On the Road: Bookman’s (not Busman’s) Holiday, Then One for Dogs

In case you had doubts....

The Bookman’s Holiday

 

The first leg of my winter odyssey south and west takes me only as far as Kalamazoo, where many family members and friends make their homes. One friend brought supper for me my first night in the ‘zoo, and in the morning when I picked my son up for breakfast, we went instead to – surprise! – a bookstore. “Do you mind?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would I mind going to a bookstore with my mother?” Okay, it was a stupid question.

 

This is a bookstore is the name of the bookstore where we found ourselves. That really is its name. It’s partnered up with the next door Book Bug, specializing in children’s books, and they share café space. 

When I visit any bookshop for the first time, I pretty much know right away if it’s going to be a memorable experience or just another ho-hum Hallmark moment. And the minute I got inside this is a bookstore I was excited. Who wouldn’t be? I should say, what booklover and bookstore lover wouldn’t be excited by such a place?

 

1) I love their counter!

 

Is this cool, or what?

“What if someone wants to buy one of those books?” I wicked-innocently asked a clerk behind the counter, pointing to the real books holding it up. He said those books were not for sale but that a “reasonable facsimile” could be provided. 

 

Here are some of other aspects of the shop I found to love:

 

2) The books are attractively displayed, categories easily identifiable, and there is an unspoken, silent invitation to venture quickly into the far reaches of the store.

 

3) A few used books, clearly marked as such, are mixed in among the new, and once I realized that I started seeking out the yellow tape on their spines, treasure-hunting.

 

        4) The café invites lingering, in much the way that the bookshelves invite browsing. If I still lived in the ‘zoo, I would be a regular. I can’t give the bagels high marks (my advice is to skip the bagel and go straight for a brownie), but the coffee was excellent.  

 

Nectar of the gods!

5) I overheard a couple of conversations, and the talk was interesting. That to me is another mark of a high-quality bookstore. And of course, at our table, my son and I were having interesting conversation.(Can you doubt it?) Our talk was of writing, as it often is when we get together.

6) Even the restroom was cool!

Doesn't everybody read in the bathroom?

 

Whenever I find myself in a really good bookstore for the first time, it takes a while for my initial giddiness to subside. Quickly I found a used book and bought it -- right away! -- but only after latte and conversation with my son could I could remember the name of a new book I wanted. Yes, they had it. Good! I bought that, too.

 

And okay, I’ll confess, with nary an apology to Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, that I also bought a couple pair of socks, because far be it from me to criticize a bookstore looking to enhance its slim profit margin by selling puzzles, socks, and other sidelines, as long as they are also stocking excellent books! If socks keep bookstores in business, I’m all for socks (particularly cute ones). And I am definitely not one of those people who loudly proclaims "love" of bookstores and leaves empty-handed!

My haul --

 

Holiday for Dogs

 

Sunny, having no choice in the matter, waited patiently in the car while her bookseller dog mom indulged a human love of literature. I told her that her turn would come in the afternoon. Did she believe me? Did she have any idea at all what I was saying?

I think she had doubts.

Our grandson and his wife have a 20-acre piece of property north of Kalamazoo, and grandson’s wife, her mother, and I, each bringing a dog, met there to walk trails in the woods. Motivated by a deep and abiding tick phobia, I wore a stupid-looking hat with a big, floppy brim and tucked the legs of my jeans into my socks. (You wouldn't want to see that image.) The dogs had no such worries. A malamute, an Aussie, and a Boston terrier walked into a bar – I mean, ran into the woods. Sunny’s leaps across the creek, a charming little creek with a sandy bottom, delightful turns, here and there a miniature waterfall, were stunning! If dogs ran steeplechase, she could!

 

The lovely little creek!

There is always so much to see in the woods, and every woods is different. This one had beautiful beech trees, one of the trees I love back in Leelanau County, but also different species, such as shagbark hickory, and I was told the mushrooms, both spring and fall, are plentiful and various. The fungi I saw may not have been edible (I don't know), but they were eye-catching.

Shagbark hickory

 

The dogs’ holiday in the woods, honestly, was as much a holiday for me as was the bookstore visit. The sun was shining! And tomorrow, at last, Election Day will be behind us, as is (finally) Halloween! I will be happy to see the landscape naked again, its human dressing of skeletons and political signs gone for another season.

How are you spending these fabulous, sunny, still unseasonably warm fall days? They are like windfall apples, aren’t they? Or merchants’ lagniappe. Unexpected, extra, delightful, unearned and perhaps undeserved gifts…. 

Dogs having fun!

Escaping the Most Beautiful Autumn?

The hills are alive with gorgeous color.

It’s official: my seasonal retirement is underway, now that Saturday, October 30, my last official bookstore of 2021, is in the rearview mirror. It was a fantastic season, both in the bookstore and the gallery, we are deeply grateful to everyone who made it so, and now we’ve been getting at projects long postponed -- such as, for me, my “blackstraw” jam (a mix of black raspberries and strawberries, fruit from earlier months that’s been in the freezer all this time) and, with the remaining raspberries, a fruit syrup that will be delicious in Italian sodas as well as on ice cream and waffles.

Tamarack in wetland woods glows gold.

As beautiful as was October and as lovely as November yet continues to be, however -- and is this not one of the mildest and most colorful fall seasons northern Michigan has ever seen, or is only Leelanau County so blessed? Gaylord, over in the middle of the northern mitten, had almost a foot of snow last Tuesday! -- my days have not been all light-hearted bliss.  Social strife and politics afford sufficient fuel for anxiety and heartache, but quite honestly it’s my dog whose fate occupies my nighttime waking hours. We have met with a special trainer and consulted our vet about medication and hope to hear soon what vet and trainer together think about Peasy’s chances at rehabilitation. I have minimized his problems here in my blog, but believe me, it has been and continues to be a difficult path forward, involving many sleepless nights. Little guy has no idea how many people he's never met are pulling for him! If only he could be as sweet with the rest of the world as he is with me!

My boy loves his outdoor world.

Each of us is the center of her or his experience. There is no getting around that fact. For me, the social and political climate of the last decade have been such a source of agony that I explain my obsessive focus on one little stray dog against this larger background. How can I not take refuge from intractable national and global problems in one very personal issue that will – perhaps -- with all my determination and a wide, winning smile from Lady Luck -- show itself to be meliorable (and did I just make up that word?). The other side of the coin is that it's no wonder to me at all that a dear friend with Stage IV cancer has no emotional energy whatsoever to worry about politics. But what a wonderful example of positivity she is, and how we have enjoyed our five fabulous "special Sundays" together this fall! Love you, Mel!

Precious times together with human friends!

At any rate, these nights in the wee dark hours my coping strategy is frequently a retreat from insomnia into the world of fiction, and here are the books I've read since my last post:  

 

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (#151 on my list of books read this year) furnished our old reading circle with plenty of food for discussion, and those new to the novel were very glad to have read it, while I was glad to have read it again.

 

The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce (#152), was a lighter novel but more than I expected. 

Then there was Paradise (#153), a work by this year’s Nobel prize winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and I’m still trying to figure out what to make of the ending. Have any of you read it? What did you think?

 

For several of the early chapters of Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (#154), I wondered why I was reading the book at all. Was it a roman à clef, and should I have been picking up on all kinds of Manhattan gossip? Either the book deepened as it went along, or the time I invested in it heightened my appreciation.

 

Women Talking (#155), by the Canadian writer Miriam Toews, was a story the author imagined after reading of an actual event. True to its title, the novel was almost exclusively conversation among illiterate women in an isolated rural religious community trying to make the biggest decision of their lives.

Anne Lamott's Blue Shoe (#156) was my first foray into her fiction, but I couldn't help wondering how autobiographical the story was, although the central character was not a writer....

 

After all that, seeking cuddly comfort, I turned to Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake (#157), a children’s story, with illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush, who also illustrated my beloved books about the Borrowers. Elizabeth Enright, Eleanor Estes, Palmer Brown -- I always find comfort in these children's books, which are also books from my own childhood.

 

-- Then came Mary Elizabeth Pope’s The Gods of Green County (my 158th book read in 2021), a truly spell-binding experience and an early reason, already, for me to look forward to re-opening in May 2022, when I can press this book into the hands of customers looking for a fiction recommendation. 

 

That the evil manipulations and outright brutality of the novel’s villain (I think it’s fair to call the sheriff that) take place almost exclusively “offstage,” reported only second- or third-hand by other characters, seems altogether appropriate. It keeps the story's focus on Big Earl and Coralee, Leroy and Cole, and the young boys, Little Earl and Caleb. Other characters who seem minor early in the novel, come into their own as the fictional years go by. And always we are surrounded by the flat cotton fields and woods of Arkansas. Here, for instance, is Coralee:

...Sometimes I felt like I lived in a world of fields and trees and spirits when everyone else lived in a world of bricks and clapboard and bodies. Maybe that is why I never could make conversation. There were rules about who talks first, and for how long, and about what, and also when it was your turn to say something funny. I never could get the knack of it. 

Coralee and Big and Little Earl will insinuate themselves into your heart, I guarantee.

Nearing the last few short chapters of The Gods of Green County, I almost succumbed to disappointment (will not say why, because I don't do spoilers!), but the remaining pages did away with any incipient negative judgment, and I closed the book with deep satisfaction. Not only can Mary Elizabeth Pope “tell a story,” she has shaped her novel in such a way that everything that happens in her characters’ lives seems inevitable – and it all brings us home in the end. Catharsis achieved -- something rare so far in 21st century literature.

 

Pope did a reading at Dog Ears Books years ago from her collection of short stories, Divining Venus, and a memoir essay, “Downshifting, included in Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan, edited by Michael Steinberg, tells of her summer job at Barb’s Bakery in Northport, so perhaps you met her at the bakery or the bookstore or both. Whether or not you did then, you will not want to miss The Gods of Green County. Really!

Friends past and present gathered together

So even in “escape,” you see, I have not been wasting my time. I’ve been getting out in the sunshine and under cloudy skies, too, as much as possible, enjoying the beautiful Michigan autumn and the companionship of a dog who doesn’t love the whole world (as did Sarah) but who does, at least, demonstrably love the Artist and me. And I am doing the best I can to deserve the love of them both.

That clueless heartbreaker!

Paying Homage to a Lowly Native Tree

 

A tree is a place, not an object, it’s an island in the air

where our sight may live awhile, unburdened

and free from this heavy, earthen body.

 

-      Joseph Stroud, “Homage to the Black Walnut in Downtown Santa Cruz,” in the collection titled Below Cold Mountain

 

Fall is a good time to pay tribute to trees in general, particularly here in the northern Midwest as tree foliage loses its chlorophyll and blazes with bright colors for a few short weeks. 

When I look back over the years, I see that many different tree species have obsessed me in different seasons of my life. One year (while reading Swann’s Way) it was hawthorns, in the field and in books. I could think of almost nothing but hawthorns for months on end. Another year it was old apple trees – and everywhere I looked, I saw them. Many autumns have seen me swooning over the varied colors of ash trees, from butterscotch yellow to deep plummy purple, while during many winters in the woods I’ve been entranced by paper-thin, almost transparent beech foliage hanging on against winter’s wind and snow. I love the catalpa that appeared out of nowhere one year as a mere stripling in our backyard, now a stately tall tree that flowers for us each spring, and I also love its modest Arizona cousin, the desert willow, which is not a true willow at all but another member of the small genus Catalpa.

Catalpa in Michigan

Catalpa flower

Desert willow in Arizona

Beginning to flower

Speaking of true willows, the family Salicaceae encompasses the genus Populus, those species I call (after their name) the “people trees,” and this is how Burton V. Barnes and Warren H. Wagner, Jr., introduce them in Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region.

The genus Populus belongs to the willow family, and the aspens, cottonwoods, and poplars resemble the willows, especially in flower and fruit characters.

 

Flowers on pendulous catkins (delicious little word!) are pollinated by the wind, and leaves flutter in the breeze like whispers of a conversation just far enough away that the words cannot be distinguished. Aspens, balsam poplars, and cottonwoods inhabit very different ecosystems, but it is the lowly aspen, known locally in northern Michigan as popple, that occupies my mind this fall. Populus tremuloides, our popple, is Colorado’s aspen. Westerners (without our beautiful maples) rhapsodize over their aspens, while we here pretty much take our popples for granted, but this year I can’t stop thinking about them and combing the Leelanau roadsides with my eyes, hungry for popples.

 

As 2021 has been a record mushroom year, it seems only fitting to note here that Michigan’s largest living organism is a fungus growing in the Upper Peninsula that covers over 30 acres, but another reason I mention the U.P. fungus is that it has something common with our popple trees. You may think you are looking at a grove of individuals, but it’s far more likely that the trees you see all arise from a common underground, nearly indestructible root system (try to get rid of popples sometime!), which makes the trees genetically identical clones of one another and all physically interconnected. See the explanation and some fabulous photographs of aspen out west here. Within their genus, Barnes and Wagner tell us this about popples: 

…The aspens are boreal and northern species, adapted to a cold climate and either moist or dry soils. They reproduce abundantly by seeds under the right site conditions. Aspens are also adapted to fire and sprout profusely from roots when their trunks are scorched and killed.

 

Is Utah’s Pando aspen grove the largest popple clone in the world? Colorado has challenged the Utah clone, but these things are difficult to measure. 

 

My late Uncle Jim, a veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps, had my undying admiration for his ability to identify trees in winter, when there were no leaves to match against field guide illustrations. Overall shapes of trees helps (the few remaining elm trees in the landscape stand out easily with their vase shape), and bark is another big help. The bark of Populus tremuloides is 

Thin, creamy white to yellowish green [when young], smooth, becoming fissured and gray [with age] with long, flat-topped ridges at the base of old trees or trees in deep shade.

 

Popples don’t care much for shade (the old ones you'll find there have no doubt been overtaken by other encroaching species), so you’ll often see them at the outer edges of woods and forests, clustered together like a herd of shy young deer, nervous about venturing too far out into the open. My advice today, though, is to take note of them before the wind has completely unclothed them for the winter. Individually they may not look like much, but in groups they are graceful and lovely, especially when the sun catches their dancing leaves, and these sweet little native trees are worthy of our Michigan attention.

Books Read Since Last Listed

 

148. Rashid, Mark. Lessons From a Ranch Horse (nonfiction)

149. Mosley, Walter. Walkin’ the Dog (fiction)

150. Mowat, Farley. The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (nonfiction)

 

Currently reading: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

 

 

Peasy News

 

Next week, the first week of my annual seasonal retirement (Saturday, October 30, is the last bookstore day of the 2021 season), we are taking Peasy to begin some special professional training (training for all three of us), and I’ll let you know how that develops. Pursuing social skills with our special needs dog, as well as addressing long-postponed household projects and issues, means we won’t be leaving for Arizona much before early December, but what needs doing needs doing, and we must needs get at it.

As always, thanks for supporting Dog Ears Books,  thanks for reading, and please feel welcome to share Books in Northport with your friends and neighbors.

Changes and Dogs and Books

Summer is over vs. Fall is not over yet, OR Fall is beautiful!

 

Two Different Ways to Count Blessings

 

As my blogger/reader/dog lover friend Dawn says, right in the title of her blog, Change is Hard. As I recall, the hard change Dawn initially referred to was a transition from one job to another, and that was years ago now – she is retired now! -- but changes don’t stop coming, as long as we’re alive, and all of us been through a lot of hard changes in this country since Dawn and I connected via our blogs. There have been, of course, other kinds of changes, long anticipated and welcomed. Life just keeps coming at us, one way or another, and we do our best to adapt each day.

I absolutely love asters!

When I was young, my friends and I used to say (thinking ourselves very clever), “Someone told me to cheer up because things could be worse. I cheered up – and sure enough, things got worse.” Gallows humor, I suppose, which we could afford because we were, as I say, young and therefore, secretly felt invulnerable. What we find amusing changes as we advance in age….

Anyway, the other morning I had a little epiphany (I don’t know about your epiphanies, but most of mine are little ones), and maybe you’ve read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and will recognize my lightbulb moment as the difference between Anne’s way of counting her blessings and her mother’s way. Her mother’s advice when Anne felt gloomy was that she should think of other people whose lives were worse. At the time, the Frank family were living in hiding from the Nazis, but their situation could have been worse -- and became tragically worse when their hiding place was discovered, with only Anne’s father surviving Auschwitz.

Anne, however, even in hiding, was young and full of hopes and dreams and looked for sources of joy rather than other people’s misery to bring herself out of spells of despair. “I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains,” she wrote in her diary. She could not leave the hiding place to go outdoors into nature, her favorite medicine, but she could peep out at the sky: “As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?”

Little Pea and I love our outdoor rambles.

So how can I ever be sad, with my oh-so-fortunate life? But sometimes we all are, and we need to pull ourselves back into the light, so although what I call my little epiphany is one I’ve had repeatedly in the past and repeatedly lost sight of, I was glad to have it again the other day. 

 

Because I’d been despondent over the most recent appearance of the Mr. Hyde side of my dog Peasy’s personality. It’s a side of him that only flashes out briefly, never lasting even sixty seconds, and is much less frequent than when he first came to live with us, but now when he falls off the good-dog wagon in that dramatic and frightening way, even for only a moment, and after weeks of seemingly near-normal behavior, I am plunged into the Slough of Despond!  So I called to talk to a woman who has extensive experience with special needs dogs like Peasy, and I did feel not quite so horribly depressed afterward. Some of the dogs she houses, the unadoptables, are so much worse! But there, you see? That is the negative way of counting the blessing that is Peasy: to say he could be "so much worse!" Thinking of his Mr. Hyde self in that comparative way helped me to calm down, but it was no ode to joy! The return to joy took Peasy himself, his daily unquenchable curiosity about the world and his wonderful bounding energy. Whatever his unhappy earlier life, Peasy has become, over time, a mostly happy dog. He loves having a family and a home! And regardless of how he feels about meeting strangers (from nervous to terrified), he is very comfortable and affectionate with us.

New toy! Mr. Rope! Such fun! Happy boy!

Recent Reading

 

Our intrepid Ulysses reading circle met last week to discuss (my choice of book) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and we stayed on topic for two hours, everyone agreeing that it had been a brilliant, unusual, and very worthwhile novel for reading and discussion. September’s book will be Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I'll be reading that one for the third or fourth time, but it is worth re-reading.

 

After rather an overload of mostly nonfiction read recently, this morning I finished a long novel, Damnation Creek, by Ash Davidson, recommended to me by my sister. The story is set in redwood country, near the town where my younger nephew presently lives (the author is from Arcata, California, and now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona), and is fairly even-handed in its treatment of the logging industry from the perspective of people who depend on it for their living. I recommend it to anyone who has read The Overstory, not because it takes the "other side” but because it is sympathetic to working people’s needs and at the same time acknowledges serious harms done. Also, it’s beautifully written. 

 

So here are books I’ve read since my last post:

 

131. Cameron, Peter. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (fiction)

132. Gootwald, Linda. Once Upon a Shelter (nonfiction)

133. Davidson, Ash. Damnation Spring (fiction)

Fruits of wild roses --

Autumn Vacation Hours

 

[Late note: This should have been titled "Hours of Autumn Vacation," as the title I gave it sounds like bookstore hours, and that's not what it is. It istime stolen away from bookstore and housework and yard tasks to immerse myself in balmy autumn hours.]

It’s Sunday, and the sun is shining bright, and all over northern Michigan colors are popping. The Artist and I will be working outdoors this afternoon, preparing for a family visit and clearing the deck for visiting on Monday, rain or shine. Actually, the forecast for Monday is rain, with sunshine and clear skies to return on Tuesday. Whatever future days may bring, however, today’s post is a showcase for sunny days and the stunning colors of fall.

Friday, while Bruce manned the bookstore sales counter for me, I took the opportunity to take care of a couple errands down in Suttons Bay and then – oh, sybaritic escape! – took what remained of my New Bohemian Café chai latte and my dog and the novel I was reading down to the beach just north of the marina and sat there reading and looking up from time to time to note a sailboat out on the water or gulls huddled on the sand. Once in a while a gull would take wing and scream or laugh; other than that, the day was quiet and peaceful. 

I drove south and west in the county to see what I could see. Every prospect pleased. Back around the old homestead, asters in their stunning colors put a song in my heart. I was home, but I felt, just then, for a while, as carefree as if I were on vacation.

Not that my ordinary commute to Northport or time in the bookstore is a hardship. Here is some color from Leelanau Township and Dog Ears Books.

This morning, though, I vowed to pay full homage with my camera to the wonders of green ash leaves in autumn. While we have lost many mature ash trees in Leelanau County (perhaps the majority), enough remain to give some idea of the range of their subtle fall colors.

 

[Second late note: I haven't given you any idea at all of the range of colors of ash leaves. These all look yellow to brown. Where are the reds and purples?]

Going out to photograph ash leaves, I came upon an oddity that might have puzzled a newbie botanizer looking to identify a wild vine. Here is what I saw, and what do you say about it? 

If you realized that the wild grapevine had twined around the scarlet-leafed Virginia creeper, you are correct.

But pictures above show only the beginning of the northern Michigan fall color palette. Everywhere, overall, there is so much! 

Our eyes drink and drink, and still there is more! Lovely, lovely October in Michigan! What good medicine you are for our weary souls!

 

On Saturday afternoon a friend who dropped by the bookstore remarked on the soft, mild air we had enjoyed on Friday evening. “It reminded me,” he said, “of when I jumped ship in Caligari, Sardinia.” Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Wonderful, the associative leaps memory can make – and the delightful surprise of such a remark to the ear of a listening friend! 

 

Thank you, October! We needed you!