The Best Things in Life -- and --

Redbud on the creek, Northport

Northern Michigan is in bloom!

Let’s start with beauty, because there is no such thing as too much beauty. Leelanau County has been bursting with blossoms. Cherries first, then apple blossoms, now lilacs. Not only orchards, though. There are lots of flowering plants in the villages, too. 

Chokecherry and viburnum, Northport

Closer look at viburnum called 'Chenault' (somewhat past peak)

These blooming trees in Leland stopped me, too.

At home, wild violets gave me enough for two batches of violet jelly (lots more violets, but how much violet jelly do I need?) and made a stunning setting for photographing my dog when Sunny Juliet plunked down in another little sea of deep purple. And while there aren’t many redbud trees this far north, those few do their part, even the spindly little volunteer behind the old henhouse at my place.

Wild Violet Jelly

Redbud flower closeup

It’s worth looking close to the ground, as well, for beauty you would not be able to take in from a speeding car.

Not much to look at?

Look closer!

And gardens! This is the time of year I live for! I think of it as my real life, with before and after mostly prologue and epilogue. 

Lobelia! Need I say more?

Black petunias! Bacopa! Splendid iris from the late Al Bona!

That got me to thinking the other evening about seasons and how, for me, here in Northern Michigan, the four seasons as generally divided don’t make sense. Spring isn’t really March-April-May, but (in my opinion, in my life) April-May-June, with summer July-August-September, and so on. December is more late fall than early winter, and winter usually hangs on through most of March. What do you think about that?

My reading these days--

As is so often the case, my attention hops like a flea (or buzzes like a bee?) from one book to another. Having trouble with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (I could not seem to hear the characters’ voices in my head), I picked up a less demanding book, Dark Light, nonfiction about the dawn of electric light and all the promises and fears any revolutionary new technology spawns, but have yet to finish it, because morning reading on the porch for several days was Remember, by Lisa Genova, neurologist and author of the novel Still Alice, in which the main character develops signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. Not being able to recall a name, Genova assures readers in her new nonfiction book, is not a sign of dementia. It happens to 20-year-olds as well as 80-year-olds. Older people simply worry about it more. 

Remember is an easy read and a quick one. Whatever your age, and whether or not you worry about your memory, it’s worth learning what helps us remember, what gets in the way, and what we can do to keep memory as sharp as possible as we get older. Pay attention, the author tells us at the beginning. (“Stop, look, and listen,” I think to myself, remembering the lesson about crossing streets that I was made to repeat over and over when young.) You can’t remember that to which you have not paid attention. I particularly like this piece of advice, since I decided years ago that paying attention is my #1 job in life. There are other pieces of advice. Sleep, exercise, a healthy diet—all the things that are in general good for our physical health are also good for preserving our memories. Alcohol is a culprit, better avoided. Caffeine in moderation and not too close to bedtime. 

***

Then there was One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, a hard book to read, not for the difficulty of the writing but for its subject matter. Still, the urgency of El Akkad’s book is such that I believe every American should read it now. Because, as he says --

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

- Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025)

That will be one day. What about today? Where do you and I stand today? 

Detail from book cover

I did, finally, finish As I Lay Dying. Faulkner will never be my favorite writer, but reading one of his famous works was a duty I could not neglect forever.

Big Life, Little Life; or, Macro, Micro

“Big Life, Little Life” is the title I gave to my most recently filled volume of journal writing. “Macro/Micro” are the terms used by Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse on their Saturday Coffee Klatch videos. For those of us fortunate enough to live far from war and famine, the contrast is often stark between happiness in our personal lives and the agony we feel over our country’s disintegration and its role in world suffering. My parents were spared this, I have thought so often. My (late) husband was spared this.

Recently I had my annual Medicare wellness visit. Am I depressed? No, I can’t say that I am depressed, because my personal life is fulfilling. When I wake up in the middle of the night, however, I often wake into rather than out of nightmare, as I remember what is happening in my country and in the world. Anxiety? Yes, on a daily basis. You are not alone, I was told. “Ninety-nine point nine percent” of her patients are anxious about the country and the world, she told me. And we are the lucky ones! We did not send our children off in the morning only to have a bomb drop on their school and kill them. We are not handcuffed and shackled and herded from one “detainment center” to another, treated worse than American pet owners would ever treat their dogs and cats. We are not starving. Why are we anxious, and what do we fear—if not the theft of our souls? And the death of freedom and the actual deaths of innocent human beings, our brothers and sisters?

What can we do? First, we must speak up. Then -- what practical, doable action have you found that you can take in your community?

Here and now, though...

...Tree Guy and I are putting a life together. This is quite an unexpected late-life gift, as we see it, and Sunny Juliet, who is part of it, may not “count her blessings” in quite the same way, but she loves being part of a pack and having a home and people to play with her and provide her with special treats. She is a lucky dog, and Tree Guy and I are a couple of lucky humans.

Color/Light and Home in Autumn

 

 All the color that you see is light, pure and simple. And when there is no light there is no color. We think we see colored things, and in a sense we do. However, it is more accurate to say that we see the colored light reflected, transmitted, or emitted by things. It is the light alone that we see, not the things themselves. Thus our only visual contact with things is through light, light that enters our eyes.

 

…The only colors that we see are light, and as we are seeing them this light is falling on the retinas of our eyes. Were it not for light and the light-sensitive retina, we would see no color at all. Remember: color is light.

 

-      Ralph Hattersley, Beginner’s Guide to Color Photography

 

 

The Artist and I used to have frequent conversations about color and light. In my graduate philosophy classes, I learned to categorize color as a ‘secondary quality,’ that is, a quality not inherent in objects but created from interaction between objects and our senses, or, as Hattersley writes, between the “things themselves” and the retinas of our eyes--which leaves out the brain’s interpretation, but you get the point. Quick review of primary and secondary qualities, ignoring subsequent challenges to the distinction, can be found here. 

 

There are certain seasons, certain sensual prompts, that take me back to the Home Place. Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. In autumn one is treated to an orgy of sights, sounds, and smells that can be wonderfully overwhelming. … The tired sameness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories. In those days of crispness I want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever. 

 

-      J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature

 

 

Of all the seasons, autumn for me is the most deeply drenched in memory, the most saturated (even in its colorful dress) with poignancy and longing for what will never be again. And yet, it is not only September getaways and “county cruises” with the Artist that haunt me, but long walks home from first grade, university classes, my son’s baby and toddler years, past dogs, and so on, split-second images from years ago flashing, superimposed, on achingly beautiful scenes of the present. And yet (again, “and yet”!), fall is so beautiful, whether colors are shining in the sun or gleaming in the rain—or, as last Sunday evening, sleeping in the dark while an old ivory crescent moon lit my way home—that despite the pangs, I find myself wanting to gather up every moment of it and hold it tight, as if it could be harvested to carry through the monochromatic weeks ahead.

 

More than anything else, the degree of satisfaction to be gained from a life rooted in home depends on the strength of one’s conviction that there is nothing better down the road. Betterment comes from within a person, not from within geography. But I believe that had I not left home for awhile [sic], I would not have been completely convinced of that. There would always have been a lingering question in my mind: Would life somewhere else have been more pleasant?

 

-      Gene Logsdon, You Can Go Home Again

 

I had an interesting conversation today with a younger woman whose dream of country living in Leelanau County did not bring her the contentment it brought me. Perhaps it was the commotion of extensive remodeling added to raising three children in it that broke the marriage’s back. Whatever it was, taking care of the farmhouse and acreage on her own proved much more work than she wanted, and she is happier now (divorced, the house sold) with a lighter load of responsibility. She is also particularly hungry for travel. 

The two of us realized that our present situations and feelings, hers and mine, are diametrically opposite. I don’t know if I will ever travel again, if it involves flying and leaving my dog and/or the borders of my country. (Day trips with my dog are another matter.) Even on the rare occasions when I go out for an hour or two in the evening, I often look forward to coming home to Sunny again before I’ve gotten out the driveway. 

I have traveled to other places and lived in other places (I still miss those winters in Cochise County, Arizona), but where I am now is home. “We’re very lucky to have a home,” I tell Sunny.

Sunny seems to agree. At least, she isn’t complaining. And we will get through the winter together.

With a little help from our friends!

Very Important Postscript: Identity of November guest author has been revealed on my Northport Bookstore News blog! I will post more about the author's new book on this blog before his appearance on Nov. 12. 

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!