Michigan Winter-Spring

Wednesday there was ice. Freezing rain, sleet, call it what you will, it wore no body armor, nor did it carry lethal weapons! It was but a reminder to slow down and exercise caution. And after all, it is March in Michigan. By bedtime and the next morning, ground that had been briefly bare was again covered with snow. The bad news is that we have a blizzard warning for Sunday; however, the good news is that Thursday dawned clear and sunny, and the snowy, ice-covered world sparkled. Better than diamonds! No mining necessary! Ephemeral beauty is the best kind, isn’t it? “Everything is temporary!”

Yes, everything is temporary, grief is the price of love, and death is the price of life. 

    “It’s the bargain we made. No, we didn’t make it.” 

    “Someone else signed us up.”

True, I’m glad they did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. Because in this often sorrowful world, there is also joy. The world—life—is everything all at once, though our tiny minds can only focus on a small sliver at a time. 

Here’s some good news: Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new book coming out in October and has more or less promised to make another visit to Northport.

Here’s more good news: I have Fleda Brown’s new book of poems in stock NOW! It’s what you need, I assure you. I know I do.

        I am over the hump of the buying demographic.

I can drive my old car off the ends of the earth for all

anyone cares. The young are removing me from their

sight as if they were the first humans, inventing fire.

- Fleda Brown, “This Week,” in The End of the Clockwork Universe

The young cannot remember being old, as we old ones remember (so well!) being young. It doesn’t matter. The astonishing thing is how young the old can still feel—when glances meet, hands touch, the sun shines, winter aconites bloom, and a breeze lifts a thin lock of grey hair as if it were a girl’s raven-black bangs.

The other evening I thought I would read George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss but somehow couldn’t open the book and picked up instead Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker, a road trip story featuring an old woman and an old man, she with cancer and he with dementia. Does that sound depressing? It isn’t. There are moments of aching sweetness throughout the book, humor, suspense, and a tone of resolute determination that runs through the wife’s narration.

When does the last road trip come? How often do people know at the time that it’s their last ? 

My travels may be more modest from now on, but they are not over. My memory is not gone, either, and I am still making new, happy memories. Occasionally happiness feels selfish and self-indulgent, given all the tragedy in today’s world, but more often I feel that it is part of gratitude, an acknowledgement of the abundant gifts I have received, and I have many reasons to be grateful for my life, here in its eighth decade.

And do I want another spring? Am I impatient for its arrival? Oh, my friends, does a bear shit in the woods, and is the pope Catholic?!

P.S. Beautiful end to the sunny day here. 

It's Travel Time

WHAT month is it???

In northern Michigan there are, besides weekend tourists and short-term vacationers, summer people and “year-round” people. The year-rounders who can afford to make a getaway in late winter or early spring, though, are not shy about doing so, and who can blame them? Some take February or March in Florida or Mexico or the Caribbean. For years, before and between the Florida and Arizona winters, the Artist and I made more modest forays to Lake Huron on early spring weekends when March rolled around, because cabin fever isn’t just about getting to an exotic location. It’s more about seeing different scenery and different people. 

 

“But we didn’t even have winter this year.” 

 

“We had a month of winter (January).” 

 

“No, we had ten days. That’s all!”

 

Okay, and now February, typically the coldest month in northern Michigan, has been bringing us daytime temperatures in the 40s! Along with many others, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this month’s weather. It isn’t right, isn’t normal, it bodes ill for the future – and yet, in the present, it makes life easier and certainly (because of lower fuel bills and no plow bills at all) less expensive, which is hard not to appreciate. And who can complain about blue skies? Besides that, for me (and I know I’m not the only one) this time of year is a minefield of associations. Anniversaries after loss are ambushes along life’s road, in that you know they’re coming – looming inexorably -- but not the moment or hour or the manner they will hit. So with all of the financial and emotional possibilities threatening, I found unseasonable February warmth and sunshine more than helpful.  

While we still had snow --

Blue view --

Thanks to books, I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ireland and Scotland, France and Italy, some of it over a hundred years ago and some in more recent times. Fiction, nonfiction – one is as dreamy as the other, when it comes to exploring mountain villages, river sources, stone ruins, and local stories from local folks in faraway places. When March arrives, I’ll post my “Books Read” list for the month of February, with enough annotation to give an idea of each title’s contents for anyone who might be curious.

 

Leelanau County itself, though, provided me with antidotes to cabin fever. Monday, Presidents Day, was a bank holiday, so I had to go to Traverse City on Tuesday instead to take care of banking errands. By noon, though, I was already zipping out of town when the beautiful sunshine inspired me to detour to Good Harbor Bay, where Sunny and I walked on the beach! As close as I live to Lake Michigan, you would think beach-walking would be a frequent life activity for me, but somehow, unless I have company, time just seems to slip away. Well, not that day! I seized it!

Good Harbor, Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Again, the following day, Wednesday, the Artist’s birthday (he would have been 87, if still living), when I felt the need to do something special, Good Harbor was my choice. I'd first contemplated a stop at the Happy Hour for a beer on the way home, maybe even buying for whoever might happen to be sitting at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, but there was no way to include Sunny Juliet in that plan. And as it had on Tuesday, the sun was shining, the sky blue, so with sunset later and later every day, Sunny J. and I had plenty of time after I closed the bookstore at 3 o’clock to drive down to Good Harbor again, scenes of many memories and associations over the years.

Lake Michigan, Wednesday afternoon

Calm water

This is how I am traveling in February now. Books take me to other countries, and I take mini-vacations close to home with my dog, because, as the Artist loved to say, so often, “We live in a beautiful place,” and whatever the weather, every road of my county is saturated with memories, making it all the more beautiful. Travel time in my home county is any time, and any county drive is also time travel, my present brimming over with the past. 

Thursday morning fog -- beautiful!

 

Today’s postscript:

 

If audiobooks are your thing, please consider signing up to get yours from libro.fm – and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore. Your audiobooks won’t cost any more than they do if you buy from the online behemoth, but you will be supporting a small indie bookstore in northern Michigan. Thank you! And special thanks to those of you already ordering from libro.fm via Dog Ears Books!!!

Long Winter Nights

Little light, except as reflected off snow, and almost no color -- color comes further down.

 

We are past the winter solstice, so each night is shorter than the night before, but somehow in January it doesn’t feel that way to me. Daylight skies are grey, and cloud cover continuing through the night hides moon and stars, making darkness deeper, colder. Theoretically and no doubt actually, cloud cover would make night warmer if there were warmth to hold in, but that if is a big one. And daylight is not exactly a relief, either, when it means having to bundle up and go out in the cold, one of the few minuses of having a dog in winter. Or maybe it’s a plus, that having to wade through knee-deep snow and breathe cold, clean air, but, like the gradually shortening nights, it’s often hard to feel the positive aspect. 

"Are you putting on your coat?"

Beginning with the end of December and continuing through March come also for me difficult anniversaries. The Artist and I had to say goodbye to a dog we had all too briefly, and only weeks later came the Artist’s first trip to the local ER (we were in Arizona at the time), quickly followed by a jolting ambulance trip to Phoenix and, finally, major surgery. At first, that January two years ago, after successful surgery we thought everything was taken care of and were happily, if briefly (as it turned out), planning the rest of our life together. Respite from worry was short-lived. More trips to the ER, more surgery – and ultimately, the end of our earthly adventures together, March 2, 2022.

 

Scenes from those emotionally intense five to six weeks of my life are burned into memory, and while I can set them aside during the long, sunny, birdsong-filled days of spring and early summer and the busy, colorful days of late summer and fall, the dead of winter brings them all to the fore again. It isn’t that I reach intentionally for the most difficult remembrances. Hardly! When I wake with those scenes crowding in on me, I try to put myself back to sleep with happier memories, such as September walks in the grassy, hollyhock-lined alleys of Grand Marais, our dreamy travel through France another September, or the most ordinary summer Sunday spent mowing grass and moving cars and boats around the yard here at home. All those scenes and more I would welcome in dreams!

 

Meanwhile, in my waking hours, I take refuge in books.

 

Over the years, the Artist and I put together quite a little collection of books having to do with rivers and boats, and the one in which I sought solace during the season’s first massive storm was Henry Van Dyke’s Little Rivers, a collection of travel and flyfishing essays first copyrighted in 1895 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and first published in 1903. Van Dyke, an American cleric, writes of boyhood fishing and later travels with father, friends, wife, or by himself to various flowing waters in Canada and Europe, always with bamboo rod and “fly-book.”

 

His fishing was for trout and salmon or grayling. (Here I pause, because I have always thought grayling was a trout, not, as he describes it, some lesser, bottom-feeding fish, and now, looking into the matter, I see it is a salmon and considered very good eating.) But the most prized of all, for Van Dyke, is the ouananiche, “the famous land-locked salmon of Lake St. John” and other Canadian lakes. Don’t you love that name? Ouananiche!

 

Any fisherman would delight in Van Dyke’s description of waters and fishes and the stalking and hooking and landing – or sometimes losing – of piscatorial prizes. (Piscatorial: that’s the kind of old-fashioned language of this book from over a century ago.) For my own pleasure, I am equally pleased by his knowledge of wildflowers and birds and noting which appear in each season along the rivers he walks and fishes.

 

Even that is not all, however, as the book is a collection of memories, and as the author looks back on his happiest vacations his thoughts are colored by what Susan Cain calls bittersweetness, sometimes even recalled from the happy times themselves.

 

And yet, my friend and I confessed to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature’s loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever. 

 

Our Paradise, the Artist’s and mine, encompassed happy hours in a variety of places: A little trout stream in southwest Michigan prosaically known as the Mentha Drain; another unbeautifully named river, the Sucker, in the Upper Peninsula, its mouth meandering an always-changing watery path through woods and wetlands to Lake Superior; Leelanau County’s lovely Crystal River (despite the leeches that clung to us after we waded out); and our own little hidden-away, no-name creek, keeping its secrets until we followed it upstream after a storm to a miniature waterfall. There were the Allier and the Alagnon in France’s Auvergne region, rivers whose names we had never heard until our wandering brought us to their banks. And of course, principally – because of the many times we explored various stretches, never encountering another vessel or explorer – Van Buren County’s Paw Paw River, the “Little River” that gave that name (Little River Cafe) to a restaurant friends of ours had for a while in the town of Paw Paw.

 

During this lifetime, none of us ever “stays” in Paradise, but if we happen upon it now and then, we can count ourselves fortunate, and those are the memory scenes that I court during these long, dark, cold winter nights. Also, dark eventually gives way to daylight, if not always sunshine, and I have a ever-eager companion in the outdoor cold.

But my dog, while great, isn’t news, and I do have some very good news this week. On Tuesday, (one of my two by-chance-or-appointment days -- BCOA -- along with Monday), I came to the bookstore in hopes of a UPS delivery, and sure enough – my order of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters came! You can just imagine how happy that made me, and I know it will make many of my customers happy, too. In fact, one local woman walked in just after I had photographed the box of books and said immediately, “I want one!” And we’re off!

The books are here!

First one out the door!

Anniversary, Reading, Loss, Gratitude, Dog

Quiet reflections

First, Nice things people say,

or,

Thirty years is a long time 

 

I’ve been having a quiet 30^th anniversary summer in my bookstore. Setting up an anniversary guest book, however, was a happy inspiration. Not that everyone writes in it. In fact, I usually have to urge people to leave their marks after they say something that touches me, but I know looking over these pages in the future will mean a lot to me.

On the bookstore counter --

One young man last week said my bookstore had changed his life! He said he’d been addicted to online gaming but found a book here that started him off as a reader and that I had really “made a difference.” That blew me away! Another thanked me for being a “significant part of [his] childhood.” I remember him coming in with his grandparents years ago. A young family visiting Northport for their fourth year in a row told me Dog Ears Books is now a vacation tradition for them -- and all the children wrote their names in the book. It feels strange to see myself as an “institution,” but that’s how people talk, and thirty years, I realize, is a long time.

 

On Wednesday a man wearing a t-shirt from the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan told me I had a “good bookstore.” Coming from a rare book connoisseur, that was a nice compliment – though, no, he did not buy books. (I knew you’d want to know.) Others, though, have bought a lot of books. 

 

If you come in soon, please take time to leave a written remembrance. (At least your name!) And if you feel inclined, here’s one more thing you can do for my 30^th anniversary: send your friends the link to Books in Northport -- or to a particular post you think will mean something to them. Thanks for that, too.

 

 

My reading, from recent past to near future

 

I finished Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, which took me longer than usual because I read it in the original French. I’m now ordering the English translation for my bookstore, because I highly recommend this book. 

 

Following the last page of the novel in the Gallimard paperback (1974) is a notebook put together by the author as she looked back over the years of its creation. Yourcenar began with an idea for the book’s form (conversations among different characters of Hadrian’s time) but discarded that idea when she decided it didn’t work. More than once, discouraged, she abandoned the project. Once she burned notes she had made for the writing; another time finding notes for the novel inspired her to return to it. Conceived and begun in 1924, Mémoires d’Hadrien was finally published by Librarie Plon in 1958. It is a masterpiece.

 

There is a lesson in this for all who write: not to force or rush a book into print until the author is satisfied that it fulfills the promise of its conception.

 

I’ve been postponing opening the first page of Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, because I knew that once I did there would be no putting it down until the last page. I have read Year of Wonders; March; Caleb’s Crossing; and People of the Book, so how could I resist a novel by Brooks with a horse at its center?

This morning (early, dark, rainy) I looked online to check Brooks titles and saw – did I know this and forget? – that she was married to Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz, who died “suddenly” (probable heart attack) at age 60. They had had a long, very happy marriage. I found and watched on my phone an interview with Horwitz about his book Spying on the South and then listened to another man talking about meeting Horwitz during the author’s research for what became Confederates in the Attic, and I vowed to read both books soon (though not before Horse). But what I really wanted to know was how Brooks was affected by her husband’s unexpected death and how she went on without him, so I kept searching until I found answers.

 

(Note I say ‘death’ rather than ‘passing’ and ‘died’ rather than ‘passed,’ because for me that’s part of facing what I see as reality, though I realize others see it differently.)

 

Brooks and Horwitz were married for 35 years. She told an interviewer, “We were so lucky until we weren’t,” and those words brought tears to my eyes. She spoke of how happy she always was when Tony came home from wherever he’d been and the “fun” could begin again. For a year following his death, her work on Horse interrupted by the tragic loss, she was unable to write, but she eventually returned to the project, believing that work, as Ruth Bader Ginsberg had advised someone else, would “see her through.” 

Brooks, who started riding only at age 59, now has a horse named Valentine. She has a dog. She has a son. And she has gratitude for the life she and Tony had together for all those years. 

 

I have written before on this blog that I not only feel gratitude for my life with the Artist but am grateful for it – yes, grateful for the gratitude, though that may sound strange – but take no credit for the feeling, because it is not an attitude I worked to achieve. Rather, it is a gift that my life with him has given me, on top of all the other gifts (including Sunny Juliet). And so, having lost my love but as a bookseller with a literary life, as the mother of a son (and stepmother to other lovely humans), with a dog companion, and loving (though not having) horses, I now feel a closeness to an Australian author I will probably never meet. Her writing life and work, like Yourcenar’s, along with gratitude and memories, help to light my way.

 

 

Dog stuff

 

Sunrise over Northport from New Bohemian Cafe

Waukazoo Street was quiet on the Tuesday after the Northport Dog Parade. The reason was not hard to find: New Bohemian Café was taking a well-deserved break. The crew was back at work on Wednesday, however, and I was a near-sunrise customer, treating myself to breakfast (and sharing with Sunny) before we went for our weekly early morning agility lesson. In the photos below, Sunny is just exploring and warming up before our teacher arrives. When the real lesson started, we worked too hard for photographs. 

Sunny is jumping the hurdles at 20 inches now and getting more comfortable with the teeter-totter (set lower for her than in this photo when she was only exploring it). We have even started the first exercises that will eventually lead to weaving, the hardest equipment for dogs to master, as it’s like nothing they would have to do in nature. Agility work, as I see it, is not an alternative to social skills but perhaps an adjunct, in that my dog and I have to work as a team, and she has to look to me for guidance. We need to work more directly on that social stuff, but we’ll get there. She is a good dog. And, as I sometimes tell her, “We’re stuck with each other.”

 

My Bookish Life and the Great Outdoors

On the shelf? Answer to question below?

Where Do We Belong?

 

When I posted a couple of photos of my yard and gardens, and a similarly inclined friend commented, I replied to her comment, “Isn’t our real life outdoors?” and she replied, “It’s where we belong.” Ah, but this friend also has a bookstore, so this morning I was thinking, But our books belong indoors – most of the time, at least, except when we’re reading one under a tree or by the edge of the lake or something. It's a booklover’s/outdoor woman's conundrum! And then there is bedtime reading and winter reading, cozy indoors. But right now it’s still summer….

 

 

Library Friends: FOLTL and Me, 2023

 

The last two events of the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library Summer Author Series kept up the standard set by earlier presenters, Dave Dempsey, author of Great Lakes for Sale,* and Jacob Wheeler, author of Angel of the Garbage Dump. Sarah Shoemaker and Soon-young Yoon enlightened and educated their assembled audiences as they entertained. Discussion following was deep in both cases, history with Sarah, policy with Soon-Young.

Below, from left to right, are (first) Sarah Shoemaker, author of Children of the Catastrophe; Silvia Gans, FOLTL president; and Suzanne Landes, past president. In the second photo, again left to right, are Soon-young Yoon, author of Citizen of the World; Beth Verhey, her interviewer for the evening; Julie Alpers-Preneta, Leelanau Township Librarian; and Pamela Grath of Dog Ears Books. Mimi and Joel Heberlein provided the venue this summer, the Willowbrook Mill on Mill Street.

FOLTL is Friends of the Leelanau Township Library. After losing my long-time volunteer to retirement this year, as well as the more global and permanent loss of my husband last year, I have not hosted author events in the bookstore/gallery myself, content to promote and attend FOLTL events and offer those authors’ books for sale following their presentations. I do, however, have two poets scheduled for the day of Leelanau UnCaged, last Saturday in September – scheduled on the day, that is, with reading time not yet set. Fleda Brown and Michael Delp will be here that Saturday, and you won’t want to miss them.

 

 

Bookish Temptations

 

I have not yet let myself even open Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, because if I do, I won’t be able to stop reading, and all the books I’m halfway through will feel justifiably slighted. That’s what happened when I picked up The Hearts of Horses, by Molly Gloss, a book I highly recommend. I mean, horses!!! But also, her writing so impressed me that I not only ordered paperback copies of that title but two others of hers, as well, confident that they will also be wonderful. 

Wonderful also is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, which I had never attempted until recently and am now about halfway through. She published that literary tour de force (historical fiction) in France at the age of 48 but had been writing it off and on for a decade. Never having been a great reader of historical fiction in general or an amateur of the Roman Empire, I am surprised at how involved I have become in the life and times of Hadrian, fictionally imagined by a 20^th-century woman. Yourcenar was admitted to the Académie française in 1980, the first woman to receive that honor. She deserved it!

 

 

My Nonliterate Sidekick

 

Sunny Juliet has no interest whatsoever in books but is excelling at agility. This week she did not only jumps and tunnels but teeter-totter (“Teeter!”) and the bridge (“Walk it!”). By summer’s end she will probably be introduced to the weave poles, though proficiency at weaving is the most difficult agility challenge, as it’s nothing dogs would have any reason to do ordinarily. But I can't photograph her at work because we are working the course together....

Don't let the sleepy act fool you. She is ready to go on a moment's notice!

I asked our instructor (Sunny and I work as a team, and I have as much to learn as she does) if the idea of the dog agility course came from equestrian events, and he said one trainer he worked with started out as a horse trainer but found over the years that he had fewer and fewer students, so when he observed that everyone has dogs, he turned his attention to working with people and their canine companions. 

Ready!

What’s in a Phrase? “It's the Berries!”

 

\

Black raspberries were so plentiful this year that they threatened to bury me alive. (They are winding down now at last.) Sunny liked to “pick” them right off the canes with her dog lips, and I encouraged the help. Get those low berries, girl, so the momma won’t have to! Recently I noticed blackberry canes at one end of one of my raspberry patches, and that’s encouraging, because the main wild blackberry patch – enormous in extent, prolific in fruiting – is too close to orchard trees for me to risk gathering sprayed fruit. Even closer to the house red raspberries and red gooseberries are appearing, and I’ve been ridding them of competition in hopes they will multiply. 

“It’s the berries” is slang that was outdated when I was young, along with “the cat’s meow” or "the bee's knees," but really, don’t those expressions sound kinder and gentler than saying something is “the bomb” or that so-and-so “killed it” with a performance? And then, of course, there is the song. Take a listen: it will make you smile.

No books here -- what gives?

Recent Bookish Losses 

 

One “old Leland” friend who died recently was Barb Nowinsky, the first Leelanau County librarian I ever knew by name and could call a friend. That made me sad. 

 

*Another loss was Bob Giles, former editor and publisher of the Detroit News, a journalist many of my friends knew as a beloved boss, and the author (most recently) of When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later, published in 2020 and very much still worth reading. Bob was in Northport only five weeks ago, when he interviewed Dave Dempsey, author of Great Lakes for Sale, in the first of four FOLTL Summer Author Series events and one Bob dedicated to his late wife, Nancy, a strong library supporter. His body was failing, but his mind was strong and sharp. I'm glad that my last memory of him will be that one.

 

 

Another Point of View on Death and Loss

 

My experience of encountering memories along every mile of every county road is hardly unique to me. Sometimes it breaks my heart, other times I find it comforting. A friend reported another friend’s young child observing the phenomenon thusly: “First you’re here, then you’re everywhere.” I like that thought. For me, Leelanau County is crowded with friends, some still living, others departed but not gone from my memory. I'm glad they are still "everywhere," though no longer here at my side.

Recovery, Phase 2: Nesting

This is what I came home to.

No, you didn’t miss Phase 1. I was too exhausted to see straight during Phase 1, much less write a blog post, having driven twelve hours on Saturday to arrive home after dark and collapse in a heap. Luckily for me, a good friend who used to teach school in Baltimore and come home to Leelanau for the summer, remembering how she felt after all her twice-annual packing and driving, invited me to dinner the next two evenings. Thanks to Susan, on my third morning home I felt nearly human again. 

The first, pointillist green flush in the woods. I wish there were a pause button for this moment.

Unpacking car and bags and boxes, putting things away, clearing clutter left last November, and beginning – only beginning, so far – to deal with sawdust in living room and porch (thanks to a big and very welcome project that took place, surprisingly, in my absence), I find that deciding what to do first, then what to do next, is about all that occupies my mind right now. I'm cleaning up my nest for the season ahead. But with weather as beautiful as it has been the last couple of days, indoor tasks get pushed to the back burner while I work outdoors, pruning berry canes and picking up branches, spreading compost and mowing grass, all tasks Sunny Juliet considers nothing but interruptions in our real northern Michigan country life, which in her mind is chasing tennis balls! 

"Get with the program, Mom!"

Errands, too, of course: banking, paying bills and taxes, updating car and dog licenses, laying in groceries and other supplies, and on and on and on – all part of settling into our little home nest again, Sunny and the momma.

 The whole Leelanau world is blooming and nesting, it seems. And as always, the month of May is speeding by way too fast.

What with everything that taking leave of Arizona entailed, then the drive of over 2,000 miles, and now the work of re-entry, come sunset I’m looking for bedtime reading that prepares me for sleep by silencing the ever-growing to-do lists in my head. (Challenging ideas and deep thinking can wait.) Currently I’m alternating a re-reading of Adele Crockett Robertson’s The Orchard with Anne Tyler’s French Braid: a couple chapters of Robertson’s story first, about trying to keep her family farm in business -- and thus in the family -- during the Depression years, then as much of Tyler novel as I can absorb before Morpheus claims me. 

One more note on my cross-country trip, solo except for canine copilot, and on my life in general. I am not “brave.” Soldiers and support staff and journalists going into war zones are brave. Hiking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail could qualify. Going to law school. Donating a kidney -- which means you leave yourself without a spare. It takes courage to make such choices and face the uncertain outcomes. All I’m doing is putting one foot in front of the other, doing each day as much as possible of what needs to be done. The unexpected occurs, one deals with it. It’s just life. 

The second time we married each other, we both cried with joy.

What I notice, though, going into my second year alone, is that life for me has flattened out considerably. Morning birdsong makes me smile, as does my dear little dog, but nothing gives me the piercing joy that so many moments brought in my life with the Artist. On the other hand, panic and despair have become more or less distant abstractions rather than, as far too often in years past, my immediate response to difficult situations. Is this good or bad? Or, as I always say of life in general, just another double-edged sword? Call it what you will, it seems to be where I am now, and there are worse places to be. 

Loving family and friends, a constant canine companion, beautiful northern Michigan spring – I can deal with these days, full as they are with hard work. 

Always nearby.

But I miss my love. In our years together, we often spent time apart. When we lived in Kalamazoo, I would stay behind to work while he went north as often as possible. Our early winters in Leland, he drove to Florida and I stayed home to write. But he always came back. So it isn't being alone, working alone, that is so dreadful -- though when we were together, working or playing together, that was always the best. The awful part now is knowing that he isn't coming back. And still not quite being able to believe it.

"Forget me not."

I never will.