And Then It Rained

(I am in love with pagoda dogwood!)

Reminder: This Thursday, June 11, at 4 p.m. at Dog Ears Books, author Robert Downes will give his presentation on Native American history prior to European exploration. This is a free event and one you can take in before your dinner hour!

Seasonal thoughts and projects

Reading one of Jean-Luc Bannalec’s murder mysteries the other evening at bedtime, I ran across a phrase—and here I have to paraphrase what would be a translation, anyway—about summer always arriving on a certain day. That is, there is a day when you feel, at last, Yes, this is summer. I felt that way last Friday. It wasn’t the first day I’d been able to have the bookshop door open, nor the first day warm enough to go about in sandals and without a jacket, but it felt different. Not just a temperate spring day, but summer. 

That being the case, my two “days off,” Sunday and Monday, were busy ones at home. Accomplishments included getting my lawn mower working again (it had gone on strike, and I was able to persuade it back to work again all by myself!), mowing grass, running out to a couple of nearby garden centers for more plants (both flowers and vegetables), getting all the new arrivals in soil (either in the ground or in planters), along with catching up on laundry, hanging the heavy items out on the line and later bringing them indoors to fold, wrapping up the day by watering everything, even though rain was in the forecast for after midnight.

The garden is coming together.

Did it rain overnight? If so, I slept through it. Morning was misty and calm, my world jungly green, only a sweet, slight breeze through the open window. No need to water on Tuesday, so, after her morning sortie, Sunny and I had a leisurely porch breakfast. Later in the day, it rained for sure. 

Poppy after rain

All three cuttings I took from my cranberrybush viburnum survived the winter well, one of them even flowering its very first solo season, which encourages me to try more of this manner of propagation. For 2026, the experiment I have in mind is pagoda dogwood, Cornus alternifolia, which I am delighted to discover blooming very close to my house as a volunteer, not far from the legion of volunteer black raspberries I depend on harvesting every summer for my signature ‘blackstraw’ jam, a combination of black raspberries and good local strawberries. Yum!

Dogwood again...

...and raspberry-to-be!

Again, reading

Besides the Bannalec mystery, I’ve been reading, a few pages at a time and in English translation, Rabelais's big work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, but don’t know if I’ll get through the whole fat paperback volume. It is entertaining, I admit, but entertaining in the way of “Saturday Night Live” rather than as a movie with a strong narrative from beginning to end. Lots of smart-aleck nicknames and jokes. Lots to do with controversies of the time of Rabelais and his opinions. A few pages at a time, I can do. The whole thing? In my mother’s deadly phrase, We’ll see!

Thoughts on “being an author”

An author is the originator of a written work. Some authors are writers by profession, while others are not. 

Being a professional writer, like being a professional musician or fine artist, involves long-term commitment, sometimes lifetime commitment. Other people come late in life to writing, often as a second (or even third) career in retirement. 

Not all professional writers are book authors; they may author (the word here functions as a verb) articles or short magazine stories. Some are journalists or columnists or grant writers. Also, not all authors of published books consider themselves—or even aspire to be—career writers.

I’ve been sorting through my thoughts on this because a couple of women visited my bookshop recently with a new book written by one of them. “I’m not really an author,” Jennifer Sager said, modestly introducing her book. “She keeps saying that!” her friend protested. After the three of us conversed for a while, and I took a careful look at the book they had brought in to show me, I said to Sager insistently, “You are the author of this book!” And she is, whether or not she ever writes another. 

Steph’s Story, published by a relatively new small press in Bloomington, Indiana, Filibuster Press, is a story Jennifer Sager felt “compelled” to write. Jennifer is a middle daughter who grew up with an older and a younger sister. The oldest, Stephanie, was born with Down syndrome. In telling of her sister’s life, the author of Steph’s Story also tells her own journey from sheltered childhood to dawning realization of handicaps faced by many different groups of people for various reasons. Because her parents did not heed doctors’ advice to put Stephanie in an institution (and “try again” for a “normal” child), Jennifer’s growing up introduced her to a range of other young people with disabilities, from those in wheelchairs to those with high-functioning autism. Only as she grew older and had experience outside her immediate neighborhood did she realize that poverty and skin color, like disability, could trigger discrimination. 

All of the author's factual information, history, and advocacy, however, is woven into a very personal, engaging story. I started reading on Monday evening and had soon eagerly devoured over 100 pages.

Three sisters! For me, as the oldest of a trio of sisters, that idea alone sparked my interest, but it was Jennifer’s love for Steph and her joy in their bond that is holding me page after page. Who wouldn’t enjoy this book? I’m sure the affirmative messages will be especially important for anyone with a child or grandchild who diverges from the “norm,” but I’m also sure that anyone at all interested in families—and who of us is not?—will enjoy reading Steph’s Story. 

From where I stand

Is this section a rant? Call it what you will.

Let me first note, briefly, that a request for evidence is not satisfied by insults, name-calling, or the sheer repetition of an unsupported claim. However loudly you may yell, however nasty you get with the person who asked for evidence, if yelling and name-calling and hurling insults is all you can do, that just tells me is that you have no evidence, no ground for your claim. (You know who and what I'm talking about here.) 

Day after day, it remains astonishing to me how many Americans are willing to accept not only patently false claims but outrageously bad public behavior from someone elected to serve our country. Serve, not harm, not injure, certainly not destroy. What are they, those sticking with him, getting from supporting loss of dignity and destruction of hope for others? Anything other than the satisfaction of seeing their opposition’s misery and frustration? 

Now, something else: Less than 1% of the American population identifies as transgender. One percent. Of this one percent, only 0.002% (ten out of 500,000) are college athletes. How and why did transgender people come to be such a huge political issue? 

Two words: smoke screen. 

Just say the word ’transgender,’ and certain groups of people completely freak out. They are filled with fear, their fear fuels their rage, and they forget everything else. Jobs are vanishing while wars are not, and the rich get richer and richer as the poor get poorer and sicker and more and more disenfranchised. 

Someone must be blamed for the woes that afflict us! Where do we look for a scapegoat? Let’s find a very small, vulnerable population and focus fear and anger on them!

I am so tired of that cruel strategy and sick of watching people fall for it!

On the other hand--a life well lived!

Leelanau Township lost a priceless citizen recently. At 99 years of age, however, Julia Brabanec was ready to go. “I don’t know why I’m still here,” she had confided to me in one of our visits in her last year. 

Julia's contributions to the northern Michigan food landscape were featured in Emita Brady Hill’s 2020 nonfiction book, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming.  In fact, the first chapter in the book is “Julia Brabanec,” in the opening section, “Two Orchards and a CSA: Becoming Organic.”

Julia and her late husband John first came to Leelanau County on their honeymoon in 1948. Later they bought land here and on it developed an organic orchard. The Brabanecs lived simply, pumping water from their well and lighting their house with kerosene lamps until a home wind generator enabled them to electrify. They did almost everything themselves, too, so although they built the foundation for their new (second) home on the property in 1985, the house was finished only in 2005 with the help of their children. Julia and John were always too busy farming to build a house. One thousand, one hundred trees—apples and peaches—“mom & pop” doing it all, from planting to delivery.

If you haven’t read Northern Harvest yet, you really should, to learn the rest of Julia’s story, as well as that of other women in food and farming in Northern Michigan. 

My late husband always referred to John and Julia as “the Helen and Scott Nearing of Leelanau County.” John died 16 years ago, and I remember his funeral well. Julia wanted to go out more quietly, and she got her wish. 

It’s easy sometimes to say and think, as we witness the passing of the old guard, that the future will never again know such good people, and yet I see men and women in younger generations already coming up with solid values such as Julia and John lived by: love of the land; belief in organic methods; a strong work ethic; and dedication to the future. That last is what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Care for the future and all who live on the land, urban and rural. Respect for life and the dignity of all.

I am honored to have a beautiful portrait of Julia Brabanec, a photograph by author Emita Brady Hill, behind my bookstore desk, as I am honored to have known Julia Brabanec and to have counted her as a friend.

Julia Brabanec: A good life, well lived!

Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

Looking and Looking and Looking!

 

Morning comes to Suttons Bay

Collecting Mornings

 

Day was at hand. … The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting into gold…. A solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. 

 

-      Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey

 

My “travels” are with a dog, but lately I too have been collecting early mornings, saving them up against the weeks of darker dawns to come. One day last week an appointment in Suttons Bay took me in that direction, and I went earlier than necessary to make a stop for coffee and donut, giving Sunny and me a chance to watch daylight come over the water. The very next morning I had to get garbage out to the highway for pickup by 7 a.m. and decided, because I needed bread, to keep going to 9 Bean Rows. I'm not quite sure how I ended up in Omena to watch darkness fade away, but it was another “lovely coming in of day,” to quote RLS. 

Another day begins in Omena

But whenever rain doesn’t interfere and I have no business or errands elsewhere, Sunny and I begin our days outdoors more simply, with about an hour-long walk from our front door and back home again. So much to see! And for her, I’m sure, so much to smell! 

Sky one morning closer to home

Then there are Sundays and Mondays, too, my days off from bookselling, so again, if rain or other business does not conflict, after our early morning walk, Sunny and I can go to the dog park to meet friends! – a word Sunny recognizes, although I think she interprets its meaning as “fun.” 

On the way to the dog park via Mill Street in Northport

Coming back the same beautiful way

With the last of October’s leaves still clinging to the trees, as well as blowing in the wind, I took long routes back home on both Sunday and Monday. 

View from high on Onomonee Road

Winding along Gills Pier Road

These are my “travels,” then: walks and drives with my dog in the near vicinity of our home, as I tell her frequently how lucky we are to have a home and to live in a beautiful place.

 

Doggie Digression

 

I’ve said that Sunny thinks ‘friends’ means ‘fun,’ so what does she think it means when I say, ‘Momma has to go to work’? What is ‘work’? What she knows is the routine that accompanies the words—her water dish filled, treats sprinkled on the bed, the momma leaving the house, and Sunny staying home. 

Then there is ‘Go for a ride?’ and ‘Go for a ride, go for a walk?’ Those phrases mean we head for the car together. 

‘Bring it!’ encourages her to bring back that tennis ball she chased and caught. Sometimes she starts back without it and needs to be reminded with ‘Get it!’ and 

‘Bring it!’ 

I haven’t stressed the word ‘car’ to her, but ‘house’ is one all my dogs have learned. It means we’re going indoors now, and Sunny knows that word, too. Will there be food involved? I’m sure that’s uppermost in her mind. Maybe that's what ‘house’ means to her?

 

Past, Present, Future

 

Pascal’s wager is so uninteresting. Like all bets, it lives in the future. It is just another presentiment, just another theology of postponement, in which the present is disowned. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

Solitude intensifies the ache of beautiful autumn days for me, the excitement of panoramic color in sunshine as unsharable as the closed-in feeling of a day of rain, and so, hungry to share, I crowd images into my blog posts. But we were not, you and I, gazing at these scenes together in the same moments, and my sweet dog was, I’m sure, more intent on watching for squirrels or deer or turkeys than she was delighting in scenery. Still, I cannot disown the beauty of the present, even as I long for the sharing times of autumns past.

 

I used to think the worst part of dying would be leaving the story in the middle and not knowing “how it turned out,” but of course there is no “turning out,” no end to the story, as long as the human race manages to avoid extinction, and do I really want to know “how it turns out,” anyway? Either the final end of our species or the nearer, intermediate results and consequences of present events? Henri Bergson, one of history’s most optimistic philosophers, died during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, not living to see the Liberation. But then, was the Liberation “the end”? Could anyone celebrating the end of World War II in 1945 have foreseen the resurgence of Nazism—and in the U.S.A., of all places? 

 

Recently, in a box of deacquisitioned books from a private library, come to inhabit my bookshop until they find new homes, I found a fascinating little paperback published in 1945, just after the end of the war. The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and Its Application, by Thomas James Norton, contains more than the bare text of our Constitution. Line by line, Norton gives background and explanation for phrases and statements, and his explanatory commentary is illuminating, to put it mildly. 

For example, the reasoning behind counting each enslaved black African as 3/5 of a person was a compromise between North and South having to do with direct taxes, the North contending that the South would be undertaxed if slaves were not counted, Southern states arguing that they would be overtaxed if slaves were counted. It had nothing to do with recognizing personhood of enslaved peoples, nothing to do with envisioning the end of slavery, and everything to do with taxes. Only after the compromise was reached was the counting method applied to determining how many representatives each state would have in Congress, and there it is interesting to note that while not counting the enslaved population at all would have benefitted the South in terms of taxation, counting every five enslaved person as three state residents worked to the advantage of those states in the House of Representatives.

 

What I’m really excited about is that this Thomas James Norton title is still in print and currently available through my national book distributor, so I should have copies here in the shop by the end of the week! Of course, if I need to order more, I’ll be happy to do that, too. As Americans, we all need to educate ourselves on the background of current debated issues.

 

 

Taking It (All?) In

 

My hero Brown Dog usually lives in borrowed deer cabins. I’m aware that he’s almost become a survival mechanism when I’m at desperate ends. My life at my cabin when I’m not working bears similarities. I might wake early and take a walk while my mind is still empty which allows me to see the landscape more vividly and, at rare times, holographically with the additional illusion that you can see all sides of a tree or a hill at once, the slightest filaments of time herself flutter in the air. 

 

-      Jim Harrison, Off to the Side

 

 

The landscape around me is vivid in autumn, so how could I see it otherwise? But seeing all sides of a tree or a hill at once is something I have never managed to do, and though I do sense time’s filaments fluttering nervously, even when the air is still, when I stop to think about it all I wonder what is there that I’m not seeing. All the hidden elements and workings of nature and man. 

Impossible not to see this!

But what happened here?

And what is going on in this corner, hidden under the leaves?

The other day I had a discussion with someone who blamed “migrants” for rising medical costs. When I asked for clarification, she said she didn’t mean only immigrants, with or without documents, but apparently food stamp recipients and people on unemployment, all of whom she saw as contributing to costs borne by others, including herself. She is intelligent and hardworking and has often worked two jobs in order to meet expenses, so after she described a couple of scenarios, I finally saw part of the problem. 

 

People in an ER waiting room or using food stamps at a grocery store are visible. CEOs and high-stakes investors in private equity companies, the companies buying up medical practices, dental practices, hospitals, nursing homes, even veterinary clinics—those people are not visible! You don’t see billionaires in the ER or at the grocery store or pumping their own gas or anywhere you and I usually encounter our fellow Americans. 

 

Two years ago I had no clue about private equity companies, either. Didn’t know what they were or how they operated. No idea. They were not visible to me. Learning about them was a shock.

 

How often do we see our United States representatives and senators in person? We certainly never see them being entertained by high-stakes lobbyists! Those scenes form no part of our daily lives.

 

Add to the visible/invisible divide all the media machines that concentrate on and exaggerate the visible poor (priced out of so many aspects of the market economy), while ignoring, except for glamor or sex scandals, the invisible ultra-wealthy who profit from that same market, reaping higher and higher dividends from our rising costs without being taxed accordingly, thanks to their connections to power.

 

As a bookseller, my responsibility is to select books I think people already want but also, as the fictional bookseller Roger Mifflin put it, those they don’t know they want. Want. Besides meaning desire, ‘want’ can also mean a lack or unfulfilled need. “It wants salt,” the Artist used to say.

 

And then sometimes—often?—after cramming my head full of economics and history, I want a light-hearted murder mystery, maybe one narrated by a dog, so believe me, I understand that, too, and no one has to be embarrassed by asking for what they want in my bookshop!

Recent binge!

 

Chuck Collins will be here next week!

 

Despite the title and cover illustration of his latest book, Burned by Billionaires, Chuck Collins is a calm, personable, mild-mannered, approachable human being with both feet on the ground and a mind open to questioning, so please come hear him speak next Wednesday, November 12, at 4 p.m. Bring your own open, questioning mind and please feel welcome to join a discussion following his presentation. I have some questions of my own, and we will have a stimulating time, I’m sure! I even have an idea for a very, very modest and (I hope) somewhat amusing door prize....

Don't forget our world's beauty!