I don't have much to say.

Last night, the last night of this year’s Hanukkah; tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.

Lights! Light! The winter solstice behind us, we now have one or two minutes of additional daylight every day.

Cards and letters, greetings, gifts and gatherings. 

This is the good news—and while there is all too much of the other kind, this morning I am focusing on light and love and life and wishing the same for each of you this holiday season at another year’s end. We will never have this day again.

Back at Last

 

…Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was filled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snowflake and cedar frond, every fox and goldfinch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. 

 

-      Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

 

It’s coming again, our Great Lakes winter. Or is it? Last winter we had a little snow in January and none to speak of (at least, none to plow) other than that. Then spring 2024 was early and wet, and after that summer descended into drought, a long, dry spell that, while it lasted into early autumn, did nothing to dull the fall colors, which were seemed to go on and on and on until November winds came to strip branches and topple trees, until now, here we are looking for snow. There was a bit on the ground Thursday morning, our first, but it didn’t last long, and our long-range forecast is for a “wet” winter, 40-50% chance of wetter-than-average weather, as in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, and hail. Does that mean the yo-yo continues to bounce back and forth, never a settled season? 

 

Whatever the weather, winter's increased darkness always brings an increase in indoor reading time. More on that in a minute, but for now I hope you noticed that Jerry Dennis's sentences are as savory and mouth-watering as the moments they describe.

One January day in 2024 -- real winter!

Where have I been?

 

Since September 13, 2007, my initial post on Books in Northport, this is the longest I’ve gone between postings, the most recent one before this dated October 29, 2024. The main reason for the long hiatus was the death of my laptop screen. I tried one day to work from my phone, posting directly to the Blogger platform, rather than working through a Word draft first, then uploading it, the result not quite an unmitigated disaster but when done at last I realized -- too late! -- that I’d uploaded to my photo blog rather than either this (primarily, or at least initially) book blog or even my dedicated bookstore blog. (Here is where that post ended up, for those of you who never happened on it.) With the laptop, I could have rectified the error easily. Of course, with the laptop I wouldn’t have been posting from my phone in the first place. 

 

Then one day last week a friend called and said, “I need your blog!” She clarified by adding, “I mean, I need you to write something new!” So now that I have a clean new screen and keyboard at my disposal (and all my old programs and files right where I want them, too), I’m jumping back in. Perhaps not a peak performance, but at least something to indicate that there still are books in Northport!

And bookmarks!

 

Still reading – and rereading

 

Away from my email for three weeks (that part, I have to admit, felt like kind of a vacation), I made a few feeble stabs at handwritten notes for a future blog post and kept my “Books Read” list up-to-date with handwritten additions but didn’t bother with long descriptions of or reflections on the books added to the list. I also wrote a few letters to distant friends, made notes about new books to order for the shop, and set aside Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi to reread Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, one of my favorites among his novels, which inspired me to pull RL’s Dream off the shelf next, a Mosley novel I read so long ago it was as if I were reading it for the first time. With the main character a musician originally from the South, and with Mosley’s brilliant sentences, I sensed many echoes of Albert Murray. There was also a historical novel squeezed in there, a 24-hour spell with The War Began in Paris, in which a former Mennonite woman from the American Midwest, working as a small-time journalist, becomes entangled with another American woman journalist with Fascist sympathies, glamor and excitement dulling her sense of danger. 

 

Oh, the world, the world! Even in fiction, there is no escaping it! Not that escape should be a relentless quest. Understanding, empathy, living other lives in other skins – that’s the magic offered us in fiction, don’t you think? I’m curious what my readers have to say on this topic, especially as not long ago I stumbled on a website where a writer proclaimed something like “Life is too short to read depressing books,” and her readers all agreed in their comments that they wanted nothing but escape from novels and therefore avoided any book that received a major prize and/or had been recommended by Oprah! Novels without conflict, characters without challenges? To me, this is a peculiar narrowing of the entire idea of reading, although I certainly understand the need at times for “happy endings.” But what do you think?

 

? ? ?

 

A little “playing tourist” –

My son and his wife came up for three nights, making for cheery alterations to my usual schedule. After their Monday of hiking Whaleback and tasting at Tandem Ciders while I took Sunny to the dog park and did a bit of housework, the three of us reconvened for dinner. Having company is inspiration to the cook in her tiny Paris kitchen: On Sunday evening there was a curried soup made from Hubbard squash and coconut milk; Monday’s vegetable dish of cauliflower and mushrooms with parsley exceeded my expectations, and the leftovers were even delicious cold. As for the rice pudding, while it was hardly a failure, next time I’ll let the rice steam much longer so that it disappears a bit more into the custard.

Tuesday the three of us went out together, visiting Samaritan’s Closet in Lake Leelanau and the Polish Art Center in Cedar before dinner at Dick’s Pour House in the evening. Shopping! Dinner out! Not things I usually do on my own, and it was even more fun to know that Ian and Kim were enjoying their little Up North vacation. Kathleen at the PAC in Cedar is delightful, too, as is her shop. 

Deer season and outdoor dog activity

 

Sunny and I are challenged in our outdoor time during firearm deer season, although she has no idea why mornings are different. When it isn’t raining, we still have tennis ball play in the yard or even in the two-track, but there is no off-leash running along the edge of the woods these days. All the more reason, then, to take Sunny to the dog park when I can. But the extra round trip to Northport is only worthwhile on days my bookshop is closed (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), as the morning’s first regulars don’t arrive early enough to provide Sunny with playmates if we get there at nine o’clock. By ten, though, we can usually count on another Aussie, a couple of Pyrenees, a Bernadoodle and a smooth-coated collie. A few times there was a little fierce barking (some from my Naughty Girl, some from others), but a tennis ball hurled through the air quickly distracts everyone from conflict. And it is so good to see dogs running off-leash!

  

New Books: Arriving Soon!

 

My new book order, usually sent in on Mondays, finally (after not happening at all for a couple of weeks) got done on Thursday this week, a bigger order than usual, making up for weeks missed. There will be an assortment of new board books for the pre-reading crowd of babies; a fun book of dog poems for “kids” of all ages; Robin Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, as well as a version of Braiding Sweetgrass for young adults; a couple editions of Wind in the Willows for those who need to re-immerse in it or discover it for the first time; and, as usual, a few surprises. The order should come in early next week, so I may be in the shop on days you’d expect me not to be there, because opening boxes of new books is a delight not to be postponed but indulged as soon as possible.

The run on jigsaw puzzles has already begun, though, so don't wait too long to make your selections for those long winter evenings ahead.

  

And the season rushes on!

 

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving already -- the best, I always think, of American holidays, being all about gratitude rather than hoopla. Hoopla fun will come two days later, though, never fear, with Saturday evening’s lighting of the Christmas tree in Northport and a visit from Santa – and then the race is on! Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25 this year and continues to January 2, with Kwanzaa from December 26 to January 1, so the end of one year and entry into the next will be rich with holidays. 

 

We need our holidays. We need to shift focus from competition to celebration, from conflict to love. We need festive lights during the shortest days and longest, darkest nights of the year. We also need to take time to remember those in less fortunate circumstances (far too many!) and do what we can with our end-of-year contributions. Writing those checks, like writing a holiday letter or addressing cards to friends, is a good December ritual.

A couple of longer bookstore days

 

My 11 a.m. -3 p.m. hours will be subject to some stretching for the days following Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how late I’ll be open on Friday, November 29, but I’d love to see local shoppers in my bookstore on that day, and if there are enough of them, I’ll be happy to stay open as late as 5 p.m. 

Indie Bookstore Day!

The next day, Saturday, will definitely be a later business day, as Northport's tree lighting doesn’t take place until 6 p.m., and I don't want to miss that!

Lights are strung, ornaments are on. All systems are GO for a week from Saturday!

“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like…”

Early morning, and I sit happily here under my Christmas tree! It’s only a foot and a half tall, but it perches atop one of my bookcases, so when I sit in the closest chair to that bookcase, as I am doing this morning, I look up at the lighted tree above. Yes, lighted! Our grandson’s family sent a string of tiny battery-operated lights just the right size for an 18” tree, so after sunset last night and early this morning I turned on the tree lights and am absurdly pleased. Adding to the effect and my happiness is the shape of the lights: each one is a miniature Eiffel Tower!

Next to the tree, what started out as a neat stack of holiday cards (actually, in the beginning I was standing them up until there were too many for the space) is now a sweet, slippy, messy pile, telling me every time I look that way that faraway friends have remembered me. There are also little presents that arrived early, and rather than put them away I arranged them on top of the bookcase where they make me smile, reminding me of family who love me.

 

On the table are pots of poinsettias that a neighbor bought for a dinner party and then passed along to me. So bright and beautiful! 

As is true for so many of you, I was happy to have the winter solstice arrive and to know that our hours of daylight will now grow longer and longer, but at the same time, with lights on my little tree I look forward to the dark of evening and don’t mind the dark of early morning, either. 

 

Funny how much difference a few tiny lights can make, isn’t it? 

Happy Holidays –

Let your little lights shine!

Wrapping, Unwrapping, and Wrapping Up the Old Year

Good morning! Last dawn of 2019!

In the days preceding Christmas, my writing desk displayed a row of colorful gift bags for local Arizona friends and neighbors. “Would you like me to find a box you could put those in,” the Artist asked, “so you wouldn’t be so crowded?” I thanked him but declined the offer. “I like to look at them,” I told him. For me, those colorful bags went some distance toward making up for the lack of the fragrant Fraser or balsam fir I would have had back in northern Michigan.

Outgoing gifts, only partially reflected in memorabilia-crowded mirror

Incoming gifts -- and ours to open!

Over on my bookshelf was a substitute “tree,” a shorter, less elaborate mesquite branch than the one I found and used last year, but something, at least, on which to hang Moravian folded paper stars and other ornaments from sisters and friends. I also cleared the remaining top of the bookcase of other items to make room for gift bags from sisters and friends. In that way, my book and writing corner served, for a little while, as our Christmas corner. 

lighting my corner of the darkness

Because I don’t know about you, but when the short, dark days of December roll around, I “need a little Christmas,” and I’m completely sympathetic to Jo March’s complaint that “Christmas [wouldn’t] be Christmas without any presents!” Poor as those “little women” felt, yet they managed to scrounge up gift surprises for each other and for their mother, and in my frugal life it means a lot to me to be able to do the same. 

Still in Michigan, and starting way back in summertime, I had great fun thinking up and making and buying little things and making a happy collection of items for the bags I would later assemble. But I’m lucky. I have sisters! The Artist thinks my gift bags are a “girl thing,” and maybe they are. I do know that my sisters and I have a wonderful time finding and buying things for each other. “Oh, Bettie will love this,” Deborah will say to me as we stand together in her friend’s gift shop, and I agree. “You’re right. That’s perfect for her!”

Gifts on any occasion need not be expensive or elaborate or enormous to say “I love you” to recipients. It is indeed the thought that counts. But giving tangible body to the thought counts, too, I find. For instance, my sisters and I typically give each other cute socks, tee shirts, books, holiday ornaments, and kitchen items, and whenever I put on a shirt or pair of socks from a sister, or pick up a book or admire an ornament or use something in my kitchen that a sister gave me, I think of that sister, and she is right there with me. The gift keeps on giving!

New shirt from a sister!

New socks from a sister!

New apron from a sister!

more new, heavenly soft shirts

Sometimes, surprisingly people other than the givers are with me, too, through gifts I receive. Such is the case with a book one sister sent me this year, a book of poetry by the cousin-in-law of a friend of the Artist’s and mine. I have yet to meet Cele Bona, but her poems are powerful, and her name and relationship to our late friend Al Bona, himself a friend we also admired for his poetic gifts, brings Al to mind, though he has been gone for years.

Years! They pass so quickly! Some years I send Christmas cards, other years New Year’s cards, and sometimes no cards at all. But the truth is that I enjoy buying bright postage stamps and taking stacks of cards to the post office almost as much as I enjoy going in with gift packages to mail. I often think of a friend who hated going to the post office (and now there are ways to avoid the p.o. altogether), but whether I’m at home in Northport, Michigan, or in Willcox, Arizona, the post office is almost always a delightful stop for me. I love the way the United States Postal Service connects us all, and when I go to the p.o. I feel that connection, a little the way I feel it when I go to my precinct voting place in northern Michigan (where I’m happy to say we use paper ballots!). We’re all in this together, these places say to me. We may be far apart in the moment, but these places, these rituals, these bits of paper and other stuff provide us with tangible links to each other.

A friend back home collects our mail and sends it on to us.

[Reminder: Gifts can be wrapped in brightly colored recyclable tissue or reusable cloth. Paper envelopes that hold cards can be recycled, and the cards themselves can be repurposed. Besides, it’s only once a year!] 

But just as I never tell anyone, friend or bookstore customer, “You have to read this book!” -- I only make suggestions or offer ideas -- so I do not intend to guilt-trip anyone into buying or giving Christmas presents. Whether or not one celebrates this holiday or any other, giving presents in the U.S. is, like so many other decisions in this freedom-loving country, an individual choice. Neither am I going to go all religious here (wouldn’t that be inappropriate?!) and dwell on the Infant as God’s gift or the gifts the wise men brought to the Infant, because the truth is that for centuries even Christians did not celebrate Christmas or exchange gifts. Is Dickens responsible for kicking off the holiday we all know today as “traditional”? Who knows, and what does it matter? Philosopher I may be, but there are some things I don’t want to argue about, and Christmas is one of them. 

And just as I will not guilt-trip anyone into giving gifts, neither do I intend to let anyone guilt-trip me into abstaining from gift-giving. I love that part of Christmas! I love looking for, thinking about, finding, selecting, buying, making, planning, wrapping and giving gifts for Christmas! It is a big part of my holiday joy. No colorfully wrapped packages? How sad! Maybe someday I will be an old lady in a nursing home, hunched up in a rocking chair and unable to indulge myself in what is, for me, a very modest seasonal orgy, but until then I’m not giving it up! 

For now, though, all the wrapped gifts have been unwrapped to exclamations of delight, bright bags and tissue are put away for another year, socks and tee shirts tucked into drawers, and soon it will be time to take down the ornaments and stow those in cupboards and closets, time to unplug and remove lights from the cabin windows. — But no, maybe I’ll leave those lights up a while longer. They are such tiny lights, such brave little lights, after all, and we do need our courage and indications of each other’s loving presence as we go into another new year, don’t we? So with that in mind, here is my wish for family and friends and everyone in the world, known to me or unknown: 

Amid the challenges and struggles that another year will certainly bring, may we find also hours and days of joy and gratitude and love, and may we return again and again to a calm center of peace. 

Happy new year, one and all!

Not All Lights Are Out!

Not frozen yet

Kathie &Barbara

The last day of our 2018 season, Friday, November 30, was a good day at Dog Ears Books. Many friends stopped in to enjoy cookies, shop the sale, and exchange wishes for a good winter and happy holidays. Serendipitous encounters occurred, also, such as this one between a local reader and this year’s bestselling local author. And about those bestsellers, here are the top-selling titles for the past three years at Dog Ears Books:

Bestsellers, 2016-18

2016 was a tie between Kathleen Stocking’s The Long Arc of the Universe and Jim DuFresne’s Trails of M-22. 

In 2017 Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester came out on top early in the season and stayed there all year.

And for 2018, the #1 book in Northport was easily Barbara Stark-Nemon’s Hard Cider. 

Congratulations to these hard-working and very deserving authors!

As Friday drew to a close and quiet descended over the village of Northport, holiday lights shining against the dark were an irresistible temptation. Though we will not be on hand this year for Christmas and New Year’s, I’m glad we’ve had a chance to enjoy the beginning of the holiday season with local friends. And I also want all my readers to know that there are still  several pockets of lively activity in Northport. One of them (featured in the novel Hard Cider, by the way) is Sally Coohon’s shop, Dolls and More. Stopping in on Friday morning while Bruce took charge of sales at the bookstore, I found Sally providing guidance and support to a local man making a memorial quilt with his beloved late dog’s scarves. 

Working on the backing

Memorial quilt top

Twinkling holiday lights rest on poinsettia quilt

One small corner of Sally's treasure island of materials!

So much going on everywhere!

Sally offers instruction in quilting, knitting, stamping, and holiday crafts, and her shop is warm and cozy and welcoming, a most cheery place to spend time when the weather outside is frightful.

The Artist and I will be spending our winter in a place even quieter than Northport, out in that Arizona ghost town I chronicled in 2015 and again in early 2018. What will winter be like in Cochise County this time around? How will our friends at home in Leelanau fare in terms of snow, ice, and cold? And what exciting books, new and old, will come our way in the months ahead? There again I trust to serendipity and wish a sleighful of it to all of you!