The Summer Blur Is Underway

(Reminder to self and others: Make time to write letters.)

Calendar and community are full to overflowing.

When summer hits, it’s hard to keep up. Everything—grass, gardens, weeds—is growing; everyone is shopping and visiting; and not a single day on the calendar is empty of some sort of meeting or concert or lecture or art opening. There are more temptations and obligations than there is time to fit them all in, but we do our best. 

This Friday--today!--is the Friends of the Library book sale in Northport, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. It's also the weekly farmers market, and when I was at the market I saw that people had already staked out territory, with folding chairs and tablecloths, for tonight's Music in the Park. 

On Saturday, the 4th of July, tomorrow, there will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence in front of the post office at 10 a.m. The Cancer Run for Funds race also begins at 10 a.m. on the 4th. And of course, in the evening there will be fireworks, best in the county. 

Northport Flood, 2026

The big news this past week in our village, though, was a flood of historic proportions on Monday. It made the news far from northern Michigan, with distant friends calling and texting to see if we were all right. We’re fine. No loss of life, and as far as I know no injuries, but lots of road damage and some structural damage to buildings. Second Street was a river, and the edge of the parking lot at the visitors center was the top of a waterfall, as a cascade descended from there to the overflowing creek. More rain pounded down on Wednesday, but not as much, for which all were grateful.

A few of the delicious dessert offerings! Can you say "sugar buzz"?

Then there was a lovely gathering at the Willowbrook on Tuesday evening, hosted by Mimi and Joel Heberlein, to celebrate the life and honor the memory of the late David Chrobak. David’s specialties were flowers and delicious, beautifully decorated cakes, so along with shared stories we enjoyed all manner of sweet desserts and then tossed flowers wild and tame into the creek to be carried down to Grand Traverse Bay in his memory. The Fabulous Fish Queens were on hand in their regalia. David Chrobak loved the Fish Queens. When asked if he had invented them, he is reported to have said, "No, but I made them famous."

Note one of my favorite wildflowers top left. Can you name it?

The FABULOUS FISH QUEENS!

The preceding Saturday (unfortunately, on the same evening as a village choir concert at the auditorium), the Northport Arts Association hosted an open mike night (now called open mic, but I am old-fashioned) for writers, poets, and story-tellers. Featured guest was Traverse City author Jerry Dennis, whose readings moved me to tears, but all participants were excellent. 

I was glad I went that night and also on Tuesday night to the Willowbrook and am sorry I can’t get to everything, but my energy runs out faster than it used to, along with my young dog’s patience. People are getting used to hearing me say, “I have to get home to my dog."

Farm news is news for everyone. 

It’s been 12 years (is that possible?) since I first wrote a blog post about where I get my news. Yes, way back in 2014. I did an update in 2021 and am coming back to add what has become my #1 source of information on current events, because more than anything else I now rely on a weekly midwestern newspaper called the Farmers’ Advance to keep up-to-date. Published in Mansfield, Ohio, Farmers’ Advance (since 1898!) focuses on Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan but covers issues from local to global. It is way more than a report on soybean futures. 

Almost every policy decision our federal and state governments take affects farmers one way or another. The Farm Bill is only one example, but naturally that gets coverage, the July 1 headline on the topic reading “Senate farm bill omits E15 [biofuel], Proposition 12 [which would have imposed California standards on animal housing across the nation] and pesticide labeling.” Another article in this same issue bears the headline “Missiles, drones and rising prices: What Trump’s war in Iran has cost the US.” There’s more. Farm production costs, like fuel and grocery prices, are up and expected to hit record highs next year, according to the USDA. Fewer Americans are now receiving SNAP benefits (rolls down 10%), and administrative costs are moving to the state level. New immigration policies, it turns out, are lowering legal immigration faster than illegal entries—2-1/2 times faster in the first nine months of 2024, which makes it more difficult to find farm workers while reducing the number of workers paying into social security (non-citizens have to pay in, though they do not receive the system’s benefits), the generally declining workforce also leading to lower economic growth. These policies affect all of us: Farmers just see it more easily and faster than the rest of the nation. 

The July issue tells of fairs in Ohio, equine therapy for people with physical disabilities, what to do for monarch butterflies, and a rare goat-sheep hybrid born in Olmstead Falls. Most issues have at least one story on organic methods. There are warnings of invasive plant species and unwelcome animal pests. (July 1 issue shines a light on invasive elm zigzag sawfly, not nearly as terrifying as the horrible screwworm found in Texas recently!) There is a Bible trivia quiz in every issue and, often, memories of family jam-making sessions. 

One ongoing saga since I started subscribing is data center developments in rural communities. Well, naturally, that’s where “empty” land can be found, but rural areas usually constitute also what might be called news deserts, something like the food deserts found in poor urban neighborhoods. Even in cities, local newspapers have been in steep decline, but in rural areas if there is one newspaper in a county, it may have only one reporter. Add to this the rash of nondisclosure agreements insisted upon by developers and the middlemen who scout locations for them, and you can see how difficult it is for local residents to have the information they need to govern their rural communities. The July 1 issue of Farmers’ Advance directly addresses the question of middlemen, while previous recent issues have looked at acreage lost, volume of necessary water inputs, etc. 

There’s no way I can get everyone in Michigan to read this newspaper every week, but I did the next-best thing and paid for a second subscription to go to our local township library. As I read my own copy, I generally pass it along to one friend or another. 

Leelanau Township Library

What I have been reading lately

A couple of new memoirs went home with me recently, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery and the Currents That Carry You Home, by Kimberly Warner, and What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis, by Theodore Richards. The Warner book has a northern Michigan connection, and Richards promised a bit of philosophy. I found both engrossing enough that I rather raced through them. 

John M. Barry’s history of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is impossible to race through, and there are a lot of interruptions, as I’m reading it at the shop, but I have made my way into Chapter 5 and don’t intend to stop. Quite extraordinary, how the issues of Englishmen in the 17th century feel so relevant in our United States of the 21st century! King Charles I, who succeeded King James, warned Parliament in his opening address to them that if they failed to give him

“What the state at this time needs, I must, in discharge of my conscience, use those other means which God hath put into my hands…. Take not this as a threatening, for I scorn to threaten any but my equals.”

Barry notes that Parliament “bristled” at the king’s words, telling them they were not his equals (as if they didn't know that!), and they reminded him of the “many necessary liberties and Privileges” that belonged to the king’s subjects, “by the common laws and acts of Parliament.”

Freedom of conscience—and, by extension, speech—was one those liberties exercised by the brave and repeatedly punished by the king. Also habeas corpus and due process. Plus ça change…. Oh, my, what drama Chapter 5 holds! Is the king above the law or the law above the king? Can the king imprison his subjects, seize their private property, even have them executed on a whim? This is the issue at stake. Chapter 5 alone is worth the price of the book, and if I could quote the entire chapter here, I would. 

As for fiction, I have ventured a few pages into an old novel but not far enough to tell much about it yet except that the pace and setting please me. More on that next time.

What is blooming these days

Bee balm, bergamot—call it what you will. The species Monarda is one that both bees and butterflies appreciate, and I like it as much for that reason as for its deep colors. Pansies are annuals always worth having around to fill in between blooms of perennial species and for their own cheery faces. Snapdragons, now: I did not buy new snapdragons this year but took last year’s pots in onto the front porch, where they overwintered in freezing temperatures, without any water, and came back again this year. That is one hardy annual! 

Second summer for these snapdragons

Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, has long been one of my favorites. I like the way it takes care of itself, the way it multiplies, and the way it lasts for days and days as a cut flower, its leaves possessing what I think of as architectural interest. And it’s blue. Blue like lobelia, blue like false indigo. Blue makes such a statement in a garden border, impossible not to notice.

Purple? Okay, that's in the blue range.

And everywhere, for the monarchs, milkweed!

On the home front

We three --

Besides gardens, the big news at home is that Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and yours truly have formed a new household. We are embarked on a new adventure, unforeseen a year ago, and it feels exciting and entirely natural at the same time. Tree Guy hit the ground running, as his first two evenings with me involved packing and schlepping heavy boxes of books. I told him my life isn't always this arduous: It's not every week I buy a three-carload private library, in the middle of a heat wave, with 4th of July coming right down the pike at us!

Happy 4th, everyone! Be safe, celebrate the holiday, count your blessings, smile at your neighbor, and signal all your turns, whether in an electric or gasoline-powered vehicle or on a bicycle. And watch out for deer and pedestrians on the roadways!

Time Also to Think

The image above (not a very good one) doesn't show this morning's sky. I referred to the moon over the barn on June 30 but was unable to upload my image then, so here it is on July 3. Sadly, I remain unable to upload the image from Fleda Brown’s TEA event at Dog Ears Books. The moon was on my phone, Fleda on the Artist’s camera. Technical challenges continue. 

But each night continues to give way to another day, and up at 4:30 a.m. on this day before the 4th of July, I picked up a book set aside a year ago or more, about halfway through, The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. One reason I set it aside was my inner editor’s constant carping: I wanted more smoothly flowing sentences, cleared of unnecessary obstructions, and I found repetitions annoying, jumbled chronology confusing. My other reason was more personal: Since first making the acquaintance of Henri Bergson’s work, I have loved him, and to read an account of the “controversy” during his lifetime, controversy fomented by interested philosophers, scientists, and journalists who pitted him against Einstein as if the two were boxers in a ring — well, it was just too, too sad. Bergson and Einstein had very different concerns,  therefore different thought objects, definitions, and arguments, and neither was vitally interested in the other’s chief concern. How does a downhill skier compete with a figure skater? Skiers will judge for one, skaters for the other, ¿claro?

Philosophy stimulates thought in ways different from the stimulation of fiction. My mornings this summer more often begin with novels, but life used to be very different. Back in graduate school days, all my mornings began with philosophical arguments. One night, I recall, I slept not at all, so furious was I with Bertrand Russell’s clumsy attack on Bergson, whom he had completely failed to understand. I spent that night spent writing furiously, arguing with one dead philosopher for his failure to comprehend another! 

During my first year of graduate work, in fact, the only way I could go to sleep at all most nights was to turn to the familiar novels of Jane Austen. I had all of them lined up at the head of my bed, so that when I reached the last page of one I could pick up the next, working my way to the end the line and then starting over at the beginning. Jane Austen was a comfort. Bertrand Russell was not. 

But mornings — ah, it is not such a bad thing to have one’s mind jolted awake by thought in the morning! And today it occurred to me long before sunrise that while certain philosophers have criticized what they disdainfully call “the god’s-eye view,” a perspective they say human beings often try to assume but can never realistically inhabit, the “subatomic view” is just as much outside human experience. Solid objects are not solid, the physicist tells us. Solidity does not exist! Accepting that there are gaps and spaces between atoms, what has this to do with life as we live it? With the “too, too solid” nature of our bodies and floors and the earth itself in terms of our experience (though we gardeners know healthy living soil to be full of earthworms and fungi and bacteria — anything but “rock solid”)? My question is, why is the subatomic view to be preferred? Why is it any more legitimate than the view from heaven? If one of those perspectives is suspect for being outside our experience, surely the other is, also.

Then, unbidden, an image of a doe and fawn comes to my mind. Not bothering their heads with philosophy, they stand motionless by the side of the road, the fawn obedient to its mother’s signals. Be still. Watch me. Listen. Follow me when I let you know it’s time. In some ways we share a world with deer, and in other ways we inhabit very different realms. Venn diagrams, our lives are, intersecting only at one edge, forming a delicate lentil of overlap. 

After a while the sky to the west takes on a rosy tinge, reflecting sunrise, and Sarah and I stroll out into the grass. She takes off like a shot toward the barn. Must have seen a rabbit. Thing is, she often doesn’t see the rabbits if they don’t move.

Dog, rabbits, deer. They are closer to my notice and understanding than gods and atomic particles, but even to pay attention to these other creatures means taking a break from the books. Not just “the books,” as in novels and philosophy, history, economics, and such, but “the books” in terms of the profit-and-loss thinking necessary to running a largely seasonal business during “high season.” 

And it occurred to me also this morning that running an essentially one-person business, as I have for 25 years now, is a lot like conducting a second marriage alongside and simultaneously with the first. There is the anticipation stage, preparation for the initial launch (engagement). Then one goes public (wedding), followed by the leap into a honeymoon, the nature of which can never be precisely foreseen, and further surprises of life together. If the business is successful, one year follows another, but none is ever just like the previous, as each brings new challenges to be met. Children? Well, as a bookseller, though my guest authors are adults, I have almost family feelings for the authors and books I choose to promote.

My husband, as friends and regular readers know, is an artist — “the Artist,” I have taken to calling him lately — and so he too has another “marriage” on the side. Art has been his life for over half a century, while I have been married to a bookstore for only a quarter-century. How does that work out for us? Are we jealous of each other’s other partners? In a word, no. There are occasions when one of us, in fact, gives priority to the other’s other partner over our own. At those times we are each other’s support system. At other times, I go my way with the books, the Artist goes his way with painting, and we come back together with new stories to share, and that’s good, too. 

All these marriages — that of two human beings, of one with a business, of the other with his art — also involve many more people. Some friendships blossom and fade, others persist and deepen, but every single one of them has a place in the rich marriage history. 

These are some of my thoughts this morning, before sunrise, when I have time to think, to let my mind roam.

Happy 4th of July, everyone! And don’t forget, our TEA guest (Thursday Evening Author) this week, on July 5, is Kim Schneider. That’s at 7 p.m. on Waukazoo Street, so join us if you can — and bring your visiting relatives! They’ll pick up all kinds of ideas for how to entertain themselves when they visit you.

Photo of long-ago photo. Who remembers that place and time?