Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Thanksgiving and the Past-Soaked Earth of Home

Home, as the old words say, is where the heart is. But where, then, is the heart?

-  Willie Morris, “Coming On Back”

 

Two unrelated events came together one morning to set my thoughts in motion on the subject of home. First was the serendipitous reading (serendipitous because the book arrived unexpectedly in a box from a friend bringing books to my shop for trade credit) of Willie Morris’s Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home. Morris’s home was Yazoo, Mississippi. In the first essay, “Coming On Back,” he recounts a conversation shared with him by a fellow Ole Miss graduate who realized, in a brief conversation with a Harvard man, that “not all Americans are from somewhere.” Not all Americans, that is, locate their personal identity in their old high school or a cemetery that holds several generations of their ancestors. Willie Morris was definitely from Mississippi, as Albert Murray was just as definitely from Alabama. 

I have a harder time answering the question, “Where are you from?” My father was born in Columbus, Ohio, and stayed long enough to earn a degree in civil engineering at Ohio State University before going off to World War II, while my mother, born in Los Angeles, was given a strangely peripatetic childhood that ranged as far east as Connecticut before her mother and stepfather finally settled down on the semirural edge of Springfield, Ohio. My parents met after the war, there in Ohio, but their first home was in South Dakota, where I was born but lived less than three years, after which I grew up in Illinois, impatient to leave the prairie of my childhood and adolescence for something more exciting -- when very young, the setting sun beyond the farm fields and a cowgirl life; later, breaking into theatre in New York. Ah, the dreams of childhood and youth!

The first place that ever felt as if it could be a permanent home for me was Kalamazoo, Michigan. Although my family had no history in Kalamazoo, I made in that town what felt like a full life. But then, with the intention of being gone only two years -- long enough to earn a master’s degree and return qualified for a better job at Western Michigan University -- I left, and somehow, once launched into graduate school I absorbed from those around me (faculty and fellow graduate students) the expectation that I would go on for a Ph.D., with the result that, while visiting many times since that open-ended leaving, I have never since lived in Kalamazoo. 

 

Kalamazoo, for years, was home. Then it wasn’t. 

 

Years ago, when the Artist and I were still living in Leland, I wrote to a friend that we would probably have the same post office box there for the rest of our lives, but when we moved a few miles north to live in the country and established our business presences in Northport, it only made sense to change our mailing address to Northport, too. “How long have you lived in Northport?” people sometimes ask. I have never lived in Northport. I live in Leelanau Township, surrounded by hills and woods and orchards. I do, however, spend day after day in my bookshop in Northport, and after so many years the shop is my second home.

Original Dog Ears, the little shed on Waukazoo Street

Back on Waukazoo Street in a larger, warmer space

But that brings me back to the original question. Where is the heart at home? 

 

“Behold, thou poor Soul in thy Bath of Thorns, where is thy Home? Art thou at home in this World?”

-  Jacob Boehme, quoted by Ben Ehrenreich in Desert Notebooks

 

My truth is that I was at home with the Artist, wherever we were, and when we were apart I was homesick. 

 

We were at home in Room 11 of the Superior Hotel, a corner room across from the hotel’s two bathrooms (one with a shower whose trickling stream took forever to get hot or even warmish), a room from which we could look down on the main commercial street of Grand Marais and see townspeople coming and going to the bank, to the hardware store, to the post office. 

We were at home in our rented cabin in Cochise County, Arizona, where the front door looked out on the two-lane highway below and the ghost town straggled from one end to the other with very little traffic other than wandering cows and the occasional roadrunner, back door looking north up the Philadelphia Wash to the southern of the two peaks of the Dos Cabezas that gave their name to the little range that always seemed, to me, like the tail of the giant Chiricahua lizard down the road. That cabin was so small that the Artist used to tell people we were “living in each other’s pockets” during our months there.

It was easier even than that. We were at home in whatever car or van we might happen to be driving, whether on a simple “county cruise” or up into Canada or down to the Gulf Coast or up along the Mississippi River or west to Arizona, with whatever dog we had at the time as our mascot, sharing cups of gas station coffee along the miles. And we were at home in each motel room along the way, always looking around at the antiseptic walls with their sterile furniture store artwork and discussing the ways we would rearrange and furnish and decorate and cozy up the room if we had to live there for some undetermined length of time and call it home. Because we could have. Together, we could have.

And so the farmhouse, our dream come true, with all its quirks and imperfections, all its “issues” and many unmet needs, because (though not the home of our ancestors) it held our life together for two decades, continues now to be my home, one I never want to leave. Yet at the same time I am often homesick there because of his absence. Our years together were a long conversation to which the two of brought our loftiest dreams, our most childish silliness, our pettiest of irritations and most joyous exclamations and occasionally (more rarely, I’m happy to say) our deepest fears. The abrupt ending of that conversation has brought in its wake a reverberating stillness to the rooms I now inhabit without him. 

In one of the many books I read about grief there was a sentence that resonated so fully with me that it seemed to say everything in one line, but since I’m not sure where the sentence occurred I’ll have to paraphrase it, and I apologize in advance for delivering it to you without the perfection of the original. I can only personalize it in hopes that that will restore some of the power: The Artist and I shared a private language, and I am now its only living speaker.

 

Anyone in a long relationship understands what this means. You have certain words that encapsulate an entire shared thought exploration, and you only have to utter one of those words aloud to share all over again everything you once said to each other on the subject. Or someone else in your presence voices another word or mentions a name, and your eyes flick to each other’s faces in silent recognition. You read each other’s thoughts. You care about the most mundane details of one another’s childhoods. “Tell me again….” The person you know most deeply is, for all that, always and forever an endless mystery to explore. So when that language and memory partner is gone, no one understands the significance of those words or shares the memory a name evokes or has the slightest interest in what snacks your family shared on Sunday evenings. 

In The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, the author tells of a culture in which the death of an individual is expressed by saying “his library burned.” Like a library, a human being is – while alive and barring the ravages of dementia – a repository of memories. One of my friends, someone who also lost the love of his life (and we agree that “we are the lucky ones” to have had those loves), says he finds meaning now in being “her chief rememberer.” While the Artist is remembered and mourned by many, not only me, my own personal, nonphysical, admittedly ephemeral library, holding memories of our life together and all that he told me of his other lives before we met – that library is, as the pilot told the little prince of his rose, “unique au monde.” 

 

Many of our days in and around the farmhouse were pedestrian and repetitious. Life is like that. There was grass to be mowed, trailers to be lined up onto hitches, tarps to be tied down, all kinds of things to be moved in and out of barns. “I need a hand here,” the Artist would say, and I would drop whatever I might have been doing to lend my hand to his task, and I remember one particular day when I was called to give directions while he backed up a vehicle to a trailer, and it burst upon me that this was my life and that it was just fine! Every square foot of land around my farmhouse, like every mile of county road, is saturated with memories of conversation and shared seeing and working, so if I could have one more day with him, it wouldn’t have to be in Paris or New York or discovering together the Painted Desert. It could be any ordinary day, beginning with “Is there any coffee?” There always was. Why did he ask? But now, I miss that old question.

 

At Thanksgiving dinner, everyone around the table was asked to say something for which they were thankful. So much! So, so much! But I had to say, meaning no slight to those hosting the beautiful dinner or my family and friends miles away, I am thankful for my memories. Grateful for the life I had – and the memories that keep those years alive for me now.

 

Often, when he wanted to hold hands, he would say, “Give me your paw.” And that was everything.

But I see that I completely lost sight of my beginning as I made my way once again down memory lane! The second event that prompted my musings on home was the departure from this life of our old friend William Himebaugh. Willie and Sandy were another couple who made homes together far from their separate beginnings, wherever they happened to be -- home on the coast of Florida or the mountains of Panama or some little island or even just in a boat on the ocean. So Sandra, this post is especially for you, in memory of the love of your life. That’s really what I started out to say, before I got sidetracked by my own loss and my own reasons to be thankful.

Michael and Willie and David -- for many years!

Sharing a Few of My Secrets

Lake Michigan from Jelinek Road

 

I see things that aren’t there.

 

The probability that you would spot a great blue heron wading at the corner of M-22 and Jelinek Road is low -- not impossible but unlikely. I’ve only seen a heron once at that corner, hunting in an ephemeral pool after a heavy rain, stalking – what? Surely not fish? What year was that? No matter. Whenever I make that turn, I look for the heron and see him in memory.

 

Not much farther up Jelinek Road I see the buck that leapt in front of our van one evening at dusk, missing the windshield by a hair, only missing at all because the Artist had seen it in time to be able to brake. We could not have been closer to the animal unless we’d collided. That spot in the road holds that incident for me.

 

Still on the same long, curving climb is where we pulled over to the side of the road and sat quietly for an hour or more, hoping to see some noteworthy celestial event, the nature of which I have forgotten. Was it a comet? Whatever it was, we never did see it, our view open to the west but not to the north. Still, it was restful and pleasant to be sitting out there by the side of the road on a summer evening, doing absolutely nothing but looking at the sky and talking to each other. And then we did see something: the International Space Station passed overhead! Neither of us had ever seen it before, and I have not seen it since, but I see again in imagination what I saw with the Artist that night in the evening sky.

 

All of these sights – heron, buck, ISS – I see over and over, although they are not there for anyone else to see who travels that road. And I have not even covered a mile on a single road with these examples, so imagine the many invisible (to you) sights I see along every Leelanau County road….

 

 

My life is a setup for coincidence. 

 

When my sisters and I drove down to Good Harbor a week ago Sunday, I pointed out another memory corner of M-22, this one between Leland and Glen Arbor. There in the woods used to be an unusual tourist attraction. It wasn’t exactly stations of the cross, as I recall it, but giant billboard-like paintings from the life of Jesus that one encountered along a winding path. I called them ‘dioramas’ when describing them, but they weren’t really that: as I say, more like billboards. But what was the place called? Not that my sisters cared, but I wanted to remember. One would occasionally come across an old postcard showing one of the scenes….

 

Well, the very next day I was going through a milk crate filled with booklets and ephemera and came across what I thought would be a menu (it was that size) from the Leland Lodge. It wasn’t a menu but did advertise the Lodge as available for large group dinners. What caught my eye, though, was a list of tourist sights near Leland. The dunes were on the list, of course, but so was -- Lund’s Scenic Garden! That was it! 

 

Not everyone is surrounded on a daily basis by old books and papers, which is why I say my life is a setup to invite coincidences.

 

 

Sometimes I DO dog-ear a book!

 

Rarely do I turn down the corner of a page … or underline sentences … or write notes in the margins. But sometimes I do all of those things to a book, though I never, ever use highlighters on book pages.

 

In almost every case, the book I mark up has to be a paperback, it has to be used, and if I’m dog-earing and underlining and writing notes in the margin and sometimes making my own index (if one isn’t provided) or adding to an existing index (if one exists) – if I’m doing all those things, it’s because I’m working with the book, treating it as an assignment I’ve given myself, wanting to make sure I don’t miss important ideas and information.

 

One book I treated that way last month was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which took me a long time to get through, because it was so upsetting (although I highly recommend it) that I couldn’t read all that much at a time. This month, at the shop and between customers, the book I am treating with apparent disrespect but, really, with my highest respect (isn’t it respect when one engages fully with someone’s words?) is Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fortunately, Antifragile is not a world-historical horror show but a fascinating and original way of looking at the world in general and human life in particular. Taleb’s runaway bestseller, the book that put him on the map, was The Black Swan, which I have not yet read, and since all his books grow from one central idea and since he has his own somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary that carries through all the books, I am picking up his language piecemeal as I go.…

 

I am an introvert at heart.

 

This is a secret shared by many booksellers and librarians. We grew up with books as friends and had adventures in stories, and thus we are not the greatest of “party animals.” We were often shy as children and have had to work to overcome our shyness. My first summer selling books (yes, in Northport), I began each day with butterflies in my stomach, anticipating the ordeal of facing and talking to strangers! It probably took five years before I realized how shy many other people are. That was a growing-up lesson.

 

When someone comes into my bookstore for the first time (as is true whenever anyone enters a bar or restaurant or retail establishment for the first time), that person is entering “my turf” and trusting that the atmosphere will be welcoming, so it is (my tardy realization here) part of my role to put people at ease, to assuage their shyness rather than to indulge my own. Whether they want to browse without interference or have questions or want suggestions is up to them, and I try to be aware of those differences. There is no single way to treat all potential customers.

 

 

Sometimes I read on the job.

 

For one thing, reading books is part of my job, my sister reassured me years ago, but it’s also a way that my introvert self can stay out of the way of people who need to make their own discoveries and have their own experiences in my bookstore. I do look up and greet everyone who comes in and often ask if they want a particular subject area. If someone is looking lost, I’ll ask if that person has a question. But I don’t follow people around pushing books at them. Who comes into a bookstore for that?

 

 

I make things up as I go along.

 

Bookstore hours are something I’ve tried to keep consistent throughout each season. Last year Sunday was always a day off, Monday a BCOA (by chance or appointment) day. This year those days are sometimes reversed, and Tuesdays in July are different from Tuesdays in June and August, because the FOLTL Summer Writers Series takes place on Tuesday evenings at the Willowbrook Mill, and since I am on hand to sell books at those events, my Tuesday bookstore hours in July are only 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every year I make up my schedule season by season, or even month by month.

Tonight's featured author and book, 7 p.m.

It should be no surprise that I make up prices on my used books. For the more expensive items, I try to stay in the general ballpark of the national market; other times, with inexpensive books, or when I need room, there are bargains to be had! Right now, for instance, I have my rolling cart full of $3, mostly hardcover books, some of them minor classics, such as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelius Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. How many times did I read that book when I was young?

 

 

I love my work!

 

For years I worked at jobs that made me very unhappy. My parents had insisted I take a typing class in high school so I would have “something to fall back on,” and I fell back repeatedly, year after year, going to school for a while and then dropping out to go back to fulltime work I found terribly uncongenial. We natural introverts are, I think, often unhappy when we have bosses, but we don’t like bossing other people, either, which makes having my own one-woman bookstore the perfect work world for me.

 

But I love going home, too. 

 

Much as I love my bookstore, any season of the year I love going home at the end of the day, too. Home to books and dog, home to gardens outdoors and cozy reading chair in the house, home to homey projects, such as making jam or chutney or applesauce, or more professional projects, such as editing work.

 

I still consider myself a lucky woman. 

 

Nothing, of course, is the same or ever will be again since the Artist died in spring of 2022, but I often repeat to my dog words the Artist spoke aloud so many times:

 

“We live in a beautiful place!”

 

“It’s a beautiful day – and we’re alive!”

 

Also, I am rich beyond belief in memories.

 

Original Dog Ears Books on Waukazoo St.

At Home in Michigan, Nonfiction, and Arizona

Spectacular forsythia this year

On Saturday, we had a soft rain in the Leelanau, mostly just sprinkles. Monday morning, after a dog walk in real rain (my grandmother used to say, “I’m not sugar; I won’t melt”), I planted collard and arugula seeds in the garden, having gotten peas and spinach in two days earlier, and the timing worked out well, because half an hour later a downpour commenced. Meanwhile, in the house, lettuce has come up in Jiffy pots (the pots are in trays), and the first tiny, brave tomato seedlings have appeared. My only “greenhouse” is a window, so we’ll see how those things do.

Nothing to see yet

Small, hopeful signs here

Outdoors, spring is popping, and you can follow this link to see a blossoming black cherry, along with the lovely spring ephemerals blooming in the woods last Sunday morning. I want to add “finally,” but the truth is that we are way ahead of the normal spring season. The little plum tree in my yard will be blossoming any minute now. 

Plum blossoms coming soon

It’s funny, but no matter how impatient I am for spring to get underway, when it all does start to happen I am almost sorry, afraid it will be too soon over! There is a certain moment, the soft, fresh, pointillist impressionism of a few brief days when the first leaves are appearing – a moment when I want to hit a pause button and just sit quietly and gaze for hours, but instead the projectionist speeds up the film and rushes into summer. For a moment, though, the soft green is almost like a haze….

Do you see what I see?

 

Here's another question for you: When you see a section in a bookstore labeled “Essays,” do you move toward it or away? 

I have more people than I can count in recent years who ask me if I have a “Nonfiction” section, and I’m always baffled by the question. I have many nonfiction sections! History, travel, philosophy, religion, economics, biography, memoir, sports, hunting & fishing, health, business, cookbooks, natural science, physical science, building, visual arts, performing arts, etc. None of that is fiction; therefore, it is all nonfiction. So when asked the question, I usually ask a question of my own in return, trying to determine what subject area the person hopes to find. 

 

But now, I think maybe they might be looking for what is nowadays called “creative nonfiction,” books I would generally consider kind of memoir essays. I think of them as memoir because they are usually personal stories from someone’s life, but they can and do overlap into travel and/or nature, sometimes psychology, religion, regional Americana, or the arts. If you hear or see the word essays, though, does it put you off? Answer honestly! Does it remind you of your school days and having to write about “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”? or (worse yet) a compare-and-contrast piece on two writers, neither of whom set your soul on fire?

My obsession: hawthorn!

Me, I love essays. I love the form. Tony Judt, Adam Gopnik, nonfiction by our own Leelanau writers Jim Harrison, Anne-Marie Oomen, and Kathleen Stocking – essays range far and wide. They can be humorous or serious but are generally explorations, the writer trying out thoughts and connections. The French verb ‘essayer’ means just that: to try, to attempt, to examine. I think of them as explorations above all, whether of place or thought.

 

A sermon is a sort of essay, usually built on a bit of scripture, and any essay, like a sermon, usually begins with some small kernel. It can be a quotation, a word, something glimpsed or overheard, a nugget of wonder. Then from that initial seed, the writer grows a world, a forest of trees and ferns and flowers, all spun from that small, simple beginning, and in the most satisfying of essays (as is true only in baseball among team sports), we end by coming home, the writer having taken us far away and then having closed a circle. Poet Fleda Brown is a genius at this: thinking and writing about essays led me to pick up again her collection titled Mortality with Friends. An earlier collection, Driving with Dvorak, is another that wins my highest recommendation. 

 

But the book I want to hold out to you today is Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, by Renata Golden. When an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) was offered to me by Columbus State University Press, and I realized that the author had lived and written from, in part, the Chiricahua Mountains of Cochise County, Arizona, I could hardly wait for the book to arrive in my mail. 

 

I climb to the top of the mounds behind the house in Sulphur Canyon where I once lived, more than a decade ago, on and off for three years. … When I return, I hear the mountains speaking to me in a tone I can’t ignore, a voice humming with suggestion.

 

-      Renata Golden, Mountain Time

 

Full disclosure (for those arriving at this post without having followed the blog for years): My husband (the Artist) and I lived several winters in a rental cabin in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, just down the road from the Chiricahua National Monument. Renata Golden lived on the other side of the Chiricahuas, the New Mexico side. I found Sulphur Canyon on my Arizona atlas. It is in the San Simon Valley, east of the Chiricahua range, while our side of the mountains (west) was the Sulphur Springs Valley, but Sulphur Valley and Sulphur Springs Valley, though separated by mountains, are both Cochise County, and it’s all Apacheria, so there was no way I would be able to resist this book. And look: right on the cover is the word ESSAYS in a red-outlined rectangle.

 

How long must we survive in a place before we can say we belong there? How much time passes after we leave a land before it forgets us?

 

Golden begins her examinations of mountain time by remembering Irish great-grandparents she never knew, a generation that managed to survive the Great Famine but were not allowed to own land in County Kerry, so the next generation, Renata’s grandparents, left Ireland and came to Chicago to make a new life in urban America. The author explores in detail the 19^th-century history of the Chiricahua Apaches, an all-too-typical American tale of broken promises and eviction, the latter called “relocation” when applied to Native Americans. (No land in Cochise County has ever been returned to the Apaches, although a tiny reservation in New Mexico was designated “Apache Homelands” in 2011.) She also gives the history of her parents’ purchase of land in New Mexico that they fondly imagined would be their retirement home, a home that was never built, the land so worthless her parents were unable even to sell it.

 

The book, however, is about more than mountains and the people who live and have lived in them. There is an essay on rodents, one on snakes, one on prairie dogs, and (I’m not listing them all) a personal story of panic in a wild cave, where the writer’s reluctance to ask for help is at odds with her fear.

 

The passage of time like the passage of water reforms what was once undeniably solid. The river that carved this cave exploited the vulnerability of its limestone walls. The empty places are oblivious to the rock’s former resistance; the water leaves behind only the memory of what has been diminished.

 

Certain lines brought tears to my eyes – not for the packrat or the rattlesnakes or even the cute little prairie dogs, but for what Golden writes about aging and loss and home. Here is an entry from her “Chiricahua Glossary” –

 

Home. Where the heart is. Where you hang your hat. Where your family lives. Your natal place. A place you leave. A place I’m still looking for.

 

My heart is here in Leelanau County, Michigan, but it was also in Cochise County, Arizona, and part of it remains there. I have hung my hats and caps in both places. My family lives elsewhere, though no one related to me lives any longer in South Dakota, where I was born. South Dakota, Illinois, Arizona were all places I left. Must home be singular? 

Mi cabeza

I have to admit that I missed the high desert ghost town of Dos Cabezas this past winter and early spring: morning hikes with a younger neighbor and our dogs, get-togethers with other dear neighbors (people look out for each other in Dos Cabezas, as they do in Northport), the mountains and birds out my back door, the vast spaces, and Chiricahua only a short drive down the road. I left the ashes of two beloved dogs buried in the wash behind the cabin, and the cabin – so small and so cozy with all our books and other treasures collected over the years – is the last place the Artist and I were at home together on this earth.

Cabin seen from wash in winter

But when our grandson asked if I could imagine myself ever living fulltime in Arizona, I had to answer in the negative. Give up my Michigan home? How could I? And now that trees are beginning to leaf out and blossom, as I drive the familiar roads of my township I slow down to stop at favorite spots and say aloud but with quiet astonishment, “I love it! I love it!” 

The wild nearby

Indoor refuge

I don’t need to look for home. I’m here. Still, that other place felt like home, too. The land forgetting us? Mountains are indifferent to our presence, as are lakes and rivers: the love for them is in us. 

Do we deserve them? I wonder.