Stop-Action Moments

Sunny Juliet takes a play break.

I always say in the fall, when people ask, “How was your summer?” that it was a blur—and so it seems as it races by. There are, however, moments to stop and take a deep breath and look around in gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve had a lot of those already.

 

We had launch!

 

My dear friend Marilyn Zimmerman’s book launch was one such stop-action moment for me. All who could attend (and in the summer it is impossible to avoid every schedule conflict) were delighted to be together to celebrate the release of Marilyn’s novel. After the author described the setting and background of her story and read a passage from the book, questions and observations from the audience and further conversation while she signed copies kept our guest author too busy to have a piece of her own congratulatory cake until it was almost time to leave. Verdict: Success!

 

Author Karen Mulvahill was in the audience and had to leave early, but what a joy for me to hear from Marilyn and Karen the next day that they were avidly reading each other’s books! Northern Michigan writers I know are such generous souls, celebrating each other’s successes joyfully. That’s yet another lovely aspect of my wonderful world of books, and I am especially proud of the achievements of these two Northport writers.

 

Of course, Zimmerman and Mulvahill’s novels are available at Dog Ears Books. In Defense of Good Women is being marketed as a legal thriller, The Lost Woman as historical fiction, but I will tell you that both are much more than a single genre tag can capture. They have in common page-turning suspense; beyond that, however, Mulvahill’s novel lays bare the ways in which cruel authoritarianism divides a society, while Zimmerman’s explores hidden and complicated motivations and relationships.

 

In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman. Paper, 302pp, $17.99

 

The Lost Woman, by Karen Mulvahill. Paper, 280pp, 18.95

 

 

We had a summer reunion!

 

Omigod, is it really 18 years since our first lunch? The number has fluctuated from year to year, depending on who-all is available when Dorene makes her annual pilgrimage to northern Michigan, but here is our original tiny core from all those years ago. Back then Marilyn Zimmerman and Trudy Carpenter were taking writing classes together and writing short stories, so when writer Dorene O’Brien came up from the Detroit area the four of us got together for lunch to talk about the writing life. And here we four are all those years later! 

Left to right: Marilyn Zimmerman, Trudy Carpenter, Dorene O'Brien, et moi

A prior year with Elizabeth Buzzelli, Barbara Stark-Nemon, and Sarah Shoemaker

I had company!

 

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit for three days and nights last week. Breakfasts and dinners on the porch, one restaurant excursion, much relaxing outdoors—and Sunny got a lot of attention from my dog-indulgent sister! Somehow I guess we were too intent on conversation and food and relaxation to take photographs of each other. Even on Sunday morning when Sunny triggered a temporary crisis mode by encountering a porcupine at close quarters, there was no pause for camera work. Those quills had to be pulled out right away! After her ordeal, Sunny retreated to the other end of the porch to recover in solitude, not sitting next to the table as usual while we humans had our breakfast. She had completely gotten over the shock to her dignity and independence by afternoon, however, and meanwhile her momma had squeezed in a nap following the departure of beloved company.

I found a photo! This one of Deboran and Bob is at Nittolo's in Lake Leelanau.

 

We all had sun and rain.

Soft, gentle rain from the sky always seems better for young growing things than cold water from a hose. My gardens have had some of both so far this season. Little seedlings are emerging in the vegetable beds, and flowering plants are flourishing in the borders and fields. 

My apple trees, I report sadly, look as if they are not going to bear at all this year. Just when I thought I was on top of my game! I got the pruning done, and I was ready with my homemade codling moth traps after last year’s maddening discovery of a worm hole at the blossom end and core rot inside almost every piece of fruit! So what could go wrong? How about a failure to blossom and set fruit? Very disappointing! It seems my trees have definitely slipped into a biennial fruiting pattern, and all I can do now is to be ready again next year and hope for a good harvest in 2026.

 

Pretty tree, no fruit

We have plans --

 

Sunny Juliet and I will be having more company soon, and we will getting back to our agility work with Coach Mike next week if the weather permits. 

 

On June 24, Dog Ears Books will host another poetry reading, this time with Jennifer Clark from Kalamazoo. She will be our featured guest for the third time with her third collection of poetry, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, which is not, she says, your grandmother’s book of saints.

So if you can’t relate to sanitized, stained glass perfection, come and meet Jennifer Clark’s cast of helpers—cranky, insecure, doubting, and hilarious—saints maybe “for the rest of us”? Because we who don’t fully have our spiritual acts together certainly need guides who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty by interceding in our screwy, complicated lives!

 

That reading will be Tuesday, June 24, beginning at 4 p.m.

Poet Jennifer Clark

 

And then, the ongoing—what to call it?

 

I cannot see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil like those three little monkeys. Sorry! I cannot pretend that all is well in our society and our world these days. 

 

We have in the White House a president who “promised” he would be a dictator on “Day One,” seeming to imply that his dictatorship would only “need” to last a single day—and excuse me for all the scare quotes, but this is scary stuff, and whoever thought that any dictator would step down after 24 hours? This one sure hasn’t. And the most frightening part of it all is that his supporters, military and laypeople, continue to cheer his overturning of the Constitution and the rule of law that Americans have always considered guarantees of our country’s bedrock freedoms. 

 

Why all the arrests and deportations? It isn't about protecting us from crime. Undocumented workers doing their jobs, paying taxes, and taking care of their families are no threat to the rest of us. 

Think about it. 

He promised to bring down consumer prices “on Day One” and was unable to do so. Prices have not come down. He promised to end wars in Gaza and Ukraine “on Day One” and was unable to do so. The wars go on, as do the deaths. But deportations? That’s one area he’s been able to get some results, so by God he’s going to keep deporting! 

 

And never mind that he’s not singling out criminals but terrorizing and tearing apart families who have lived in and contributed to their communities for years! He’s a “tough guy,” right? Don’t you see it? Having gotten rid of many people in authority who took seriously their oaths of office, he is now able to command troops and appoint program "czars" to terrorize and also, often, try to quell protests against his bullying tactics. 

 

The man himself is a pitiful figure. He and his minions steal from the poor and give to the wealthiest, while they dismantle protections for civil rights, health, and our natural environment because it is much faster to destroy than to build. Destroyers make themselves feel big and powerful by tearing down or blasting apart, and that’s the name of the game.

 

This weak, whining blamer-in-chief would be less than nothing if there weren’t still many Americans who either look past his rhetoric of hate and blame and buy his pie-in-the-sky lies or actually feel their own impoverished spirits fueled by hate and blame. You hurt? Must be someone else's fault. Find a scapegoat to punish.

 

For a long time I wanted to believe that the people I know who support him must have, somehow, good intentions in their hearts, that they simply were not aware of what he was actually saying and doing. They couldn’t know what he really was and be okay with him, I told myself. They were good people, right? I wanted to believe they must be living in information silos, hearing only partisan propaganda and seeing only happy, smiling photos of him. 

 

But such total ignorance of reality is impossible, and I have to face reality. He has his own social media platform and spews his blame and hatred there daily, so his supporters cannot be ignorant of what he is. I have to face the fact that they themselves, apparently, have no loyalty to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law. I have to face the fact that “liberty and justice for all” is to them a meaningless phrase. “Justice” to them means “We win!” and everyone else loses. 

 

What does what's happening mean to you? To put party above country, loyalty above principle, might above right? Is this the United States of America your parents and grandparents fought to preserve? Is it the one you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?

 

Well, for now we go on with our lives. Those of us who write, write; those who join public protest demonstrations, demonstrate; those who lie awake night after night try to get enough sleep to face another day. We go to work, we care for our families and homes, and we treasure our friends—because life is essentially a beautiful gift, and it would be wrong not to be grateful and to appreciate what we still have. 

When my husband died, I learned that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the most meaningful experiences of our lives. And so I continue to be deeply grateful for all this country of mine has given me, even as I grieve these nightmare times and hope that we can still come out the other side into the sunshine of lawful liberty again. 

 

Hope. Community. Justice for our neighbors as well as for ourselves. Because there is no true justice that is not justice for all.

 

“We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.” 

 

That was the simple funeral speech actor Robert Duvall gave in “Broken Trail,” and I think of it often. We are here on earth for such a short time. We have such a short time in which to be worthy of our lives!

Lives were given for our freedom.

Not Just Waiting Around For It

Enough of dark and cold!

Oh, where to begin? A random plunge? 

 

Above is the title (perhaps no longer appropriate?) that I used for a first draft, now discarded—lengthy paragraphs that wound on and on, giving excessive background on my experience with unsought joy, revisiting at length past days of happiness (back in “the old Vienna,” as the Artist loved to say) before arriving, at last, to the place where I find myself now, where being open to the possibility of joy and ready to welcome it when it comes is not enough. In the present place intention is required. I need to seek joy out with the expectation of finding it.

Sunrise again -- that's better!

That, briefly, was the theme I had in mind, but my intention took a beating, even after having been written down and gone over repeatedly, pen retracing the words over and over, the words spoken aloud, visualization effected—the whole nine yards. All that, and yet joy eluded me. Irritability, not joy, was my companion. Rats!

 

Have you ever had meditation go sour on you? My intention session itself was fine, but joy did not (shall we say) manifest. And irritability is not much of a muse! No one wants to hear about it! We don’t need that from each other, do we? So I held off posting anything new here—especially after a comment from one reader about how he came to Books in Northport for “positivity”!

 

What brought on the bad mood? A combination of factors. For me personally, this is a difficult month, with a string of three-year-old milestones lying in wait on the calendar, but there is also the dark, dark cloud hanging over our country and the world, a cloud impossible to dispel and very difficult to put out of mind for long. 

 

Then, too, I was in the midst of a reading slump! Whether that was cause or effect of the mood, I cannot tell. I only know that Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, after an evening spent with it, struck me as silly and pointless and that I subsequently abandoned Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall halfway through, after the introduction had filled me with eagerness for the story. Eschewing literature after two or three impatient nights, I spent a couple of evenings with one of Lillian Braun Jackson’s Cat-Who mysteries and a big bag of potato chips, wallowing in escape reading and junk food.

 

(It really wasn't much of a party.)

My next reading choice, The Personal Librarian, was a relief and a step up. Authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray kept me turning pages in their engrossing work of historical fiction, and I have now ordered a biography of Belle da Costa Greene to see how known facts of her life stack up against the fiction. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Greene occupied a unique position in the world of art and book auctions of the period, her uniqueness taking on added poignancy 49 years after her death, when it was discovered that her birth certificate identified her as “colored.” It’s that secret identity that drives The Personal Librarian, certainly a fascinating aspect of the woman’s life, but I would like to know much more about how she learned about rare books and am hoping the biography will tell me that.

 

What really turned the tide of my mood, however, was the novel Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, a spellbinding story of a complicated family with complicated secrets, all connected by a recipe from “the island” that was their ancestral home. It was a book that carried me away and, finally, lifted me up. Awake half the night over its pages, only turning out the light after the book repeated fell from my hands as sleep overtook me, I had a happy reason to wake up in the morning: I had that book to finish! 

Have you ever had that feeling in the morning? Remembering as you came awake that an irresistible book was right there waiting for you? (So much better than only waking once again to the continuing nightmare of the current American political scene!) Now I see that Charmaine Wilkerson has published another novel, Good Dirt, and I am eager to get my hands on that, confident I will not be disappointed. 

Most highly recommended!

Switching gears for a moment: Meanwhile, when was the last time Sunny Juliet and I went to the dog park? When did poor Sunny last see anyone other than her dog mom? We’ve been alone too long!

This is her impatient face, between barks. Sigh!

What with bitter cold weather and then five days without our plow guy, it was a siege of togetherness, but I remedied that sorry situation for my girl on Sunday (though I rarely get photos at the dog park and didn’t on Sunday). On the way back through the village, I stopped at my bookshop only intending to snap one photo for my other blog, but then a family appeared, outside, gazing wistfully through the windows. I went to the door. “Would you like to come in?” They would! We visited, talked dogs, and they bought books—altogether a perfect encounter!

 

Back to reading: I’ll mention one more book here today. I’d ordered two copies of it, apparently, and then for the life of me could not remember why. The title, Faith, Hope and Carnage, seemed to threaten politics, but the content was actually a lengthy interview with an Australian musician whose work was entirely unknown to me, Nick Cave. (I know, I know—I’m totally out of it!) In an attempt to refresh my memory, I opened the book.

Not knowing what to expect, I am drawn in.

Even knowing nothing of songwriter-performer Cave’s work, I was taken by the way he talked about his creative process. Improvisation with collaborator Warren Ellis, he is quick to point out, is a lot more and something completely other than “winging it” (the interviewer’s suggestion).

 

No, that’s really not the case. We weren’t just two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a deep intuitive understanding between the two of us and, of course, twenty-five years of us working together. It’s an informed improvisation, a mindful improvisation. 

 

This theme of experienced, mindful improvisation comes up again. 

 

…[For] magical thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they’re doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

 

Cave’s seriousness about his music came clearly through his articulate statements, and without knowing anything of his music I was fascinated, but that wasn’t all. In the interview, he also talks a lot about God, about faith and doubt.

 

…[O]ne way I try [to find deliverance from suffering] is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. … I guess what I am saying is—we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.

 

I thought of a friend of mine and a book she and her late husband worked on for years. She will recognize their work’s conclusions in Cave’s words, I know. 

 

And still there was more. This famous person completely outside my ken had, it seems, lost two of his four sons to death, losses that greatly informed both his music and his religious beliefs, and he has given a lot of consideration to grief and how it changes us—one of the major themes of my own life for the past three years, as you know. He speaks of the physicality of grief as “a kind of annihilation of the self—an interior screaming.” But he also speculates that “perhaps God is the trauma itself,” words that need a little more explanation: 

 

That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things.

 

He speaks of grief as “transformative,” in which we may be “essentially altered or remade.” Another friend will perhaps be reminded by these words of our conversation on Sunday evening.

 

More of the book remains for me to read than what I have read so far, but I will definitely continue with it, as the themes resonate perfectly with this month of milestone days in my life—my husband’s hospitalizations, surgeries, his birthday, our last days together, and his death. 

 

Perhaps searing memories and my current reading of creativity and God and faith and grief in words from a musician who has had no part whatsoever in my listening life will not strike any of you as the joy my carefully worded intention sought to manifest, but it is what has come, and I am welcoming it. Taking it in. Seeing where it will take me in my improvised life during this last week of February as temperatures rise into the 30s, bringing rain to erode our mountains of plowed-up snow.

How long will this mountain last?

Where will the next weeks take me?

Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Long Winter Nights

Little light, except as reflected off snow, and almost no color -- color comes further down.

 

We are past the winter solstice, so each night is shorter than the night before, but somehow in January it doesn’t feel that way to me. Daylight skies are grey, and cloud cover continuing through the night hides moon and stars, making darkness deeper, colder. Theoretically and no doubt actually, cloud cover would make night warmer if there were warmth to hold in, but that if is a big one. And daylight is not exactly a relief, either, when it means having to bundle up and go out in the cold, one of the few minuses of having a dog in winter. Or maybe it’s a plus, that having to wade through knee-deep snow and breathe cold, clean air, but, like the gradually shortening nights, it’s often hard to feel the positive aspect. 

"Are you putting on your coat?"

Beginning with the end of December and continuing through March come also for me difficult anniversaries. The Artist and I had to say goodbye to a dog we had all too briefly, and only weeks later came the Artist’s first trip to the local ER (we were in Arizona at the time), quickly followed by a jolting ambulance trip to Phoenix and, finally, major surgery. At first, that January two years ago, after successful surgery we thought everything was taken care of and were happily, if briefly (as it turned out), planning the rest of our life together. Respite from worry was short-lived. More trips to the ER, more surgery – and ultimately, the end of our earthly adventures together, March 2, 2022.

 

Scenes from those emotionally intense five to six weeks of my life are burned into memory, and while I can set them aside during the long, sunny, birdsong-filled days of spring and early summer and the busy, colorful days of late summer and fall, the dead of winter brings them all to the fore again. It isn’t that I reach intentionally for the most difficult remembrances. Hardly! When I wake with those scenes crowding in on me, I try to put myself back to sleep with happier memories, such as September walks in the grassy, hollyhock-lined alleys of Grand Marais, our dreamy travel through France another September, or the most ordinary summer Sunday spent mowing grass and moving cars and boats around the yard here at home. All those scenes and more I would welcome in dreams!

 

Meanwhile, in my waking hours, I take refuge in books.

 

Over the years, the Artist and I put together quite a little collection of books having to do with rivers and boats, and the one in which I sought solace during the season’s first massive storm was Henry Van Dyke’s Little Rivers, a collection of travel and flyfishing essays first copyrighted in 1895 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and first published in 1903. Van Dyke, an American cleric, writes of boyhood fishing and later travels with father, friends, wife, or by himself to various flowing waters in Canada and Europe, always with bamboo rod and “fly-book.”

 

His fishing was for trout and salmon or grayling. (Here I pause, because I have always thought grayling was a trout, not, as he describes it, some lesser, bottom-feeding fish, and now, looking into the matter, I see it is a salmon and considered very good eating.) But the most prized of all, for Van Dyke, is the ouananiche, “the famous land-locked salmon of Lake St. John” and other Canadian lakes. Don’t you love that name? Ouananiche!

 

Any fisherman would delight in Van Dyke’s description of waters and fishes and the stalking and hooking and landing – or sometimes losing – of piscatorial prizes. (Piscatorial: that’s the kind of old-fashioned language of this book from over a century ago.) For my own pleasure, I am equally pleased by his knowledge of wildflowers and birds and noting which appear in each season along the rivers he walks and fishes.

 

Even that is not all, however, as the book is a collection of memories, and as the author looks back on his happiest vacations his thoughts are colored by what Susan Cain calls bittersweetness, sometimes even recalled from the happy times themselves.

 

And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever. 

 

Our Paradise, the Artist’s and mine, encompassed happy hours in a variety of places: A little trout stream in southwest Michigan prosaically known as the Mentha Drain; another unbeautifully named river, the Sucker, in the Upper Peninsula, its mouth meandering an always-changing watery path through woods and wetlands to Lake Superior; Leelanau County’s lovely Crystal River (despite the leeches that clung to us after we waded out); and our own little hidden-away, no-name creek, keeping its secrets until we followed it upstream after a storm to a miniature waterfall. There were the Allier and the Alagnon in France’s Auvergne region, rivers whose names we had never heard until our wandering brought us to their banks. And of course, principally – because of the many times we explored various stretches, never encountering another vessel or explorer – Van Buren County’s Paw Paw River, the “Little River” that gave that name (Little River Cafe) to a restaurant friends of ours had for a while in the town of Paw Paw.

 

During this lifetime, none of us ever “stays” in Paradise, but if we happen upon it now and then, we can count ourselves fortunate, and those are the memory scenes that I court during these long, dark, cold winter nights. Also, dark eventually gives way to daylight, if not always sunshine, and I have a ever-eager companion in the outdoor cold.

But my dog, while great, isn’t news, and I do have some very good news this week. On Tuesday, (one of my two by-chance-or-appointment days -- BCOA -- along with Monday), I came to the bookstore in hopes of a UPS delivery, and sure enough – my order of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters came! You can just imagine how happy that made me, and I know it will make many of my customers happy, too. In fact, one local woman walked in just after I had photographed the box of books and said immediately, “I want one!” And we’re off!

The books are here!

First one out the door!