Turn, Turn, Turn

Not AI-generated! Completely unedited!

Peak Autumn Color

People kept asking if the turning fall leaves had reached peak color, and I kept saying, day after day, no, not quite yet. There was still a lot of green left. Late Saturday afternoon’s sunshine, though, invited me for a little drive after work, and Sunday’s rain, because it put the kibosh on dog park fun, tempted me farther afield in the car. You can see more of those Saturday and Sunday scenes on my photo blog, and take a look at the Lake Leelanau Narrows on Wednesday morning, while you’re there.

When did we turn the color corner? In Leelanau Township, I’d say it was overnight from Sunday to Monday. Monday! What a perfect fall day! On Tuesday came the rain and wind. Black walnuts thumped and clattered to ground, windblown leaves tossed restlessly, yellow popples shimmered and gleamed.

My stepdaughter (Artist’s oldest child) and her husband came up on Monday, and Tuesday evening we went to the Happy Hour for dinner. I kept saying that Tuesday felt like Saturday and asking why. “Because we’re here,” she said, “so it feels like a weekend.” Also, we agreed, because it just seems that peak color should land on a weekend for all those travelers and visitors hoping to catch it.

Re-reading

At least a couple times a month I pull an old favorite book off the shelf. As October races past, after having read for the first time Le premier homme, by Albert Camus, and Medicine Walk, by Richard Waganese, I turned once more to Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, the closeup portrait of a Parisian neighborhood and its denizens and how they are storm-tossed by events in the larger world.

The years Paul lived in Paris were the fraught years between the two world wars when the wounds of France and Germany were still festering, both between the two countries and within their borders. My many readings of this book have made almost personal to me the anguish of that time, as the author shows growing tensions of people living on one small street of shops and residences in central Paris, but with every reading, also, something jumps out at me that hadn’t jumped out before. Elliot Paul’s portrayal of his years in France does not spare the corruption or “backwardness” of French politics or society, but he is also put to the test to explain his own country to the French, and never more so than when Sacco and Vanzetti are put to death, news that set off demonstrations across Paris by workers sympathetic to the condemned. 

 

It was no new thing to the French to have undesirables railroaded and executed on one flimsy pretext or another. But, somehow, they had hoped it was different in America, and so, in my innocence, had I.

 

-      Elliot Paul, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942)

 

His neighbors, Paul reports, were kind to him on the sad occasion and did not hold him accountable for what they saw as his country’s miscarriage of justice.

Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, age 32, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, age 29, were immigrants from Italy and avowed anarchists. That much is fact. In 1921 they were tried and convicted of armed robbery and murder, numerous requests for appeal were refused, and they were put to death by electrocution on August 23, 1927, continuing to insist on their innocence.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty? The court said they were. Some believed Sacco was guilty, Vanzetti innocent. In 1925, another prisoner in the same prison as Sacco, Celestino Madeiros, member of the Morelli gang of robbers, claimed in writing that it was he, not Sacco, who was guilty of the armed robbery and murder of the two payroll guards, and in 1927 Felix Frankfurter, later to become a Supreme Court justice, wrote that “every reasonable probability” pointed  to the Morelli gang and away from Sacco and Vanzetti. History, while not taking a definite stand on guilt or innocence, agrees that the defendants did not receive a fair trial, that they were condemned for their beliefs and their status as immigrants rather than for anything they had done or not done.

 

 

Another Four-Letter English Word

To HATE: to dislike intensely, passionately; to feel aversion or hostility toward. 

Most of us growing up in the U.S. in my generation were told as children that hating is wrong. We were even told often that we were mistaken about our own feeling. “You don’t hate your baby sister,” a parent would say patiently, if we were lucky. No, we were jealous, worried that the baby would take all our parents’ attention, etc. That wasn't hate. Later, did another child at school hate me? Or was that child jealous (for some reason) or even, if a member of the opposite sex, attracted but confused?

In the Christian Gospel of Matthew, Jesus counsels against hate and sets a high bar for those claiming to follow a God of love: 

 

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor^’ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

 

Last Saturday across the United States of America protestors demonstrated against the current administration in joyful, high-spirited pro-democracy rallies. The president and his Cabinet members insisted ahead of time and continued, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to claim that these were “hate America” rallies, peopled by Marxists and other extremists, including “Antifa” (which the president thinks is an organization). It was also claimed, entirely without evidence—because it was a false claim—that George Soros and other “leftist billionaires” had funded the demonstrations, paying people to attend.

HA! They would like that to be true, but it is not.

I know those demonstrators, not only in Traverse City, but in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Marquette, Chicago, Joliet, Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. They were my friends and neighbors. They were my bookstore customers. They were my family. They carried hand-made signs. And yes, some of them made negative observations on the president, because “No Kings” was the theme of the day, everyone having decided ahead of time not to fragment the message with a variety of issues, because the bottom line is we do not want anyone in power running roughshod over freedoms guaranteed us in the U.S. Constitution.

Demonstrators were out on Saturday because they love this country! There were many American flags. The protests were peaceful. Counter-protestors were safe, too.

Republicans (I do not call them “conservatives” because they are not) who decry “hate” coming from the president’s opposition would be well advised to look to the president himself. “I hate my opponent! And I don’t want the best for them!” Words from the president of the United States. As for his king-in-the-plane social media cartoon, enough has been said about that. The image spoke for itself. 

Hate pours down from the top, coming from the same source since the campaign of 2016. It takes a lot of resolve not to respond to his words and actions with reciprocal hate but with determination and hope and resolve for a better future. Because there is, too, the image of the East Wing of the White House under demolition, after the president’s earlier assurances that the structural integrity of the building would be preserved. Now, it turns out, he never thought “much” of the building. It was “very small,” he says, way too small. Not the first time he’s promised one thing and done the opposite. All presidents have made changes, you say? Redecorating and even remodeling are not demolition. The demolition image is a metaphor, a friend said. Sadly, yes.

I attended Saturday’s rallies all over the country in spirit. In my bookstore, my colors were on display for everyone to see. 

Hostility, aversion, passionate dislike? Yes, I feel it. What do I hate? 

I hate the militarization of American cities, the setting aside of due process, the attempts to gag the free press and allow only government propaganda as “news.” I hate the storm trooper actions, under orders from the administration, that tear men, women, and children out of their beds and zip-tie them for hours before deciding that some of them have done nothing wrong and can be allowed to return to their ransacked apartments. 

I hate the lies. 

I hate the desecration of the White House, the attempted destruction of unions, and the executive demolition of long-established social safety nets and environmental protections. I hate the killing, by my country and therefore in my name, of unknown people from other countries in open waters with no evidence presented against them and no trial to determine guilt of any kind. I hate having my own government violating the First Amendment here at home.

I hate the lies. 

I hate the way Americans have been encouraged by a would-be dictator (“Vote for me, and you’ll never have to vote again”) to turn against each other and see their own neighbors and family members as enemies.

I hate the lies.

He would never have been put in the White House if he had told the truth all along. No one can support the current administration and the rule of law. To support one demands opposing the other. 

 

Did you mark your calendar yet?

The date is November 12. It’s a Wednesday. The time is 4 p.m., so it won’t interfere with any evening meetings or keep anyone away from dinner or up too late at night. We will have a special guest speaker, with a new book, in the gallery next to Dog Ears Books. I’ll tell you all about it when November arrives.... 

 

But first, Halloween!

A couple of young moms in Northport have been going around town to get those of us in the central part of the village on board for trick-or-treating. I’m on board. Whether or not I’ll be in costume is an open question, but I’ll be there at the bookstore door from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 31, and I hope Halloween 2025 will be as much fun as past Halloweens on Nagonaba Street years ago. Here are some trick-or-treaters from 2004. Yes, 21 years ago in Northport!

Stop-Action Moments

Sunny Juliet takes a play break.

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

 

We had launch!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

We had a summer reunion!

 

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

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

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

I had company!

 

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

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

 

We all had sun and rain.

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

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

 

Pretty tree, no fruit

We have plans --

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

Poet Jennifer Clark

 

And then, the ongoing—what to call it?

 

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

 

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

 

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

Think about it. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Lives were given for our freedom.

I Am in Mourning For Our Country

In Minneapolis, many bookstores were already closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now more have been damaged in rioting following demonstrations over the brutal murder of George Floyd, but you will not find self-pity in the words of these booksellers. As one of them acknowledged, property damage is the "least tragic" aspect of the story. So while I feel sympathy for bookstore owners and employees, most of my sympathy has to go to the murdered man's family -- and to our country at large.

Since March, we have been reeling under a global pandemic that reached our shores. One hundred thousand Americans died of coronavirus. Businesses across the country closed, and people lost their jobs. High school and college graduates had no graduation ceremonies, and children's birthdays had to be celebrated with drive-by parades of friends waving from their cars. That alone has been difficult. A long haul. Unprecedented, to use a word that has never been used so many times in so short a period in my lifetime.

The absence of meaningful national leadership has been appalling and tragic, but unsurprising. Who could have expected anything different or better, given the last three and a half years? Queen Elizabeth, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and past presidents George Bush and Barack Obama stepped forward with calm words of comfort and encouragement. We could have used comfort and encouragement on a daily basis, but we did not get it.

Then came the murder of yet another black man by a police officer, murder committed by someone pledged to protect citizens, murder captured on video for all the world to see. Rage is understandable. Don't you feel it, too? "Violence doesn't solve anything," many people say -- but tell me, what has? Peaceful demonstrations? Cases of brutality and murder brought to the courts? More extensive police training? Body cameras? 

[Update: Here is what we got from the White House today, since this post first went up.] 
[Update 6/2: Houston police chief weighs in.]

I am in mourning for this country. 

I understand the rage. I understand the impulse to destruction, even knowing it "won't solve anything." When nothing reasonable has worked, what is left?

And yet -- from so many credible reports, much of the destruction was not caused by demonstrators from the Twin Cities but by outsiders who came in for the sole purpose of, it would seem, discrediting legitimate protest. What could be more reprehensible? I do not understand that.

And I do not understand disrespect taken to the extreme of causing death. I don't understand how it is allowed to go on and on. I don't understand why so many white Americans fail to get the message of "Black Lives Matter," misinterpreting it by inserting an "only" that was never there. Black lives matter, too. How can anyone not see? I don't understand the lack of understanding.

Another thing I don't understand -- and some of you may disagree with me on this -- is why the launch of a rocket into space is supposed to fill us with hope for the future of our country. "The heavens are opening"? Great! So now we can go mess the heavens up, too? While the mess here on earth worsens? How is that supposed to make anyone feel good?

I am in mourning for this country. My country. Your country. Our country.

But mourning by itself solves nothing. It is a luxury we cannot afford.

Little Things Add Up, in Nature and in Society

In mid-May in southern Arizona, to stand under a blooming mesquite tree or pause near a low-growing mesquite shrub is to become aware of a low hum emanating from the blossoms. The calmer the day and hour, the louder the hum. This is harvest season for small pollinators, and they are hard at work.

The other day, somewhere along the line, a bee got into our car, and, thinking at first glance that a large spider had hitched a ride on my bare leg, I hastily brushed at it with my hand. Not far enough away, though, as became evident when I felt the sting on the underside of my thigh. Moving quickly, I saw a struggling bee on the seat beside me and realized that the insect had had just enough wiggle room under my leg to deliver just enough sting to cause me to move before smothering it completely. The sting burned for a few minutes before it subsided quickly to a small, raised red spot not much bigger than what a mosquito bite would have delivered. No great harm done to me. But I’d inadvertently caused the little bee mortal injury. 

How often do we think about how we and other mammals and birds are largely dependent on the work of these much smaller creatures? Pollination of fruits and vegetables, if we had to do it all by hand, would barely keep us alive. Large grazing mammals feed on grasses and other plants that reproduce by seed, that seed requiring antecedent pollination of flowers sometimes so small and insignificant we rarely notice them at all. (Grass flowers? Yes.) Many species of bird rely on seed and berry diets, a berry being nothing more to nature than the covering of a seed or seeds, and even the insects and other invertebrates that carnivorous birds feed upon feed first on plants. Without bees, wasps, flies, and all the other myriad pollinators and their unpaid labor, earth’s menu would be very short for the rest of us, not to say nasty and brutish. 

Bees are small. Seeds are small. We don’t generally look at grazing cattle and thank bees for doing their part to produce beef. I’m thinking about bees and cattle now because I am living in their midst.

And in these stay-at-home days of COVID-19, I’ve had time to see and think about things I’ve never noticed or don’t often think about. One of my small new observations is how often birds clean their beaks. A bird will stand on a twig (flying to it after a stop at the suet feeder snack bar) and lean forward to swipe its beak to and fro against the twig in front of it. It looks like a bird sharpening its beak as one would sharpen a knife, but most ornithologists think cleaning is the primary purpose of the behavior. The curved-bill thrasher was the first bird I noticed doing this, but then I saw others doing the same, and now all the time I see birds cleaning their beaks. A small observation, but how can I have missed it all these years, when they are doing it continually?

Mesquite flowers, now. Often these long, caterpillar-like catkins hang in clusters, and the other day I noticed for the first time – really looking at the plant -- that within a given cluster, the flowers blossom sequentially rather than all at once. I imagine the seeds will ripen the same way, much as happens with clusters of blackberries or other bramble fruit, berries within each cluster ripening in turn rather than at the same time. My observation is small and, when I think about it, unsurprising. So what? Still, I wonder what advantage the plant gains. A longer season for the seeds to be disseminated abroad? That would make sense. 

Big change of topic --

The murder of a single human being is never a small thing. Whenever it happens, it is tragic. In the United States, one of our national tragedies is the frequency with which black men are murdered while simply going about their daily lives, and a second tragedy is that those victims’ murderers are rarely punished. On and on it goes, and the hearts of black parents who fear and grieve in advance are, sadly, not unreasonable in their fear and grief. Here, then, is yet a third tragedy, that of decent, law-abiding parents who must raise their children in fear in their own country. Over a century after slavery was ended and long after Jim Crow laws have supposedly been put behind us, how is it that we can live with this continued national shame, with an America offering such very different experiences to its citizens, based on nothing but the color of their skin?

As I say, this is a big thing. Nothing little about it. 

What I see as little are some of the things white people can do, each of us, one at a time, to try to bring about change, to work toward bending that oh-so-recalcitrant arc of justice. Lists of books are put forward to raise awareness of white privilege, and I don’t want to minimize the importance of raising that awareness, but a question I raised recently with Facebook friends is, once awareness has been raised, what can one go on to do to bring about change?

Of the various comments and responses, perhaps the most helpful I received, because it contained a lengthy list of calls to action, was this from my stepdaughter, 75 Things White People Can Do For Social Justice. It’s hard to imagine anyone, black or white, who could check off every item on the list and say at the end, “Yeah, I did all that,” but still I found the list itself helpful, even encouraging. It’s not saying that we all have to rush out and do everything at once but that there are many ways to contribute. I was encouraged to see that while I hadn’t done a lot of big things, I have done several little things, and I see more on the list that I can do in future. 

Because what’s the point of playing the “Ain’t-It-Awful” game? The point is to make the world better, one little thing at a time. Maybe one little thing every day – for instance, one letter or telephone call or e-mail every day. 

For today, my one little thing is sharing a book list on a new separate page of this blog. As I wrote there, I welcome additions and suggestions. The page will be a work in progress. We all need to claim our power to make change. Thank you for reading today.

Reading in Place

The roadrunner has a rather drab dress of indiscriminate pattern. The feathers are dark brown laced with white, and the tail has a greenish tinge. His wings are stubby, their principal function being to increase the speed of his running should he be in a hurry. His eyes are encircled with rings of an orange color. When he pauses to look at you, he opens his mouth, the crest atop his head rises; the impression is left that the sight of you has brought upon him a condition of great astonishment and shock. Then, recovering quickly from his near collapse, he will go jauntily on his way. -  

- Herbert V. Young, Water By the Inch: Adventures of a Pioneer Family on an Arizona Homestead

Despite several excellent books begun and not yet begun, recommended and picked up on impulse, it is books having to do with the Southwest that take priority right now. I vowed to get back to The Frontier in American History, waiting for me on the little table between our two reading chairs (finally finished that book, begun many weeks before in 2018, two weeks into 2019), and then was seduced at the library by Water By the Inch, with its memories of the desert around Phoenix before urban and suburban development, tales of moving cattle on horseback, digging and falling down wells, close calls with rattlesnakes, and a happy family with five children living in a two-room shanty without running water. Before that there was Voice of the Borderlands, poetry sometimes sweet, sometimes harsh, but always evocative, vignettes narrating the lives of cowboys and horses, rodeos, cattle drives, drug runners, desert deaths, and the dying of old ways. My gratitude for the sun’s warmth I found contained in the Mexican description of “el sobre de los pobres,” the overcoat of the poor,, and I alternated my reading of Drum Hadley’s soul-searing poetic narratives with a novel by Phyllis de la Garza, Railroad Avenue, set on the familiar streets of Willcox, long before those streets were paved. One of the winter’s first temptations, however, had come with My Heart Lies South, irresistible to me not only for its Mexican setting but also for the author’s signature on the inside front cover, along with an indication that one of the book’s previous owners had been Helen Riggs, from an important ranching family down Chiricahua way. You’ll see that book listed in my 2018 Books Read list.

And now, continuing my latest Arizona desert reading, I am deeply grateful to have discovered the nature writing — and much more — of Ken Lamberton. 

I look to the stars for confirmation that I’m not stuck in one place. From one hour to the next I can tell by marking the counterclockwise motion of Ursa Major that the earth moves beneath my feet. I’m spinning with it at 700 miles an hour. From season to season I can feel the earth coursing against a backdrop of constellations, summer’s Scorpio and winter’s Orion. I’m circling the sun at 66,000 miles an hour, a million and a half miles a day. I am not in prison; I am a traveler. I am a galactic tourist, visiting the sun and moon and gas giants. I watch the universe pass by from the window of this fenced plot of ground. I should have motion sickness.  

- Ken Lamberton, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (2007)

In fact, Ken Lamberton was in prison, serving a 12-year sentence as a convicted sex criminal. In his late twenties, a veteran five-year teacher and married father of two (with a third on the way), he had fallen for one of his eighth-grade students and run away with her, presumably to “start a new life,” according to fantasies governing the relationship — on both sides — at that time. Lamberton coped with prison by continuing to read, write, and teach. He was remorseful and desiring of forgiveness but understood that his remorse could never change the past and that forgiveness might never come, especially from his wife, the person he had hurt the most and by whom he most desired to be forgiven. 

In the pages of this, his third book written and published during his incarceration, it seems almost as if his wife, Karen, suffers more from being married to a convicted sex criminal than Ken does from being in prison. Karen also found productive ways to cope with the consequences of her husband’s betrayal, going back to school and earning a paralegal degree, as well as a B.A. in political science. She was hired by a Tucson law firm. She sued the Department of Economic Security and won not only her initial class action lawsuit but prevailing over the six years of appeals against her by the State of Arizona. She visited her husband regularly, bringing their daughters as often as possible. His relationships with the girls seem good, despite the odds. 

And yet, prison exacts a grievous toll on the marriage. 

Readers new to Lamberton’s work, as I was, may be surprised by how much of his life in prison focuses on nature and wildlife, though it was nothing new for him. His book Wilderness and Razor Wire was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 2002. In Time of Grace, he notes carefully and almost compulsively the annual visitations of various courting and migrating birds and insects and the blooming and leafing-out of trees, emergence of ground plants, sightings of tadpoles (after the rains), a brooding mother duck, many bats, and once, excitingly, a ringtail. Snakes, butterflies, even flies or a broken eggshell — nothing in the natural world is beneath his notice, and everything in his walks around the perimeter of the yard contributes to his sanity.

…I adjust my calendar to the metronome transgressions of birds. For now, they cue me to after summer’s ebb: shorter days as the desert gradually cools and dries. Grasses beyond the perimeter fence bleach and go to seed under scattered cholla cacti, tiaras of light caught among their blond spines. 

But Lamberton is no disembodied angel behind the razor wire. Acutely aware of his own sins, he is no less blind to the sins of others, whether they be wardens, prison guards, wealthy and politically powerful unpunished criminals, or American society at large. It would be difficult to read this book and not be angry at the widespread injustice Lamberton recounts. Not, I add, that he feels his sentence was unjust. No, he says he deserved it. But he sees that the system is not geared basically toward justice at all. In his “Author’s Note” at the book’s beginning, he writes:

Like many people, I believed the justice system was a vehicle for truth. I discovered that truth is irrelevant and politics is not, that our adversarial system favors the affluent, that judges have become redundant, that a plea bargain is not a compromise but a surrender. That justice is a contest with winners and losers…. I also discovered that prison is a society  with a caste system based on the types of crimes committed and those ranked a the top — murderers, drug offenders, gang members — prey on those at the bottom . . . and I was at the bottom. 

And yet, as important as the revelations of injustice — is it wrong of me to see it this way? — are the author’s views of the natural world around him and the beautiful language in which they are expressed. So whether your interest is in law, prison reform, natural science, or literature, this book will command your attention from the first page to the last. I’ll go further and say that this would be an excellent choice for a book club, particularly if members of the group come to discussion with some diversity of experience.