Searching for Sunshine

Briefly, sun broke through!

So far we have had two sunny days in January. On Wednesday a weak winter sun appeared in the morning sky, brightened with time, but by early afternoon sunshine had been replaced by familiar cloud cover and falling snow, so I’m not counting that as a third sunny day. A day must be bright for at least four hours to qualify as a sunny one, and I think counting a mere four hours as a day is generous, don’t you?

Beautiful -- but not a sunny day

Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Reading the biography by Jonathan Eig at the beginning of 2025 gave me a better idea of the complexity and also the dedication of King’s character. When I looked at MLK quotes on Monday morning, this one stood out, given the times in which we live: 

 

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

 

-      Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

These days I am finding myself more troubled by the complacency of some than by the despair of others. Despair I can understand, but how can anyone not realize the “fierce urgency of now”? At the same time, the “vigorous and positive action” we need to take can be difficult to identify, so I appreciated suggestions last week from Robert Reich and value the “action items” a friend includes in her frequent “enCOURAGEment” emails.

 

A gathering in Suttons Bay last week provided metaphorical sunshine, demonstrating that people far from harm’s way care about those caught in the crossfires and want to see the federal government’s policies and actions return to the rule of law.

 

Catalog cover is book's cover illustration.

Another, different ray of sunshine came with the Spring/Summer 2026 Wayne State University Press book catalog. Right there on the cover, and again on the inside first page, is Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, a collection of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and comics, all exploring joyful memories of growing up Black in a city and edited by Desiree Cooper. Three cheers! I look forward to the April release of this book so I can offer it to my customers in Northport.

More information inside catalog

There are occasional days of sunshine in the direst of winters and moments, even hours, of joy to be celebrated every day.

 

Far From Home

Recently I chose an autobiography written in 1937 for my bedtime reading, that of Isobel Field, stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. This Life I’ve Loved is interesting all the way through, right from the beginning, but when her mother, Fanny Osborne, married for love the sickly RLS (with no idea that he was going to become famous), something magical happened. Newlywed Fanny and Louis, as he is called in the book, went on a wedding trip to “Silverado,” a deserted mine in Napa Valley, where the hot, dry climate was expected to—and did—improve Louis’s frail health, and after a while the rest of the family joined them.

 

We had some very pleasant times together before they left [for Scotland], and I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch in my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.

 

-      Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved

 

Isobel, called Belle, was herself a married woman and mother by this time and had never before heard her mother laugh! Can you imagine that? The power of love! Note: It takes a while in the Youtube video to get to the song, but don't miss it! A great rock hit from the Michael J. Fox movie, “Back to the Future.”

 

The story continues in Hawaii and eventually Samoa, where the Stevensons bought land, built a house, and Fanny began all manner of agricultural and horticultural projects while Louis devoted himself to writing. Such a different world from Up North winter!

 

The perfume of Samoa reached us while the island was still a hazy cloud on the horizon, a blend of ylang-ylang blossoms, wood-smoke and copra. We stood by the rail of the little inter-island steamer Lübeck watching Upolu take shape before us; thickly wooded, lettuce-green hills piled up against a blue sky. Along the beach, a row of small shops faced the sea, half hidden by the foliage of trees and shrubs. Lying on the reef and towering out of the water were the hulks of three men-of-war, tragic reminders of the great hurricane that had cost so many lives the year before.

 

There was no wharf and only a few boats came out to meet us. The natives had not yet learned to barter their seed necklaces and tortoise-shell work, or dive for coins. Several outrigger canoes paddled about the ship, filled with brown men and girls garlanded in wreaths and flowers….

 

Field notes that while many Hawaiians at that time had already adopted European dress, Samoan men and women still wore the lava lava. It was the late 1800s, before the coming of world war, when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom, although the missionary faction was eager for it to be taken over by the United States. Samoa, already being governed by Germany, Britain, and the U.S., seemed to be holding more tightly to its island culture, but in neither place were there anything like the big American multistory hotels that have since made their way to the South Pacific. When Isobel leaves Hawaii for Sydney, Australia, prior to making the move to Samoa at Louis’s request (realizing his health will never permit a return to his native Scotland, he wants his family together in one place), she describes the islands where she felt so long at home.

 

…I leaned on the rail looking at the town before me. Flooded with moonlight, it was bright against the dark blue hills. Here and there roofs showed above the tree-tops, no one building rising high enough to spoil the symmetry. From the shrouded mystery of Diamond Head to the purple shadows of Waianai the city never looked more beautiful.

 

I thought that I was seeing it for the last time. In a sense I was, for a phase of my life ended then, utterly unlike anything that went before or came after.

 

Honolulu, so peaceful, so beautiful, was to suffer tragedy and blood-shed, and change into a bustling American city before I saw it again; the dignity, the romance, the charm of an island kingdom gone forever.

  

The United States of America annexed Hawaii in 1898, following what the American president himself acknowledged as an illegal invasion by U.S. Marines in 1893 supporting a local insurgency. There had been factions in Hawaii at least as long as Europeans and Americans had been accumulating Hawaiian land (often by marrying into landed Hawaiian families), a complicated history certainly not taught in my grade school when Hawaii became the 50^th state in 1959.

 

(What today of Greenland? Is there a lesson in the history of Hawaii for Greenlanders? For Venezuelans?)

 

As for me here in northern Michigan, Isobel Field’s stories of her stepfather have whetted my appetite for the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the next book I have now begun An Inland Voyage. In the preface by his widow, she writes,

 

Like Branwell Brontë, of whom he could never speak without emotion, [Stevenson] would sit poring over maps, making imaginary journeys. 

 

-      F.V. de G.S. [Don’t ask me what these letters stand for, other than the ‘F’ for Fanny!]

 

Just so, as a lover of maps and of armchair travel, I anticipate sunny hours ahead in Europe with RLS as I turn pages and journey with him in my imagination. 

 

In his Samoan compound, where evening prayers were part of daily life, writer Robert Louis Stevenson soon tired of formulaic recitations and began writing his own prayers. Here is the last one he wrote, the day before he died: 

 

When the day returns, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to labor, happy, if happiness be our portion, and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

 

Really, what more can we ask?

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?

Seek Comfort and Welcome Joy

Pure joy!!!

Some of you have no doubt realized already that many of my recent topics up to and including this one—courage, loving care, strength, comfort and joy—are not really separate or separable. True it is! Just as our desires are multifaceted and complex, not singular and “pure,” so it is with our emotions. Still, focusing on one aspect at a time can be helpful, and while comfort and joy are important parts of loving care and strength and courage, I want to focus in on the former pair today, because it’s all too easy, when we’re trying to be strong and brave and take care of ourselves and others, to narrow our gaze to difficulty, to all the challenges we face, and lose track of the importance of experiencing—letting in—ongoing comfort and joy. 

 

Joy helps reduce stress in your everyday life, and that’s a good thing, but if stress reduction is all we consider about it, we are selling joy short, judging it good because it’s useful to us, good for us, rather than inviting joy into our lives because we’re alive and because the world is basically beautiful and we are made, I truly believe, for beauty and for joy. 

 

Many people I know are grandparents, the fortunate ones able to interact with grandchildren on a daily basis. “The light of my life,” one grandfather told me of a young grandson, while another friend describes her new granddaughter (quite rightly! I’ve seen pictures!) as irresistible. Others of us, living miles from family, find comfort and joy in friendship, our companion animals, and in the beauty of nature. 

She gets me outdoors!

Spring and summer WILL return!

Music, whether playing it or simply listening to it, is important—and not only Beethoven. Klezmer music, despite the minor key, is joyful, and country music can be. Do you hear the blues as music of a sad sad, downtrodden people? Not if you are playing or singing it yourself or if you read the interpretation of Albert Murray. When the spirit lifts and lungs take in larger breaths, smiles wreath our faces, and laughter bubbles over—joyful responses!

 

Here is a site I found with “joyful literature for dark times.” I’ve read a few of the books listed on that site but have my own favorites, as I’m sure you must, as well. Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is a series I find both comforting and joyful. Mma Ramotswe is such a kind, thoughtful person, and she loves her country of Botswana so much! 

I love these books.

Do you have a favorite book that you consider joyful and that gives you joy to re-read? Or simply comforting? Have you discovered a new book lately that fits the description? 

 

You might not think a presidential memoir would figure into this discussion, but I am taking a lot of comfort from Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith, even when the topics are grim. Reading of such an intelligent, capable, principled man in the White House, who never thought he knew everything but was always eager to learn more, and who did a lot more “politicking” than most Americans realize, makes me glad for the time I’ve had on earth.

 

In the middle of the night, though, when I wake to frightening reality, I turn to a different kind of book, and at present my middle-of-the-night reading is Breckland, by Olive Cook, an early volume in the series of “Regional Books” from Robert Hale, Ltd., of London. These postwar books on various regions of the United Kingdom describe landscape, agriculture, architecture, and so on in close and loving detail. They are not fiction: In these books nothing happens. What a relief! It’s as if you are on a walk, a stroll, a ramble with someone who knows the area intimately and points out what you might otherwise miss. After a day in the “real world” where all too much is happening, it is a great comfort to travel back in time to rural England when and where the horrors of the Second World War were finally over.

 

Online, Dana Frost with her “Forced Joy” project, an idea she had when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and one she had to work hard after he died, looks at how to find joy in grief and loss, and Valerie Kaur, a warrior for revolutionary love, writes and talks about how we can focus on love and joy in the midst of hatred and violence. 

Big pot of soup!

Batch of homemade flatbread --

I also watch a few short videos online, including Sean the Sheepman and chef Jacques Pépin. Dogs and cooking are important sources of joy for me, so watching Sean and Jacques at work is a quiet, comforting pleasure. Border collies are still working sheep, and Jacques is still glazing carrots. Ah, how lovely!

 

Painted rock, gift from a dear friend

When you do an online search for “joy” topics, one of the suggestions that comes up over and over is to look for joy in small, ordinary moments, something I’ve done for years. It was crucial back when the Artist and I were so “poor” (in financial terms) that going out for coffee was a splurge, and now cultivating gratitude for small pleasures in my life alone is just as crucial. 

Pleasure and happiness and comfort and joy are hardly interchangeable terms, but joy can be quiet and blend into comfort, don’t you think? Can’t we experience joy in silent contentment, as well as in glad shouts? More than gratitude, I see quiet joy as the realization of all we have for which to be grateful, a kind of overflowing fullness in the moment. 

 

Where do you find yours? Where do you look for it? Are you giving it a big welcome?

The sun was shining!

We played!

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm in My Household Pack

The Artist liked to say, crediting Jim Harrison with originating the phrase, that “advancing age brings a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.” Recently a friend on Facebook credited Tom McGuane with those words, and then a long interview with McGuane had McGuane himself giving the credit to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Credit whom you will, many people have apparently found the idea true to their lives. 

Or did they only like the apparent truth of a witty phrase? I wonder.

Obviously, I never lived with F. Scott Fitzgerald, nor with Tom McGuane or Jim Harrison. David Grath’s enthusiasm, however, is something that enriched our life together on a daily basis, whether on cross-country road trips or mere jaunts to thrift shops and drives down to Cedar for ice cream. Some of our enthusiasms changed over the years (some falling away but new ones coming along), and our energy in later decades was not what it had been in our 20s, 30s, and 40s. (We didn’t go out to bars and stay until closing time any more, certainly!) But did the number of our respective and shared enthusiasms diminish? That would be harder to say, as what naturally enthusiastic person would have the patience to sit down and make a numbered list of their heart-quickening activities and experiences?

Horses introduce this post because, while I was always the horse-crazy girl and never left that enthusiasm behind, the Artist had loved horses as a boy and always loved seeing them, especially with me. Of course, we never drove by them without at least remarking and often stopping to visit. “Which one is yours?” we would ask each other.

But the Artist also waxed enthusiastic over Peterbilt trucks, big boat-like American cars, and stylish motorcycles, depending on me to notice tiny things such as the little lichens called “British soldiers.” In general, when it came to landscape, I called his attention to ephemera at our feet, and he called mine to look up and to the horizon. “Big picture! Big picture!” he would say.

In Kalamazoo, when we lived there, we were forever noticing architectural details on older homes and downtown buildings. On foggy evenings, we would drive out to the country to catch the “Japanese landscape” effects. Out west, the grandeur of mountains, skies, and long sweeps of desert and grassland called forth our admiration. (We were both “big picture” viewers out there.) And it was a rare drive here in Leelanau County when the Artist didn’t say aloud, in tones of grateful reverence, “We live in a beautiful place.” So now I say that to Sunny Juliet when we’re in the car and crest a hill that gives us a view of Lake Michigan: “We live in a beautiful place.” Then I tell her, “That’s what your daddy always said.”

Lake Michigan, winter view

You may recall that the Artist did not fall in love with Peasy right away, the dog we were only able to have for a year. Eventually, though, they bonded. “Do you love him a little bit?” I asked. His response: “How could I not? It would be churlish not to love him.” Well, yes, as the dog came to worship David so absolutely! (Me he adored, David he worshipped.) He also said, “He’s so full of life! I miss that in myself, and I love it in him.”

No really good pictures of the two of them together -- sigh!

I never saw the Artist as anything but “full of life.” Even on those last winter mornings in the ghost town, when I came home from rambles over desert and foothills with neighbor and dogs to find him still in bed, watching television, he was enthusiastic in his urgings for me to watch with him a show about dogs … or hurricanes … or history. “I’m learning a lot,” he often said, and he never tired of learning. Or of seeing beauty, telling me that his helicopter flight from the little hospital in Willcox to a larger one in the Phoenix area had been “transcendent!”

Sometimes Sunny Juliet needs to curb her wild enthusiasm, but I appreciate her joyfulness. It makes me smile and even laugh at times. When I feel distant even from the natural beauty surrounding me, she brings me back to the immediate present.

An Enthusiastic Author

It is always a joy to host Newbery-winning author Lynne Rae Perkins in my bookstore. On Saturday she brought her own mice! I’d put three little mice on the table ahead of time, but she had made hers, and their markings were those of Violet and Jobie, the mice in her eponymous children’s book (too good for adults to pass by, is my verdict) who did not seek adventure but had adventure thrust upon them. 

Those of you who missed Lynne in the store can stop by for a signed copy of her book while my bookstore is open -- for the last month of the 2022 season, because come the end of October, I’ll be going on seasonal retirement until May, and I’ll just say right here that July 2023 will be the 30th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, so there is that ahead of me, too.

Books Read Since Last Listed

93. Bythell, Shaun. Confessions of a Bookseller (nonfiction)

94. Balzac, Honoré de. Le Curé de Tours (fiction)

95. Woodward, Bob & Robert Costa. Peril (nonfiction)

96. Shafak, Elif. The Island of Missing Trees (fiction)

97. Perkins, Lynne Rae. Violet & Jobie in the Wild (fiction – juv.)

98. Harrison, Jim. The Raw and the Cooked (nonfiction)

99. Oomen, Anne-Marie. As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book (nonfiction)

100. Brann, Esther. Five Puppies For Sale (fiction – juv. – 1948)

101. Harrington, C.C. Wildoak (fiction – YA – ARC)

102. Colwin, Laurie. Happy All the Time (fiction)

103. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Nothing Was the Same (nonfiction)

104. Proust, Marcel. The Past Recaptured (fiction)

Apple Enthusiasm

I’ll need all the enthusiasm I can muster to keep at the apple projects this month. My trees are bearing more heavily than ever before, and the apples are big and beautiful. How many apples will it take to fill the dryer with slices? Not many, I’m afraid, which means there will be lots of applesauce, as well, and maybe a pie or two.

Happy October, everyone!

Everything Is New the First Time Around

Young and irrepressible!

 

“It’s nothing but bullshit!” I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn’t know anything, I was just a dumb kid and impractical fool who didn’t understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world.

-      Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

 

I can’t believe I’m finally reading Kerouac! Tried On the Road once, not that many years back, feeling that I had been neglecting my autodidactic education in American literature (something nearly unforgivable in a bookseller), but I just couldn’t stay with it. The early pages so completely bored me, and reading it felt like such a waste of time – and I know many people feel the same way about some of the books I not only love but re-read on a regular basis – that I shook my head and resigned myself to having that particular hole in my hit-and-miss bookish background. After all, no one has read everything. And it isn’t as if On the Road is fading into obscurity without my devotion: 3 million copies sold, still selling 60,000 a year, according to publisher Viking. Anyway, I’m doing better with The Dharma Bums (first published in 1958), which reminds me as I read of a few people I knew in the 1960s and beyond.

 

Jack Kerouac was 36 when he wrote this hymn to youth and freedom (he was dead by age 47), but Ray Smith, the first-person narrator of The Dharma Bums and stand-in for the author, seems to be in his early 20s, at most. It’s mind-bending to go, as I do, from the semifictional Ray Smith to diarist Silas Durand, 25 years old in 1855 – two such different individuals, two such different American eras: Jack bumming around California in the late 1950s, Silas soberly teaching school in the 1850s – but also mind-bending to recall myself in the second and third decade of my life, an era that now seems almost like a movie I saw long ago or a book I read several times when young but not at all in recent years. And what a blessing, I occasionally think, that fame was never mine then -- or now, of course. Fame (or infamy) must be a terrible burden at any age, but to be famous when young seems an almost insurmountable challenge. It’s a miracle that as many well-known young people survive being famous as do. Great wealth and privilege at an early age (any age?) has to be an equally great challenge, all the world being so new and intoxicating and all. 

 

Last evening we were reading quietly while waiting out a “severe” winter storm warning as the snow fell silently, so taking Peasy outdoors before bedtime was a surprise to me as well as to him! Then this morning there was more snow (five inches, one of my neighbors says), and it isn’t over yet. Snow is still falling, and the storm warning is in effect until 8 p.m.

Peaks hidden in snow clouds

Where did the mountains go?

Our little ghost town landscape is quite transformed. The mountaintops are hidden from sight, desert tree branches outlined in white, tracks of rabbits and birds and small rodents as clear as they would be back home in northern Michigan. And Peasy cannot get enough of it! Since we don’t know his age, we don’t know if he has ever seen snow before, but whether he has or not, it’s obvious that he finds it very exciting.

As for me, watching the snow from inside a warm, cozy cabin, I think what a perfect day this is to stay indoors. A perfect day for baking. Perfect for reading. Perfect for answering letters from friends and working on my Silas project. Oh, the warm indoor light! The quiet, contented tasks!

But of course a young dog cannot be expected to lie around indoors all day. He needs exercise. A lot of it. He throws his beloved lion up in the air and carries it from one end of the house to the other, but that just isn't enough.

Ha! I say Peasy “needs exercise,” but in his mind I’m sure it’s fun and excitement he craves. “Outside! Outside! Snow! Running! Finding treasures! Poking my nose down under the snow! Zoom, zoom, zoom! Fun, fun, fun!!!” 

 

Is his grip on reality more reasonable than mine? Is Peasy a dharma bum in canine form? Or is all dog nature dharma nature? Not at Peasy’s tender age, I’d say. Right now, in what definitely seems like canine adolescence, the excitement of the storm is overcoming Peasy’s tenuous grip on his dogly duties and right conduct. Come when called? Oh, Mom, you are so boring! Right now, today, Mr. P is all about fun and freedom! But I am patient. I can wait him out! And it does lift my heart to see his joy. Dog joy is one of life’s great gifts to human beings.

He jumps for joy, and my own heart leaps, too!