Color/Light and Home in Autumn

 

 All the color that you see is light, pure and simple. And when there is no light there is no color. We think we see colored things, and in a sense we do. However, it is more accurate to say that we see the colored light reflected, transmitted, or emitted by things. It is the light alone that we see, not the things themselves. Thus our only visual contact with things is through light, light that enters our eyes.

 

…The only colors that we see are light, and as we are seeing them this light is falling on the retinas of our eyes. Were it not for light and the light-sensitive retina, we would see no color at all. Remember: color is light.

 

-      Ralph Hattersley, Beginner’s Guide to Color Photography

 

 

The Artist and I used to have frequent conversations about color and light. In my graduate philosophy classes, I learned to categorize color as a ‘secondary quality,’ that is, a quality not inherent in objects but created from interaction between objects and our senses, or, as Hattersley writes, between the “things themselves” and the retinas of our eyes--which leaves out the brain’s interpretation, but you get the point. Quick review of primary and secondary qualities, ignoring subsequent challenges to the distinction, can be found here. 

 

There are certain seasons, certain sensual prompts, that take me back to the Home Place. Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. In autumn one is treated to an orgy of sights, sounds, and smells that can be wonderfully overwhelming. … The tired sameness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories. In those days of crispness I want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever. 

 

-      J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature

 

 

Of all the seasons, autumn for me is the most deeply drenched in memory, the most saturated (even in its colorful dress) with poignancy and longing for what will never be again. And yet, it is not only September getaways and “county cruises” with the Artist that haunt me, but long walks home from first grade, university classes, my son’s baby and toddler years, past dogs, and so on, split-second images from years ago flashing, superimposed, on achingly beautiful scenes of the present. And yet (again, “and yet”!), fall is so beautiful, whether colors are shining in the sun or gleaming in the rain—or, as last Sunday evening, sleeping in the dark while an old ivory crescent moon lit my way home—that despite the pangs, I find myself wanting to gather up every moment of it and hold it tight, as if it could be harvested to carry through the monochromatic weeks ahead.

 

More than anything else, the degree of satisfaction to be gained from a life rooted in home depends on the strength of one’s conviction that there is nothing better down the road. Betterment comes from within a person, not from within geography. But I believe that had I not left home for awhile [sic], I would not have been completely convinced of that. There would always have been a lingering question in my mind: Would life somewhere else have been more pleasant?

 

-      Gene Logsdon, You Can Go Home Again

 

I had an interesting conversation today with a younger woman whose dream of country living in Leelanau County did not bring her the contentment it brought me. Perhaps it was the commotion of extensive remodeling added to raising three children in it that broke the marriage’s back. Whatever it was, taking care of the farmhouse and acreage on her own proved much more work than she wanted, and she is happier now (divorced, the house sold) with a lighter load of responsibility. She is also particularly hungry for travel. 

The two of us realized that our present situations and feelings, hers and mine, are diametrically opposite. I don’t know if I will ever travel again, if it involves flying and leaving my dog and/or the borders of my country. (Day trips with my dog are another matter.) Even on the rare occasions when I go out for an hour or two in the evening, I often look forward to coming home to Sunny again before I’ve gotten out the driveway. 

I have traveled to other places and lived in other places (I still miss those winters in Cochise County, Arizona), but where I am now is home. “We’re very lucky to have a home,” I tell Sunny.

Sunny seems to agree. At least, she isn’t complaining. And we will get through the winter together.

With a little help from our friends!

Very Important Postscript: Identity of November guest author has been revealed on my Northport Bookstore News blog! I will post more about the author's new book on this blog before his appearance on Nov. 12. 

Home, Travel, Memory, Stories

Wednesday morning, 12/11/24

Warning: By the time I got to the end of this post, a couple of days after it began, even I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten from the starting point to the arrival point. -- But then, or I should say now, the arrival point has changed from an end to a way station, as I've added a section of reflection on the next novel I read. 

Bear with me, please. It's that time of year....

Odysseus went off to the Trojan war and after that spent another decade wandering the seas, encountering monsters and other challenges, including the sorceress Circe, who seduced and held him captive for a year on her island. (He liked it, he liked it!) Finally breaking free of her spell, he made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope, who had been fending off suitors all the while. In his novel L’ignorance, author Milan Kundera asks, now that Homer’s hero has returned after an absence of twenty years, does anyone in Ithaca want to hear about his adventures? Will Odysseus feel at home again after such a long absence, glad to be back at last? What is the truth of homecoming? And what about memories of his past life in Ithaca? Do any two people ever have identical memories, even of experiences they shared?

 

When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, veterinarian Joseph fled Prague and established himself in Denmark, taking a Danish wife. She later died, but Joseph feels his life with her continues in Denmark. Irena, another Czech emigrant, made a new life in Paris, feeling freer there to be herself than she ever had felt in her native country under the influence of her strong mother. Neither Joseph nor Irena felt a strong need or urge to return to Prague, but Joseph’s wife had pressed him, as did Irena’s best friend in Paris, to go home again. It was only natural! And so each undertakes the journey, neither planning a permanent return. 

 

At the start of her journey to Prague, Irena recognizes Joseph in the airport, and he, responding to her friendly smile, pretends he remembers her, as well. Both will busy with family and old friends in Prague, but finally they manage to find time to share a meal, during which the easy familiarity of speaking the Czech language, their native tongue, draws them together dizzily, along with the similarity of their separate experiences with their old acquaintances. Joseph, however, just as he remembered differently or failed to remember altogether events and conversations his brother brought up in conversation, has no memory of a former encounter with Irena, a long-ago meeting that is important and vivid in her memory.

 

Often my two younger sisters will reminisce about something in our family life that I don’t remember at all, and I’ll say, “Maybe that was after I was gone.” Or they will have news of someone from school days. “Didn’t you know her older sister?” I don’t know. Did I? I’ve been gone for – well, never mind how long….

 

Joseph’s family in Prague asked no questions about Denmark or even about his wife. What is most real to him lacks any interest at all for them. Irena also found herself frustrated at the lack of curiosity old Czech friends show in the life she successfully created for herself in France. She brought French wine for a party, and her friends snub her by ordering beer. Kundera notes that Odysseus had had two decades of adventures, but why would the people in Ithaca care for the stories he could tell? His adventures had been no part of their life! 

 

A couple of local friends stopped by the bookshop on Friday and persuaded me to put a sign on the door and come with them to the New Bohemian Café for lunch, their treat. The village streets were practically deserted, so I let my arm be twisted. (It didn’t take much.) Both these friends, husband and wife, are readers, and both have also been world travelers, so when we compared notes on our current reading and I shared with them Kundera’s insights into travelers’ returns, they both laughed in recognition. “That is the truth!” 

 

In 2025, the Artist will appear in a Gallimard title. Stay tuned!

I’ll need to re-read I’ignorance again very soon. Not only is mine the French edition, but Kundera changes characters and settings from one section to the next within a chapter, without giving indication of who the speakers are in dialogue. Since there are several other characters besides the two I’ve discussed here, that can be challenging for a reader. Where are we? In what time period? Who is speaking to whom? I found myself turning back pages again and again, trying to figure out where I was. 

 

Years ago (okay, decades ago), in the company of an elderly woman who was living far from the places she had grown up and lived and whose memory regularly dredged up only half a dozen or fewer incidents from her younger days, the present nothing to her but a blooming, buzzing confusion, I thought how important it is to grow old in a place where other people share at least some of your memories. Now Kundera points out what should have been obvious to me from conversations with my sisters, which is that no two people ever have the same memory of anything. And yet I still think that if I share a general frame of reference with someone, we will have a lot to talk about, however much we may disagree on the details. Neighbors long gone, children who have grown up and moved away, businesses from the old days, the history of local buildings, local secrets that eventually came to light and when and how we learned them – all this and more does not have to remembered exactly as another remembers it to be subject matter for absorbing conversation. At least, that is true for me in conversation with my sisters, with old friends in Kalamazoo, with Leelanau County friends, and even with people I met as winter neighbors in Cochise County, Arizona.

 

As for favorite books of childhood and beloved books of later life – now there we don’t even need to have lived in the same place when we first read the books to share with another what the stories and characters meant to us, and while different scenes vary in brightness from one person’s memory to another, and I may have forgotten completely what you found most important in a particular book we both read, no lack of interest prevents us from comparing notes. Little wonder that one of the first thing transplanted retirees do is join a book club in their new place of residence. Love of reading is a common bond that draws strangers together and creates friendships, while classics reach across whole generations. 

This copy went to France with us and came back with us to Michigan again.

Now, I want to ask, what were – and are – some of your favorite books from childhood and adolescence? Do you re-read those books today? Here’s a starter list off the top of my head, some titles I discovered later in life, plus a couple I haven’t read but know that other people adore:

 

The Adventures of Peter and Wendy

Anne of Green Gables

Betsy-Tacy

Black Beauty

The Black Stallion

The Borrowers

The Boxcar Children

Bread and Jam for Frances

Charlotte’s Web

Diary of a Young Girl

The Hobbit

The Jungle Books

The Land

Little Bear

The Little Prince

Little Women

Mistress Masham’s Repose

Parents Keep Out

Petunia

The Secret Garden

Through the Looking Glass

The Velveteen Rabbit

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Where the Wild Things Are

Wind in the Willows

The Wizard of Oz

A Wrinkle in Time

 

And because of the season, I’ll add:

A Christmas Carol

The Night Before Christmas

 

How and why did I leap in this post from the fiction of Milan Kundera to books for young people? Who knows? The reading, roving mind is a mysterious thing!

Resident princess tomboy!

Coming back days later, having finished reading another book of emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg’s Unto a Good Land --  

 

What was the matter with Kristina? What did she long for? Didn’t she live here, have her home here – wasn’t she at home? How could she long for home when she was already at home?

 

Moberg’s characters fled Sweden to make a better life in North America, one where they wouldn’t have to fear starvation for their children. Their journey to Minnesota, by sea, river, and land, took so long that they arrived too late to plant crops before winter was upon them, but Karl Oskar did manage, with the help of his friends, to build a log house for his family before the cold and snow were upon them, and Kristina was able to give birth to her baby in the house, rather than in the shanty, their first temporary shelter now become a cowshed. 

 

While there was nothing stopping Kundera’s Joseph and Irena from returning permanently to modern Prague -- they simply had no interest, having made new lives elsewhere in Europe -- it was different in the mid-1800s for Karl Oskar and Kristina, who had left their parents behind and crossed the ocean to a new land. A year after leaving Sweden, awaiting a first letter from home, they wonder if their parents are still alive, knowing they will never see them again in this life.

 

My Leelanau friends and I, whether the third generation in this place, newly arrived, or something between those two extremes (only three decades for me in this county, not three generations), could pull up stakes if we chose, but for me that is unthinkable. This is the place the Artist and I made our dream come true, our country county life. I have watched trees appear and grow (the catalpa and hawthorn and young white ash trees) and have planted others (my apple trees). Kristina misses a certain apple tree back in her childhood home. The apple tree in my parents’ yard is long gone, as are they. My apple trees are here. My home is here -- in all seasons. 

[More snow pictures here.]

Dear Faraway Friends

 

Sunday, November 26, 2023

 

Those of you as far from me geographically as Seattle, Washington … Tucson and Dos Cabezas, Arizona … northern and central Illinois … and, coming closer, Kalamazoo, Michigan … all of you are in my thoughts today, but Leelanau County and Traverse City friends seem “faraway,” too, as the first real snow accumulates in the yard and on the roof of my old farmhouse. I’m not feeling isolated. Cozy, rather. It’s so lovely, after a busy week, to have a whole day at home, me and Sunny Juliet, with nowhere else we need to be. -- Wait, wait, wait! I did not mean to forget those in Minnesota, New York State, the U.P, and Brazil!!!

 

Did I say it was a busy week? Monday was a trip to Traverse City for new snow tires. I took Frederick Franck’s Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing to read while the tires were being mounted, because just reading Franck’s books is a meditation -- actual drawing practice that much more so, however, and something I want to get back to this winter. Tuesday I cut a tiny little pine tree and took it to the bookstore, then cancelled agility class for Sunny and me, needing those four hours at home to mix cookie dough and shop for Thanksgiving. Wednesday was my day to decorate the bookstore tree, along with accepting deliveries of new books, and that evening I began preparations for the next day’s dinner. 

Like Charlie Brown, I love my little tree!

Because Thursday, of course, was Thanksgiving! A different kind of holiday for me this year, as I fixed turkey dinner for a friend and took it to his house to share the meal with him. This man was like a brother to the Artist for many years, they were that close, so I would tell people, “He’s like my brother-in-law,” and now he has forgotten the Artist and had no clue who I was, either. He knew me a few short months ago, but when I arrived at his house on Thursday afternoon, having called the previous Saturday to tell him I would be coming, he asked, “Do we know each other? Do you live around here?” When I reminded him it was Thanksgiving, he was astonished. Still, he was pleased to have company, and his appetite was good. It was strange to be with someone so familiar to me, whose house is so familiar to me, as well, a friend with whom the Artist and I shared many holidays past, but for whom I am now become a stranger. How much more difficult it must be for family members in such a situation….

 

Friday evening was a cookie baking session with my friend Susan, accompanied by lots of visiting, naturally. (Susan and I shared happy memories!) Then at last came Saturday! Horses in Northport! (Sadly, for me, on a shorter loop this year that did not include Waukazoo Street, but I think that was to avoid long wait times for all the families who wanted the horse-drawn village tour.) Activity gatherings and open houses all through the town! And at 6 o’clock, Santa turned on the tree lights. What a day!

Carolers at the bookstore

Darkness falling...

Fire truck in front of bookstore, blocking traffic...

Passerby stopping to admire artist Deborah Ebbers's work...

Crowd awaiting Santa and tree lights...

Our beautiful village tree!!!
 

So you see why I was ready for a Sunday of rest!

 

After busy days all week I turned at bedtime to re-reading: Ellen Airgood’s The Education of Ivy Blake and Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog. Two very different works of fiction, but both favorites of mine, with characters I love and satisfying but not simplistic conclusions. Writers whose work means a lot to me. Another comforting young person’s novel was Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. Enright really knew her botany! Then, beginning Friday night, came a first-time read, The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse, by Alexander McCall Smith, Not one from any of his series but a stand-alone tale from World War II England and Germany -- and not sugar-coated, either, but still, in the most difficult decisions his characters must make and in the complicated emotions they experience, delivered with Smith’s characteristic gentle wisdom. Peter Woodhouse, by the way, is a dog….

 

Now two nonfiction books, both begun but neither more than one-quarter read yet, await. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, needs no introduction or explanation. The other, Beyond the Outer Shores, by Eric Enno Tamm, is the story of the man who inspired Steinbeck’s “Doc” in Cannery Row, and I’m learning a lot more about Steinbeck, too, namely, his friendship with Ed Ricketts and their collaboration on tidewater collecting expeditions. Fascinating. 

Ricketts and Steinbeck on the Pacific shoreline, Enright delighting in her bogs. For me the natural world these days is snowy meadow, woods, and orchard -- 

And yet, although I could not possibly be more at home than here in my Leelanau farmhouse, it felt strange this month not to be crossing the country from Great Lakes to Southwest, as the Artist and I had done for several years and as I did once again last year with Sunny Juliet, from the north woods and Great Lakes to prairie to Great Plains to high plains and mesa lands and finally mountains. My little ghost town neighborhood, our “mountain family,” so far away! One friend there sent me a Thanksgiving video her son made of wildlife in their yard (deer, fox, coati mundi) and her house and yard and the entire ghost town from a drone overhead, a video I know I’ll watch over and over. The music with it is perfect, too.

Other years ... another life

But here I am in my own beautiful home place! And it is snowing! What kind of a winter will it be? I remember my first northern Michigan winter, Traverse City in 1970-71, when it was never not snowing, whenever I looked out a window, and the icicles grew like stalactites from roofs to the ground. Bundling up my toddler to pull him on his little sled to the tiny Oleson’s store on Front Street a couple of blocks from our house was an expedition that consumed half a morning! 

 

Whatever comes this year, right now it’s good to be in a warm house, looking forward to homemade turkey soup and meanwhile catching up on desk work and housework, with periodic breaks for outdoor dog fun. Winter is underway, my friends. And when spring comes again, we older ones will be looking back and saying that, in retrospect, winter flew by. I already know that will be true.

 

May everyone traveling today be prepared and safe, and may the freeing of hostages from Gaza continue with maximum happy results -- until all are once again home.

Timing? Time? Something Else?

This past week the timing has been right for black locust perfume in the air

Sometimes timing is everything. Other times, as the Artist said so often, it’s lighting that makes all the difference. Then of course (for restaurants and retail stores) there is “Location, location, location!” and (with rare books, especially), “Condition, condition, condition!” This past weekend, fortuitously, my timing was perfect for planting on Saturday evening perennials purchased that morning at the Northport Women’s Club’s first perennial sale, which I hope will become an annual event. 

Beautiful aliens, I can't help loving them.

 

Earlier in the week we were promised three straight days of rain – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – with the 10-day forecast showing rain for every daylight hour those three days. By Saturday, however, the chances had thinned out, and only one measly hour was showing rain for Sunday morning. We need rain so badly! But I had gotten my three new iris (white), three lady’s mantle, and three pots of Shasta daisy plants (more than three plants in those pots) into the ground on Saturday evening, although it meant moving a few other things first and preparing soil in one new place to accomplish the task. They don’t look like much yet but will, I’m confident, be splendid additions to my outdoor surroundings. For now, iris and annuals provide lively color.

And then, Sunday morning – beautifully overcast, with a very gentle rain falling like a Sabbath benediction. Everything green seemed to be taking deep, happy breaths of cool, moist air. A perfect day for me to stay inside, vacuum floors, clear away clutter, make a pot of chili, and take reading breaks as needed. – Oh, yes, and breaks to throw tennis balls for Sunny Juliet, of course.

Busy in Northport bookstore and gallery and outdoors at home with dog and yard, I’ve been in drifting mode lately with my reading. My dinner companion on the porch most evenings is one of Jim Harrison’s novels in a French translation (strange to read the northern Michigan town and road names in such a different-feeling context!), and my Audubon Society wildflower guide is next to that novel on the table, as I have reason to consult it on a fairly regularly basis at this time of year as I consider what else to include in a planned wildflower area between barn and chicken coop. 

 

Next to my bed are Tom Springer’s The Star in the Sycamore: Discovering Nature’s Hidden Virtues in the Wild Nearby (doesn’t that sound like a book I would love? I do!); Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things; and Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Recent bedtime reading included a Saul Bellow novella, The Theft, and Michele Harper’s memoir, The Beauty in Breaking. Since drafting this post, I have slipped into the long ago of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, by Michael Frank, a time when Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Italians lived peacefully together on the island of Rhodes. At least, that’s how and where the book begins. I’m afraid it may go somewhere darker before it ends, but I will go with Stella wherever she goes….

 

On a lighter note, this coming week at Dog Ears Books should see delivery of neighbor Robert Underhill’s new murder mystery, One Cold Coffee. Customers have been clamoring for a new Underhill novel for the last couple of years, so the first two copies he brought me went out the door before I could even open one myself. “I hope you’ll read it, too,” Bob said. Well, of course! 

[Update: 6/13, 12:45 p.m. It's here now!]

Does all this drifting from book to book make me sound like a shallow consumer of the printed word? I was heartened recently to read of a study showing that reading anything in a series of short sessions, rather than all at once, actually helps us remember better what we have read. We remember longer what we don’t read all at once. Immediately I thought of meeting in a small group for eight consecutive sessions to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses. Despite everything we have read and discussed in years since, the Ulysses experience for me was our never-equalled benchmark in terms of meaningful reading, because we took so much time with it. I think of this kind of involvement with a book as not just reading but living with and in the book day after day.

 

One June I was immersed in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy for the entire month. Another time it was The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks, a history of American literature during those years of the 19^th century. I recommend the Brooks literary histories as “slow books.” He doesn’t rush his story, and a reader cannot rush through, either. One settles down to a 19^th-century pace.

 

Now as the summer solstice is fast approaching, it can seem as if we are careening toward that longest day, a day that comes all too soon, after which there will be increasingly less daylight to fill with summer activities through July and August. To slow time down now, even if you can only do so in quarter-hours here and there, make it a point to read slowly, wander aimlessly, to putter, saunter, loll, etc. Think of the best words you know to describe the voluptuous sense of wrapping yourself in slow moments....

 

Maybe, like the short reading sessions, twenty minutes of any kind of undirected leisure here and an hour there is what we will remember best and longest when winter returns – for instance, that lovely, surprising morning coffee moment when the house wren landed on the windowsill! Ah, yes! I hope so!

 

 

Grief Notes:

 

When it comes to grief, though, time is almost nonexistent. One can count weeks and months following loss, but there is no measuring its depth. One does not “get through” or “get over” it. You are involuntarily exiled from the beloved and familiar and transported overnight to a strange new place. You will never return. You will never forget. You simply go on, because there’s nothing else to do, because you are alive, because the one you loved “would want you to,” and so on and so forth. 

 

The sun shines, clouds form, rain falls. Birds sing and nest, flowers and trees blossom and grow. Young couples fall in love, and babies are born. The earth continues its revolutions, and night and day alternate, as they always have. Sometimes you smile or laugh. Everything is the same as it’s always been, and -- nothing will ever be the same again. 

 

It is love that is everything, and you had love, its joy and its pain. Now you have memories, a volume of images and remembered conversations that come throughout the day and in dreams at night. To live without this grief would be “never to have loved,” and how could anyone wish for that?

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

   I feel it, when I sorrow most;

   'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson