White is by turns reflective, practical, curmudgeonly, and downright funny, and sometimes he’s a couple of those at once. Here he is on the subject of his experience of the 1939 World’s Fair:

The voice of Mr. Kaltenborn in the City of Man says, “They come with joyous song,” but the truth is there is very little joyous song in the Fair grounds. There is a great deal of electrically transmitted joy, but very little spontaneous joy. Tomorrow’s music, I noticed, came mostly from Yesterday’s singer....

Maine’s land and sea figures largely in many of the journalistic essays in One Man’s Meat. Here’s how January 1939 begins:

A seacoast farm, such as this, extends far beyond the boundaries mentioned in the deed. My domain is arable many miles offshore, in the restless fields of protein. Cultivation begins close to the house with a rhubarb patch, but it ends down the bay beyond the outer islands, hand-lining for cod and haddock, with gulls like gnats around your eyes, and the threat of fog always in the pit of your stomach.

But you see? He can’t help writing like a poet, either. I breathe deeply of the salty sea breeze and then turn back to landlocked Nebraska, of which Kooser writes,

People who depend on good weather for a good life – farmers, their families, and field hands – in country where the sky has pressed the dirt flat and pushed the great forests back under the grass, show us how much the weather weighs. Bent-backed under the leaden skies of winter, round-shouldered under the steel blue skies of summer, in their old age shrunken in height and walking with canes, they show us. And their buildings, put up like props to hold up their part of the sky, show it as well. The barns lean to one side and collapse, the porch roofs hang from the eaves and fall, the outbuildings crumple and drop out of sight in the brush at the edge of the ironed-out fields.

Rhubarb patch? Check. Collapsing barn? Check. As a friend of mine likes to say, stoutly, forestalling any criticism of her way of dress or housekeeping, “I live in the country!” From Maine in the 1930s and ‘40s and Nebraska far from the Great Lakes, I recognize in the essays of White and Kooser the life around me today in northern Michigan, and I feel they are both my neighbors.

Postscript Monday morning: Having finished both books now, I want to read them again immediately, out loud to David. I did read aloud to David and a friend who stopped by the bookshop on Sunday afternoon (we were there for less than an hour) White’s thoughts on poetry, and I’ve bookmarked one of Kooser’s passages about his old dog.

Sometimes I hear idle browsers (not serious browsers, who are quiet until they suddenly shriek with joy) muttering that they “already have too many books.” Here’s what Ted Kooser has to say about that:

I spend lots of winter days with books. I probably have the largest private library in Seward County, thousands of books. I can’t resist them. ... If I were to read two of three books every week, I couldn’t live long enough to read through the ones I buy....

White's book reminds me that it doesn’t matter how old the book is when one first reads it: the discovery for the first-time reader is always new. And having other worlds on the shelf, inviting future exploration, adds a feeling of wealth to a modest country home.

Ted Kooser was born in the spring of 1939, while the first entry in the collection by E. B. White (another Teddy when young?) begins in July 1938, when he moved with his family from New York City to rural Maine. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that White and Kooser ever crossed paths, much less sat in the same room together. Yet Kooser must have read some of White’s books (surely The Elements of Style, co-authored with William Strunk, Jr.!), and there’s no doubt in my mind that White would have appreciated Kooser’s poetry, as well as his sometimes-wry poetic prose. I’m thinking here of Kooser comparing Harold Stassen to a leaf-footed bug that appeared in his house one year after two or three hard frosts:

Occasionally, when suddenly agitated by some mysterious force, he would fly for a short distance, awkwardly whirring down the air of a room, to smack head-on into a wall on the other side. When the house was quiet, there would be a little click. The leaf-footed bug would fall to the floor, slowly to gather itself as if brushing off its coat, and slowly move on. I was reminded of Harold Stassen, campaigning for president again and again. It was encoded behavior, I suspect, deeply imprinted in his genes, a complete disregard for failure.

That passage makes me smile, even though I greatly admired Harold Stassen and everything he stood for, including his unwillingness to admit defeat. I suspect that Kooser admired that too and also admired the little bug he came to look for around his house every day, having once noticed it, and I’m sure White would have appreciated and admired the candidate, the bug, and the poet’s description and the analogy.

In the couple of pages of E. B. White that I read aloud to David and Ed on Sunday, there appeared these two sentences, in parentheses in the original:

...(I sound as if I were contemptuous of poets; the fact is, I am jealous of them. I would rather be one than anything.)

This comes from a writer who had put down the following sentences only a page before:

There are many types of poetical obscurity. There is the obscurity which results from the poet’s being mad. This is rare. Madness in poets is as uncommon as madness in dogs. A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall. There is also the obscurity which is the result of the poet’s wishing to appear mad, even if only a little mad. This is rather common and rather dreadful. I know of nothing more distasteful than the work of a poet who has taken leave of his reason deliberately, as a commuter might of his wife.

Don’t you sense that Mr. White’s prose is clearly in the service of poetry? That he is touched not by madness but by poetry himself? Had their lives not been separated by time and space, surely White and Kooser would have been great friends!

Well, now they have met, in my life, in my private library, and they will share shelf space for as long as my books and I continue life together. Like Kooser, I have books yet unopened (e.g., those paperbound Louis Lavelles I bought in Paris years ago), and as White notes, there is always more work in a country life than there is time in a day to get it done (he became, in his country life, the farmer I long to be), but there is always room and time for more books in my life, if they are rich enough, as these are, to bear re-reading. Reading them makes me happy. Introducing other readers to their charm and wisdom will be another kind of happiness. I do lead a charmed life!

Both books are still in print and will be available by Saturday, as new paperbacks, at Dog Ears Books.

The Dead of Up North Winter: Survival and Escape

January driving conditions

[There is a book review in the second section of this post. Anyone eager to cut to the chase can scroll quickly through my description of the farmhouse in winter and get to the book review further on.]

Waking in the dark is an escape from snow-shoveling dreams.

"It's getting dangerous for us to live here in winter," he tells me, and reluctantly, against my will, I begin to agree. I don't want to understand him, but I do. Falling doesn't count, though. One can fall as easily in town or city as in the country. A daughter-in-law's fall on black ice in her dentist's parking lot resulted in a compound fracture, but here in the country, our paths are like animal trails, and we keep to them when we venture forth from our burrow, so if we fall, it's onto snowbanks, not pavement.

The landscape is a blur....

We haven't lived here all our lives, but just the same, the way I see it, we are the old kind of country people. For one thing, our old farmhouse hides behind a hill instead of ruling from on high. Giving up an expansive view, our house has gained in privacy, but the wind finds us all the same, sweeping down the back of the hill, drifting our paths closed, sifting fine snow between door and sill to fan across the porch floor, and when our truck gets stuck or won't start, or when the drive drifts closed again after the plow has opened a lane for us through walls of snow, like old country people we stay home. Most of our living takes place in one central room -- eating meals, reading books, drinking tea, writing letters, darning socks, and listening to the radio. "This is how old Joe and his wife spent the winter," he tells me. Except that they had cows to milk and hogs to slop and chickens to feed. We don't. But there's plenty of physical exertion to be had, with all the snow. No need to lament being unable to get to a gym when one lives in the old country way.

Bills this winter are going to be crushing. That's where winter really hits hardest: fuel bills and plow bills. So we close doors and shrink our footprint, and piles of projects tower and spread, filling the smaller living space until we are like mice in a nest, snug in excelsior. In the morning dark, to rescue me from endless dreams of snow (day's repetition extended through the night), the dog comes to the side of the bed, wanting up, and I pat the covers to issue the invitation she awaits. New country people have queen- or king-sized beds in spacious bedrooms with enormous windows looking out and down onto water or vineyards. Our small, cold, crowded farmhouse bedroom holds an old-fashioned double bed, and three is a crowd in that bed, but it's comforting, too.

The wind will always batter this corner of the world, as far into any future I can imagine, but we're here now. Wind and snow and cold and isolation haven't done us in yet. We're here now. That's my mantra: We're here now.

Wind sweeps down the hills....

Darning socks by lamplight is a calming domestic task. Mug of hot tea close at hand and dog at my feet, I feel connected to previous generations of women who survived harsh Michigan winters, survival an important concept during stormy days and nights. But sometimes the concept with more appeal is escape! So where is that ARC that arrived in the mail in December? Ah, here!

The Collector of Dying Breaths, by M. J. Rose
NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014
On sale April 8, 2014

This is total escape! Complete, riveting fantasy! Once again, mythologist Jac L' Étoile, daughter of an American mother and French father and heiress to a famed house of Parisian perfumes, is plunged into a whirlwind of mysterious history (16th-century Italy and France this time around) and present danger. Once again she yearns to connect with the man she has always loved but is held back by fear for his happiness and safety. The visions she experiences -- are they memories of past lives or evidence of a brain malfunction? Either way, concern for Griffin North gives her pause, since in all her visions of a past concerning a man who seems like Griffin and a woman she seemed to be, she was responsible for his death!

Now. Here's where I confess that I am not usually a reader of fantasy, apart from Wind in the Willows and Palmer Brown's The Silver Nutmeg, and that romance-suspense is not a genre I generally find appealing, either. And there's more. Belief in reincarnation, religious or otherwise, has no hold on me, and I can become downright irritable when subjected to talk of "past lives." So how does M. J. Rose do it? How does she pull me in time after time? This is the sixth novel in a series, and I've read three of them, which is an extraordinary record, given the subject matter and my reading preferences. How to explain it?

One aspect of these stories often mentioned by reviewers is their wealth of sense detail. Rose's descriptions involve not only the sense of sight but also, tellingly, the senses of smell and touch, much less frequently utilized by fiction writers. Aromas and textures draw readers into Jac's world, and we are so grateful for the sumptuous sensory banquet that we accept all kinds of literary excess. In The Collector of Dying Breaths, for example, the character of Melinoe Cypros, in her old castle outside Barbizon, France, is completely over the top, a kind of cartoonish Cruella DeVilla on the page, with her long tunics and pounds of jewelry and white wings of hair. Everything about her spells DANGER in huge, flashing lights, and it is incomprehensible that Jac will go forward with Melinoe's crazy project! And yet she does -- and we follow with bated breath!

Another, very clever way Rose keeps us hooked in is with Jac's own reluctance to buy into reincarnation. Throughout the series the protagonist moves between flat-out, hard-headed, rational skepticism (rationality always emphasized) and weakening resistance to the temptation of belief. Jac's doubts allow a doubting reader to accompany her on journeys that we skeptics would otherwise have no interest in taking.

So that's life Up North these days, during a brutal Michigan winter. It's a kaleidoscope of adventure and retreat, comfort and hardship, survival and escape. Thank you for joining me in my world today.

Our parking area when the sun came out four days ago....

Spiritual Attachment Amid Spring Distraction

O, Glorious Morning in May!

Is single vision possible in the spring? Narrow focus? Can anyone achieve or even attempt it? Look here! Oh, look over there! The door opens . . . the sun floods in . . . outdoors beckons. . . .

Bruce worked yesterday at the bookstore, and David was on hand, also, working in his gallery (photos soon, i.e., as soon as he feels everything is ready), making freedom’s clarion call almost irresistible, and the only reason I settled down to paint the new railing by the entrance was that we were expecting a friend’s visit, and the hope of seeing her kept me at my task until it was done.

Helping the paint dry....

Can you read the shadows on the wall?

Picnic ground on the bluffs

Didn’t Sarah deserve a reward then for her patience? I thought so, and we made a little expedition to Peterson Park, where by chance we met a Boston terrier from Chicago. (That was fun for all concerned!)

Lake Michigan

Next stop was to see our friends (and their pigs) at Bare Knuckle Farm. (Hi, Abra!) Then a visit to Northport Nursery for beautiful blue lobelia. I don’t worry about finding geraniums before Memorial Day, but lobelia can be elusive, and an opportunity cannot be allowed to slip past.

(A plethora of parentheses, you see. They indicate a distracted mind, don’t you think?)

Time, work, and nature will make this a garden

Home at last to water my straw bales and to breathe in their sweet scent, anticipating the tomato plants I’ll be getting from the Bare Knuckle folks and remembering the giant collard plant – one plant – that gave and gave and gave two years ago when I had my first straw bale garden. (Must have collards!)

We met friends for dinner at the Bluebird in Leland, and that brought back a flood of memories, as did seeing many other friends there for dinner, companions from earlier Leland days, older now, as are we. After dinner, we took the traditional stroll down to the harbor for sunset. 

The river flows out into the Big Lake

Stephanie said, "Every sunset is beautiful."

Memories, going back in time, anchoring one in place. David will always be a “Leland person,” his memories there going back to 1957, but it’s different for me, because in Leland (coming from Kalamazoo) I was only, first, his girlfriend, later, his wife. When a Northport friend whose Leelanau family goes back four generations told me years ago that I was a “Northport person,” I felt proud. I’m happy in Northport, where my bookstore was born 20 years ago, right on Waukazoo Street. But I’ve never lived in the village.

So my “spiritual home,” as David puts it, is not in any city or town. Not in Northport, Michigan, or Paris, France, not in Chicago or Cincinnati or Kalamazoo or Delton. It’s here on our few acres surrounded by orchards and woods. Back when we still lived in Leland, David had his studio here in the farmhouse, and I had my first garden, and the only water we had for drinking was what we hauled in. A rain barrel and many trips down the hill to the creek and back up with full buckets kept my garden alive. Our old dog loved to lie under the basswood tree in the backyard and watch me work in the garden. Now Sarah loves the same spot.

Pots to fill

Under the basswood tree. The messy but venerable old silver maples, one in front, another in back of the house. Back roads and places without paths. My old farmhouse, my country neighborhood. St. Wenceslaus Parish, Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern. My front porch and my backyard. My clotheslines. My meadow.

This is the place I love, my home ground, my spiritual home, my anchorage. Here the distractions fall away. Its center holds me.

It is a whole world...

,,,in every season

Surviving Up North Blizzard, Chapter 2 (Sunday)

Sunday morning at our house

There may turn out to be only two chapters to this saga, as our power and phone are back on, and as of this evening the driveway has been plowed! The siege is ended! We were pleasantly surprised (thrilled, more accurately) when radio and a lamp suddenly went on in the middle of the morning. Really? Already? We had expected to have to rough it for at least another 24 hours.

Bright sunshine!!!

Remember Friday and Saturday? The situation didn't look much different for us on Sunday morning, except that the sun came out. That was cheery! It was colder, too, but the snow had let up, and the sun urged us outdoors, after a hearty breakfast of buckwheat-blueberry pancakes. (I made extra pancakes so we could have some later like bread, with peanut butter and jam. Good lunch!) It really was beautiful. (And yes, I promised "beautiful" photos for Chapter 2, but decided to save them for my photo blog, "A Shot in the Light." They'll be up sometime soon, i.e., when I get to a high-speed connection and can put them up at full size, undiluted. They deserve that, I think. -- But on with the story.)

We bundled up to "assess the situation," as David called it, taking a good look at the vast Siberian landscape ordinarily designated our driveway. 

Does this look like a driveway?

If you look really hard at the driveway photo, you might be able to see two orange flags, one on the right margin and one a bit in from the left margin. What do you think? David said he "wasn't worried" about getting out. I was dubious. The old husband-wife story, all over again: She doubts, he prevails. Or -- ?

Onward and upward?

Here we go up the hill! 

See farmhouse and one-story end of the barn (where cows used to live) in rear-view window! 

Feel heavy clenched fists on passenger side, heavy determined foot on accelerator on driver's side!

We roar forward in 4WD! 

We climb the hill!

Sarah, left behind in the house, was no doubt straining to hear every sound....

Sarah checks out human progress

But no, in the end it was Sarah who prevailed. She was not left behind, after all! Maybe 4WD would have gotten us had the truck been higher off the ground, but you can see where we got stuck and had to shovel out to back down the hill again. 

Then Sarah came out, and we all went for a walk. The tire tracks made it easier to walk most of the way up the hill. Where the tracks gave out, David and I went in over our knees, and Sarah was up to her belly!

Sarah doesn't mind deep snow

The view from the top of the hill was worth the climb. We were happy!

Looking north from the top of the driveway

Looking west toward M-22 and Lake Michigan

Later in the day, another doggie sortie took me to the top of the hill, and I saw tracks! Some large animal had come in from the highway, angled across the hayfield, and up to the neighbor's drive--oh, I get it. The neighbor had come out from Northport to check on his plumbing pipes. Well, it was exciting there for a moment.

Actually, it's been exciting for three days. We were lucky. We kept warm, kept ourselves fed, and we had light and time for reading and writing. Some people might call it a hardship. For me, at least in part, it had elements of vacation. I'm trying not to feel guilty about that....

Sun looking silver behind small cloud

P.S. I've uploaded more photos of scenes around our house in the past couple of days, which, if you choose, you can see here and here and here.

Surviving Up North Blizzard, Chapter 1

Friday night it blew in

The storm was due to begin late Friday afternoon, and it did. I put a notice on the bookstore door, OPEN Saturday, March 3, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. WEATHER PERMITTING. Weather did not permit. The writing was on the wall by Friday night.

Temporarily--NO EXIT!

This was the view out our front door on Saturday morning. Our old farmhouse has a metal roof, the temperature was relatively warm, and so the snow was heavy and wet, not inclined to stay on the roof. Instead it slid down to form another layer of exterior wall on the front and back of the house. First order of business, then, was shoveling through the wall. (The good news was that we didn't have to worry about shoveling the roof.) Too bad we'd left the snow shovels "handily" leaning against the outside of the house, one on either side of the door! Oh, well, a stainless steel mixing bowl will do in a pinch. Anything to get through the barricade and liberate the snow shovels from their untimely burial!

Looking back at house, walk not yet cleared

Snow piled up around a house isn't all bad. It insulates the house against the cold outside, very important when the furnace is out. As to the why of the power outage, I refer you to the line below, carrying a heavy load of wet snow, due to freeze when temperature dropped Saturday night. Driveways could not be plowed because roads had not been plowed because trees and lines were down all over the place, leaving 78,000 northwest Michigan households without power. We were only one household among many.

Power line packed heavily with snow

I trudged up the unplowed driveway to take the picture below. The snow was over knee-deep, but, as you see, our barn roof has not yet collapsed. (Yea!!!) Our house is just left of center, barely visible through the branches of the cherry tree in foreground. 

Our rural homestead, far off the highway

So how does one survive without power, far from civilization? Some (like our friend Ken, Ohio writer Gene Logsdon, and many others) do it with wood heat. Our little fireplace, though originally designed for wood, now gives heat from propane gas, and propane also fuels our kitchen stove, so we are able to cook without electricity (though I would like to score a hand-operated coffee grinder before the next time the power goes out). When we woke in the middle of Friday night and realized the power was out, right away David closed off our living room, cozy room, office, and laundry room. That left only the main room we live in all winter, anyway, in the center of the house (with no exterior walls) where the fireplace is, our tiny "Paris" kitchen, tiny bathroom, and bedroom. We bundled up and stayed pretty comfortably warm. We'd filled jugs with good well water before the storm and hauled in tubs and pots of snow to melt for toilet-flushing purposes. We had everything we needed. 

Saturday's chicken in the pot made a second appearance for Sunday dinner, augmented with freshly made homemade noodles. Yes, even in a blizzard! That's when comfort food means the most, after all. But I'm getting ahead of my story by leaping to Sunday. Back to Saturday, kerosene lamps and candles gave us light for reading books and writing letters. At bedtime we continued the reading aloud started before the storm, The Crofter and the Laird, by John McPhee, which let us travel to a small island in the Hebrides after a pioneering day in northern Michigan. That was cozy!

I have many more photographs to share--you won't be getting the whole iceberg even then, only the tip--but this is a beginning, the story of Friday night and Saturday. Sunday the sun came out, and the cold, white winter landscape around our isolated farmhouse was unbelievably beautiful. Those pictures, the most beautiful, are yet to come; today's are only reportage. 

I had something very different planned for the first post of this week on Books in Northport. I'd written about books, if you can believe that. But my guess is that most everyone today is more interested in the storm. Do I guess correctly? How did you weather the weather?