Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

If You Know Me, This Is Not News

Old school, Empire, Michigan

 

“Old School”

 

Yes, I am “Old School,” as the phrase is used nowadays – as an adjective for someone who clings to old ways rather than leaping (blindly, I would say) into every new technology that comes along and leaving the tried-and-true behind. Recently a friend told me about a family whose expensive home is completely “paperless,” and I was, frankly, appalled. Family members read books and magazines but don’t keep them when they have finished reading. Out they go!

 

My first thought was, how terrible that would be for babysitters! 

I was remembering a family I babysat for regularly in my old home neighborhood, a young couple who had only two printed items in their home, the current TV Guide and a tattered Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. The parents stayed out late when they went out, there was only one child, and the parents paid well, but the barrenness of their home environment made the hours heavy going. These days, though, I suppose babysitters are simply glued to their phones after the children go to sleep. It’s a different world….

Three letters went out in the mail to friends this morning.

 

Someone who is “Old School” writes letters on paper, buys stamps for the envelopes, and trusts to the United States Postal Service to deliver. (Thank you, Benjamin Franklin and USPS!) One day last week I hit the jackpot and found four letters from friends waiting in my post office box. Jackpot!!! Letter-writing is not about immediate gratification but about taking time, “spending time” with absent friends, anticipation, and so much more. Follow this link to Leelanau Letter Writers and see if you might want to join a slow movement.

Well-used and well-loved road atlases from my home shelves --

A road taken....

Someone who is “Old School” loves maps – maps on paper! Yes, everyone can access maps on their phones and, in newer model cars, on screens built into the dashboard, but when you zoom in for detail, you lose the big picture, and I want both at once! I also want to make notes on the pages. A 2015 atlas is not “outdated” for me; it is redolent of trips taken and sights seen, possible roads as well as those remembered, because dreaming over maps is also another form of armchair travel. There are places I have never been, except through books and movies and maps. 

 

The ivy isn't plastic, either.

Writing checks is really “Old School,” and I make no apology for paying my bills with checks. How many companies do I want to have access to my bank account to grab what they say I owe? How large a balance do I want on my credit card to pay off every month? Fewer and fewer people bring either cash or checks to my bookstore, and I’ve adjusted to the changing times in that regard (there’s no staying in business without adaptation to change), but I prefer to pay my own business expenses and home bills by check. When told by another business a few days ago that they have “no way to process checks,” I was more than a little annoyed by that flimsy excuse. They had no problem “processing” the cash I handed over, and the “process” is the same: check or cash, deposit it in your business account! I have not stayed in business for over three decades by passing bad checks and do not care for the implied – though carefully disguised – insinuation. 

 

Home library bookshelves reflected on glass of photograph

Finally, being “Old School” means loving books!!! Printed books, bound books, books on paper – the descendants of the 4^th century Greek Codex Sinaiticus. Handier than scrolls, much lighter in weight than stone tablets, books properly bound and cared for can outlast the civilizations that produce them. Take a look at the Florentine Codex, a 12-volume work on the Nahua culture in Mexico, before and during colonization by Spain, with a general explanation of what constitutes a codex. A proud tradition of literacy.

 

For me, having my own home library is essential to feeling at home at all. Besides books, I also have many physical albums of photographs. Although more modern people (more modern than I will ever be) are content to store their “books” and “photographs” in a “cloud,” make no mistake about it: A cloud isn’t some physical warehouse in the sky; it’s just someone else’s bigger computer somewhere else, and that’s not good enough for me. I want to know that my photographs will be in my albums every time I open the covers, just as I want to know that the books in my home library will contain the same words, in the same order, every time I open to see and read those pages. No one is going to hack into some distant computer and alter my favorite histories, novels, essays, or poetry books!

 

(I don’t want “virtual nature,” either. I want nature, the real thing. What is the point of living on earth if we have to live as if we’re on a space station?) 

 

As I say, if you know me, none of this is news to you, and if we’ve never met you might guess at some of it because, after all, I have been a bookseller, with an open shop, i.e., a “bricks & mortar” location for over 30 years. Are independent bookstores all disappearing? The people who think so are not regular bookstore customers. Does nobody read any more? The people who ask the question are not readers. 

Other questions people ask: “Where do you get all your books?” and “Have you read every book in here?” The answer to the second question is no. As for the first question, there is no single answer. Some books I buy, some are donated to me, some are brought in by customers for trade credit. I don’t have time to spend running around to auctions and garage sales, but occasionally I’ll be invited to take a look at a private library and make an offer – or simply take off their hands as many books as I think I can use. In the past few weeks, I had a chance to look at three different collections that needed to be downsized or dismantled. Classics, being classics, are always in demand; in a village on the Great Lakes with a maritime history and a beautiful modern marina, boating books are always important for my collection; and philosophy, while hardly a bestselling section, is one of my personal specialties, so I was happy to fill gaps that had appeared on those shelves. 

Aviation had to move over in the bookcase with military history ...

to make room for more boating books, with more in the way.

Philosophy got a complete reorganization ...

from A to Z.

Audiobooks

 

Now, before anyone takes me to task for my old-fashioned ways, let me say that I understand perfectly well that as we age, there can be problems with eyesight or even trouble with hands, either making the holding and reading of physical books difficult -- or maybe you just want to listen to a book while on your stationary bicycle --- so this “Old School” bookseller has jumped on a modern bandwagon with libro.fm for your listening pleasure. Your audiobooks won’t cost you any more on libro.fm than you would pay the online behemoth, you can choose an independent bookstore to support, and naturally I will be happy to have you choose Dog Ears Books. Thank you!!!

Old school, Maple City, Michigan

“No, how are you, really?”

Recently I wrote, in two consecutive posts, about feeling “crabby” one morning -- the same day, written about twice, because the hours had divided themselves into a morning of outdoor adventure and afternoon of indoor reading. Now, in light of a book I devoured in two days of intense reading, I want to revisit that day briefly before getting into the book. 

Saying I’d been “crabby” when I first got up wasn’t a falsehood, but the word was not as accurate as another I could have used. Initially the word that came to mind that morning, without my having to search for it at all, was abandoned. I felt abandoned. 

But when I wrote about the day, I didn’t want to name my feeling so bluntly-- didn’t want to sound pathetic or self-pitying and discourage people from reading any further – the risk I’m taking today. After all, abandonment was, and is, hardly an objective fact of my life: I have family, friends, neighbors, dog; I see people and receive phone calls and text and e-mails and even postcards and letters in my physical mailbox down the road. To feel abandoned, then, was not a logical, rational thought. The feeling, however, was real and deep. Abandoned. Bereft. Because absence is a constant presence in my life now and can demand to be recognized when I least expect it.

Days before, I had started a very different post, a brutally honest one, thinking it the beginning of a draft for next month. “The Cruelest Month,” I titled those paragraphs, writing that the cruelest month wasn’t April for me, as the poet would have it, but March: Since my husband died last year in March (nine days after his February birthday), last year’s “cascade” of medical issues, beginning in January and ending in death, now repeats itself as a cascade of unavoidable memories, with the anniversary of the end looming ever closer.

Thus the feeling of being abandoned -- although I need to explain further that feeling abandoned does not necessarily correlate to being alone. Sometimes I am perfectly happy alone (as when reading that paper by Georges Poulet), while other times (not always!) with other people I can feel like a sad little island, abandoned in a sea of grief. Because widowhood is not all one color. Every day is not grey and rainy and dismal. 

And speaking of weather, I have always found my moods affected by weather (and used to tell the Artist, “I’m a very shallow person” for that very reason), but grief can make warm sunshine seem pointless, whereas a rainy day can give the perfect excuse to curl up alone, contentedly, and read a book. People, weather – sometimes they encourage certain feelings, and other times the feelings are completely at odds with what’s going on in the “outside” world – that is, outside one’s own head, heart, and skin.

In her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain (author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) explores the tendency of some of us to what Aristotle called ‘melancholy,’ those feelings of 

…longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death –bitter and sweet – are forever paired.

From sadness, creativity, seeking unconditional human love or divine love, and the American gospel of positive thinking to grief and loss, “getting over it,” immortality, and intergenerational pain, this book goes broad and deep. There is the story, perhaps apocryphal (and maybe you’ve read it before, as I have), of Franz Kafka giving, to a little girl heartbroken after losing her favorite doll, a new doll with a letter he wrote as if the old doll had written it: “My travels have changed me.” For everyone who has ever lived, change and loss are inevitable, and when they come, life will never again be what it was. 

(Typing that last sentence, the one just above, I first typed “For anyone who has ever loved….” Has anyone ever lived without loving? Such a life would not keep one safe from change and loss. It would not be much of a life at all.)

It's too early in the year to know if Bittersweet will be the most important book I’ll read in 2023, but I know it is one I will be recommending to others and will re-read again and again myself. It is much, much more personal than Cain’s earlier work, and the pieces of memoir, which come along unexpectedly in various chapters, enrich the author’s themes. 

A couple of pages very meaningful to me personally had to do with writing when we are sad. She cites the work of Texas social psychologist James Pennebaker, who stumbled on something when he was suffering from depression and began writing down “the contents of his heart,” as Cain puts it. 

…And he noticed that the more he wrote, the better he felt. He opened up to his wife again [he had been drinking; they had been fighting], and to his work. His depression lifted.

The psychologist went on to make the phenomenon he experienced the basis for decades of study. He asked groups of people to write about their personal troubles, directing others to write about mundane facts in their lives.

Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers. Even months later, they were physically healthier, with lower blood pressure and fewer doctor’s visits. They had better relationships and more success at work. 

Those who did the exercise of “expressive writing,” Cain reports from Pennebaker’s work, were not wallowing in their troubles but deriving insight from confronting and facing their pain.

P.S. 2/16/2023: Oprah picked this book! It's her 99th Book Club pick!

A couple weeks ago, before I’d even seen this book, I sat down to write a long letter. (I write letters, as well as blog posts, but letters I write by hand, on paper, with pen.) I began writing in a rather “pitiful” state of mind, going on and on about my reasons for feeling blue, somewhat as I admitted in my post the other day to feeling “crabby” but with a lot more honesty. By the last page of my letter, though, as I noted before the closing line, I had written myself into a cheerful frame of mind! I’ve noticed before, more than once when drafting blog posts, that I often sit down feeling sad and then somehow write myself into gratitude.

Writing isn’t a silver bullet or a magic potion and doesn’t always banish the blues. And they do come back. But that’s life: sometimes it’s an emotional rainy day, and then the sun shines again, and predicting how we’ll feel on any given future day is never foolproof. But if, as another friend says of me, I am a graphomaniac, I guess that’s one more thing to be thankful for in my life, because now and again writing gets me out of some dark places and back into the light.

Did you ever -- write a letter to a stranger?

Patience on a comforter

 

Good morning! And no, to answer a question about my question, politicians don’t count (although writing to them is always a good idea). I'm thinking of writing to someone geographically distant whose story you read or heard somewhere, and you’ll never run into each other at your local grocery store, but you thought, We have a lot in common. I’d like to know him-or-her-or-them. (There. I’m practicing using they/them as a singular pronoun. I need practice with that, I guess.) Have you ever done that?

 

Occasionally I receive notes in the mail from people I’ve never met or encountered so fleetingly that no memory image remained, because I have had a bookstore in Up North tourist country for 29 years and counting. (Thirty next summer!!!) Because some of my annual visitors keep track of my life on this blog. Or because someone ordered a book or books from me years ago, and we fell into correspondence for a while.

 

But it doesn’t always work out long-term.

 

Once, for example, I had a book order from a Frenchman who was teaching at the time in an agricultural lycée on an island in the Indian Ocean. We were both devotes of the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. He had ordered a Fabre book I had listed online (back when I did that sort of thing) and explained the reason that his mailing address was France: all mail went there first, then came to the end of the island where the airfield was, and eventually worked its way to the other end of the island where the school was. He sent me a little package of vetiver, one of the island’s chief exports. 

 

I sent something back (I don’t remember what), and things were going along swimmingly until I shared an idea I had: When he and his wife returned to France, we should set up agricultural exchange visits! I imagined having my French visitors stay in our old farmhouse and touring them around Leelanau County, introducing them to cherry growing culture and farmer friends in my township and beyond. They would have so many questions and would love northern Michigan, wouldn’t they? Then they could host an agricultural visit in return. We might have several of these from one year to the next -- as I imagined the concept growing.

 

But after sharing my brilliant idea, I never heard from my distant friend again. In retrospect, I think he must have thought I, personally, was angling for a free country place to stay in France with my husband, which wasn’t at all the idea, but I never followed up on whatever misconception or misunderstanding there must have been, and there ended our exchange. 

 

Another correspondence was more successful. My distant customer was a woman who ordered several books of old dog stories, and as it turned out, she was also a writer. When her next book came out, she sent me an early copy. Wonderful writer! That was years ago, and we are still in touch, albeit infrequently. 

 

So now, this morning, I’m kind of on the fence. Does a woman-woman letter-writing connection between strangers work better, especially when the women are roughly the same age? Or is there any chance at all that a young(er) male Scottish bookseller (my son’s age) would welcome hearing from an aged female colleague in the wilds of northern Michigan? He and my son have the same birthday, but surely the fascination of that coincidence is only in my point of view and would mean nothing to him. 

 

Really, don’t I already have enough to do without launching – no, attempting to launch – another pen pal relationship? That was a rhetorical question….

 

Happy Labor Day weekend! And remember to join us at Tuesday evening’s open house at the Leelanau Township Library, where you can have Sarah Shoemaker sign a copy of her new book for you, beginning at 7:30 p.m. 

 

We are tested in many ways.

 

Will Sunny be on trial Thursday morning? It will be our first puppy class! Will the other puppies be younger, smaller, and less obstreperous? Will we "pass" the class, or will she be so wild that we'll be kicked out? She’ll be excited, I know, when we enter the big working arena, as her dog mom repeats a calming mantra to herself to calm her nerves!

At least puppy class will give me a break from Widowland, this strange new challenging country I now inhabit. Some widows tell me, “It gets easier,” while one said the third year was worse than the second, and yesterday I was told, “It doesn’t get easier. It gets worse.” Obviously, experiences vary across the widowed population. One woman could not bear to look at old photographs or read old letters, whereas I cannot keep from what are to me precious and tangible evidence of past happiness. 

Evidence. There’s a concept that brings me to larger national events. Hearings proceed on the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and while many Americans are glued to their TVs, just as many (or so it seems) are steadfastly avoiding the unfolding story. I have neither television nor the leisure to watch it nonstop if it were available, but I have tuned in on the radio a couple times in the car and have read news summaries of various days’ presentations. 

I was distressed, though, when one friend said her reason for not watching is that the hearings are a “show trial.” What? The term “show trial” indicates the pretense of a trial (i.e., not a hearing or hearings but an actual staged trial, and a rigged one at that), in which the verdict has been decided beforehand, with evidence often manufactured and confessions of guilt forced. Example: the Stalinist show trials that took place from 1936 to 1938. 

 

The trials were held against Stalin’s political enemies, such as the Trotskyists and those involved with the Right Opposition of the Communist Party. The trials were shams that led to the execution of most defendants. Every surviving member of the Lenin-era part was tried, and almost every important Bolshevik from the Revolution was executed. Over 1,100 delegates to the party congress in 1934 were arrested.  The killings were part of Stalin’s Great Purge, in which opportunists and Bolshevik cadres from the time of the Russian Revolution who could rally opposition to Joseph Stalin were killed. He did so at a time of growing discontent in the 1930s for his mismanagement of the Soviet economy, leading to mass famines during periods of rapid and poorly executed industrialization and farm collectivization.

 

-      https://www.historyonthenet.com/stalin-show-trials-summary

 

My friend did not mention Stalin but pointed to the Watergate hearings, which she finds unproblematic, because “most Americans thought Nixon was guilty.” (If his guilt was assumed beforehand, wouldn’t that have been a “show trial,” if it had been a trial and not a hearing?) The whole point of a hearing is to decide if there is enough evidence to proceed to trial. If the prosecution’s case is weak, perhaps there will be no trial, but if one does take place, the defense at least has a good idea of what it will face in the courtroom. From the little I have heard and read, plenty of evidence that we did not have before (example) has been placed before the public in the January 6 hearings, reams of it now public record. Of course, self-selected segments of the public can choose to avoid looking at the record, lest their opinions be challenged by documented facts....

Then there is … Facebook. Here confusion between hearings and trials reigns supreme, with the addition of those refusing to follow the hearings or dismissing the evidence (without having heard it) objecting to the procedure they do not understand and are not following. Example: One comment on a friend’s Fb thread reads: “This Stalinist inquisition has NO rebuttal or cross examination.” (Ah, there! Someone has brought in Stalin! See above quoted passage and compare and contrast Stalin’s trials to today’s hearings.) Well, it happens that the former president did issue a rebuttal statement, twelve pages, and here it is. Typically, he repeats claims already found to be baseless and attacks the current administration’s record, which is not at issue in the hearings. As to cross-examination, that would take place at trial stage, if criminal charges are brought. 

As Abraham Lincoln might say were he alive, in a larger sense America itself is on trial today. Can a nation conceived and dedicated to equality under law long endure, and are we dedicated to the task of preserving our heritage? 

Companions of Time’s Short Day

Too soon, too soon, the sunset!

 

When I came across this quotation in a volume on book collecting, “The night of time far surpasses the day…,” my first literal association was with the psychological slowing of time during what someone else has called “dark nights of the soul.” Yes, those nights are long, and the coming of daylight a blessed relief. The quoted sentence, however, doesn’t stop there, and I had to search out the larger context to discover the meaning and how it might relate to the matter of rarity in old books. Here are two consecutive sentences that begin to shed light:

 

The number of the dead long exceeds all that shall live. The night of time far surpasses the day, and who knows when was the equinox?

 

There, we see, the “night of time” holds all the dead, remembered and nameless, that have gone before us, and the ancient and forgotten “equinox” would have been early in human prehistory, when the dead and the living were equal in number – if we can even imagine such a moment as real, given evolution and all. Where might a meditation on this idea take us? Seventeenth-century English writer Sir Thomas Browne began his own meditation inspired by the discovery of ancient Roman burial urns in the Norfolk countryside, and the quoted passage above appears in his Chapter V. 

 

Perhaps the most educated man of his time, Browne was not content to say merely that life is short and that almost everyone who lives is forgotten in time … or at most remembered as a name only or for some particular aspect or some act perhaps not essential to the living being who once walked the earth … and his “Hydriotaphia” is certainly worth reading and re-reading – which I shall do! -- but this morning I’ll return first to John Carter’s Taste & Technique in Book Collecting, because many other books await me, as well as letters deserving replies.  

Bookman’s (Brief) Holiday

Anyone who has read previous posts on this blog, the farewell to Peasy followed by the Artist’s medical crisis and its resolution, knows that seasonal retirement has not been exactly a picnic this time around but that we have been abundantly blessed with family and friends and good fortune. Postponing our return to Dos Cabezas until Sunday morning, we were enjoying such a relaxed Saturday at the Artist’s cousin’s Phoenix home, in fact, that I decided to steal away by myself for an hour to Books on 7th Avenue.

 

Whenever I first find my way to a treasure island of used books, it takes a while for my initial excitement to subside into the calmer mood necessary for discovery. Excitement in this case was heightened before I even made my way through the door, as there on the FREE cart outside I found a book for my Western collection, a public library discard copy of The Civil War in the American West, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. Once indoors, I quickly came upon A Clash of Cultures: Fort Bowie and the Chiricahua Apaches, a tragic story set in Cochise County, and The Cattlemen, by Mari Sandoz, the latter without a dust jacket but definitely important enough in my eyes to purchase.

 

Happy with three additions to my growing home library on the West and Southwest, I explored other aisles and found other treasures, including a book for the Artist, one for our host, one for a friend back in Michigan, and two on French literary history for myself. Reluctantly but happily, I stopped with those eight and felt amply rewarded. 

 

What was it that the Chinese fortune cookie foretold for me back in 1986? “Your path will be arduous but amply rewarded.” I carried the little slip of paper with me for years and carry it still in memory.

 

 

We Get Letters – and Books!

We returned to the ghost town on Sunday, January 16. The Artist had not seen the cabin since January 5, and I had left it on the morning of the 8^th. Expecting mail and not knowing how long we would be absent, I imposed on a neighbor to collect mail from our box down the road, and on Monday morning she brought the week’s haul. (Another neighbor brought food enough to take care of us for days!)

 

I love mail!!!

Almost all the letters included condolences for loss of Peasy but had been written before anyone had heard of our subsequent trials. Still, how good to get news from faraway friends and to be assured of their love and good wishes for us.

 

A friend in Kalamazoo sent me books, a large one on horses (!) and two paperback volumes of Rousseau’s Confessions. I have already dipped into Volume I of Rousseau, but the Artist and I are both more than eager to read the novel (copy inscribed to the Artist) by a writer we met years ago, when I copyedited his first book, a volume of short stories called The Wild Upriver. Jim McVey’s new book, Loon Rangers, like the first, is graced by a David Grath image on its cover, and I am confident that the story will transport us to the wild outdoors that Jim knows so well. Anticipation is yet another delight in the life of readers.

 

Thoughts of Peasy

One friend wrote that it seemed we had “found peace” with our decision to bid farewell to Peasy. Another hoped we were not “harboring guilt.” Most all understood the difficulty of the decision. At least one sent hugs. 

 

When I first posted about little Pea’s leave-taking and wrote about how much we had given him and the gift I felt he was in our lives, I meant every word, but I must say that I have yet to “find peace” with the decision or the good-by. It was, I know, the most “responsible” decision. And yet – our little dog boy was so full of life and joy, and the house and car and the vast range around the cabin are resoundingly empty without his presence. Despite all the anxiety he caused us, he was also a comfort in many ways. The other day I said to David that if by some miracle (and it would be, too!) we could have our practically perfect Sarah back with us, my heart would still ache for Peasy. Bless him -- he understood.

 

 And Yet, Gratitude, Of Course!

 

We two could not be more blessed with family and friends and, as I said above, good fortune. We have each other – certainly not anything to take for granted after the past week and a half! Out of medical limbo, we are once again looking forward, and that feels good.

We are alive and together!!!

But also, not to trivialize human life, there is that ever-present absence these days. The Artist and I have been fortunate in having had the opportunity to love and be loved by three dogs in the past three decades [I had to correct the time period there!], each with a different personality and all with permanent places in our hearts, so I’m sure the heartache I feel now for Peasy will subside in time to something gentler and happier. Just now, though, in the light of life’s brief candle, I am grateful for the understanding of anyone who has ever known and loved a difficult dog, because even a “dog with issues” is so much more than his issues and the difficulties he presents. 

Our sweet, clueless little Pea

Finally, Books Read Since January 1, 2022

 

1. Burke, Shannon. Into the Savage Country (fiction)

2. Flaubert, Gustave. Un Coeur Simple (fiction)

3. Paley, Grace. Fidelity (poetry)

4. Qoyawayma, Polingaysi (Elizabeth Q. White), as told to Vada F. Carlson. No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds (nonfiction)

5. Green, Ben K. A Thousand Miles of Mustangin’ (nonfiction)

6. Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land (fiction)