October's Quiet Entrance

Monday: Quiet aftermath

The Lull After the ???

Do we want to call the 12th annual Leelanau UnCaged street fair a storm? Probably not, even though, once again, it brought thousands of festival-goers to our little village. Despite the numbers, though, somehow the crowd is not overwhelming, as everyone is intent on enjoying the scene: music, arts and crafts, fair food, activities for children, people- and dog-watching extraordinaire, and general good vibes all around. I think I may also say, without fear of contradiction, that the weather was perfect. Last year's weather was close to perfect. (A few people actually thought it was “a little too warm”! Really!) This year could not have been any better.

Saturday morning: All set up and ready to go!

Every year I enjoy strolling through the village in the morning as booths are being set up for the day, and though I spend the day indoors in my bookshop, I was able to have the door open all day this year, and everyone is so happy at UnCaged that I feel very much part of the scene. From the very first year, it has felt like a homecoming for the village and the whole township. 

And then comes a quiet week, the lull after the festivities, everyone still floating on top of a cloud (in the sunshine!), happy that grey, rainy weather held off and did not dampen our celebration on Saturday.

Thursday: Rain

Where does fall color start?

Virginia creeper first, closely followed by staghorn sumac, but never fear, autumn is barely underway, and weeks of beauty lie ahead. The few trees already losing green are mostly urban specimens, surrounded by cement or other hard paving. Trees in the rural landscape are still green.

Green trees, red sumac

Village scene with falling leaves

Grimace of Recognition

Warm, tender, funny, cozy. These words have been used to describe Receipts From the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year in an English Seaside Town, by Katie Clapham, one year of a independent bookseller’s diary about bookshop life in her English seaside town. From my own Michigan lakeside village shop, also fiercely independent, I can’t help having a somewhat different take from that of the casual, uninvolved reader. Mine, the response of a committed insider, cannot help responding with (not a shock, but) a wry grimace, whether over bits of conversation that the English bookseller hears from people passing her open shop door without entering or mental notes of the bookseller herself when she sees that July sales in the year she is reporting were less than July sales the year before.

Let me say quickly that my grimace of recognition is not over a business account balance in the red! Frankly, I don’t understand that at all. If your business is losing money, how is it that you are still in business? How do you pay your bills? How do you buy groceries? Unless you have income from another source or are independently wealthy, and then yours is more a hobby than a business. 

Come on in!

“What a cute hobby!” a woman exclaimed once in my shop. Whether or not my shop is “cute” is not for me to say, but it is definitely not a hobby. If it could not support itself and also provide for me, the door would have closed long ago!

But yes, those overheard bits of conversation (e.g., “It’s just books in there,” as I heard someone say once outside my door, dragging her companion past) ... and the inquiries for a specific book that, when put in the customer’s hand, she for some reason decides against purchasing ... and then observations like this:

If you’re wondering whether just one paperback is really such a significant sale, consider the obstacles we’ve overcome to secure it: the dark night of the soul that is winter, not to mention the insidious shift of retail from the high street to the internet and the gentle surrender of attention spans everywhere as the commitment to reading becomes too costly in the attention economy. Buying a book from a bookshop really is an act of resistance; a retro act of resilience and determination to maintain or regain some screen-free time, and a defiant stand against the big corps that assume people value an extra couple of quid over keeping retail afloat in their own home towns. Yes, even if you only picked one up on the way to get your venti mocha, a single paperback is enough to make a difference to us, every damn day. 

- Katie Clapham, Receipts From the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year in an English Seaside Town

And yes, my bookshop is unique!

I would not call my bookshop “most unique,” because—well—I wouldn’t call anything “most unique,” unique meaning “the only one of its kind,” and so anything either is unique or it isn’t, and nothing is more or less, let alone least or most unique. But is my bookshop unique? Yes, it is. 

Mine is an independent shop, i.e., not part of a chain, not owned by a corporation, and it’s the only bookstore I own, and I am unique, so there you are. Or, here I am. No two indie bookstores are identical, even if one person or family owns and operates more than a single storefront. Mine is also the only bookshop in Northport, Michigan, and no other bookshop, in Northport or anywhere else, has a collection identical to mine. Each indie bookshop—as is true of a village or an individual human being—wherever it is, has its own unique personality. 

New offerings appear weekly (sometimes oftener).

Answer to the Question You Didn't Ask:

How do you grow an avocado from seed? Keep throwing avocado pits in the compost pile. Sooner or later (maybe much, much later, as happened for me) one or two will produce baby trees that you can dig up and pot for indoor life. Over the decades I have tried every other recommended method, over and over, and none worked for me. This one did. Twice! In one summer!

My window garden will expand over the winter.

 

No Sunrises, No Sunsets, Lots of Changes

Deborah Wesley photograph

Wildfires are currently burning (as of Wednesday morning) in the U.S. states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, as well as in western Canadian provinces (from British Columbia to Newfoundland but mostly from western Ontario to the Pacific Ocean). Since prevailing winds blow west to east across North America, air quality in the Midwest and all the way to the eastern seaboard is affected. The only escape is indoors, but who wants to stay indoors all summer? Some people must; others of us are taking our chances, despite the occasional cough. (Don't scold, please! I won't live forever!) My two younger sisters from Illinois came for a visit, and we spent time outdoors each day. 

Three sisters -- yes, styles have changed, too.

My sister Deborah also spent considerable time spoiling Sunny Juliet—that is, tossing tennis balls out in the yard for a certain lucky dog girl to chase. When all three of us were outside, Sunny still brought her tennis balls to Auntie Deborah rather than to her dog mom. No fool, my Sunny!

I finished In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy with a big sigh. Like The Vacation, by Carlos Fuentes, and This Magnetic North, by Tim Mulherin, Jane Brox’s book is a story of change. I guess that is the story of life, isn’t it? Change! I learned a few things in the Brox book, and one of those things is that big bluestem (Andropogon gerardi), a native prairie grass I seeded into the edge of my meadow 25 years ago—a native grass, mind you, not an invasive alien—can nevertheless outcompete other plant species. Now I’m thinking maybe that’s what happened to those purple coneflowers that failed to appear last summer after a quarter-century. The little grey-headed coneflowers are holding their own, so far, but the purple ones have vanished. 

Gone with the wind! Here they were years ago.

These are still with me...

co-existing, for now, with big bluestem.

A meadow, a forest, even a roadside changes from year to year. About three years ago I noticed a little bright yellow flower blooming on the side of M-22 just north of Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern. Birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) is a nitrogen-fixing legume, but it is invasive and aggressive, forming root mats that crowd out native plant roots, and this year I am noticing it blooming all up and down M-22. Spreading rapidly! So, pretty though it is, I will not be transplanting any to my meadow, which changes just gradually enough (except for the disappearance of purple coneflowers) that I manage to accept the differences from one year to the next. 

Birdsfoot trefoil

This Saturday (already!!!) is Northport’s annual dog parade—and how many does this make? My old Nikki was in the parade back in 1997 ("Mardi Growl”) and again in 1998 (“Treasures of King Mutt”).

Memorabilia! Priceless!

Our Sarah made one parade appearance. That year (2010, and you can find Bettie and Ben and Gracie and Sarah by following this link) my sister and her husband were visiting, along with our mother and their dog, Gracie, so Ben and Bettie each had charge of a dog while I stayed near my shop, watching the parade with our mother. Mother is gone, Gracie and Sarah are gone. More changes…. But the dog parade goes on, this year as “Bone Appétit.” (Note: That final 't' is silent.)

The pretty Bernese below made her first bookstore visit—first time in any bookshop—to Dog Ears! She will have moved on from Northport before parade time, but we commemorated her inaugural bookshop visit with a photo shoot.

My own general view of change (returning to my theme) is that I can handle it better if and when it’s gradual rather than overnight. How about you? 

Please come for guest author Tim Mulherin’s talk at Dog Ears Books on Wednesday, August 13, starting at 7 p.m. The topic will be changes in our own Northern Michigan! 

The book for August 13 event

Author Tim Mulherin

September in the Air

Old pasture near Cedar, bright with goldenrod

 

Vegetal Diversity

 

There is a group of trees in the back corner of my meadow, not big enough to qualify as a spinney, much less as a grove, but the grouping pleases my eye. From left to right in the image below, they are: box elder, silver maple, catalpa, white ash, and another silver maple. Farther to the west on that same edge, before a Chinese elm, a couple of pines, wild grapevines, and the inevitable popples, is an impenetrable hedge of wild roses and blackberries.*

Volunteer tree row

The meadow itself these days, from the east or southeast, looks like a monoculture of Queen Anne’s-lace, but it is actually very diverse. In the northwest corner and spreading out to the east and south is a forest of little grey-headed coneflowers and tall prairie bluestem at present (earlier wildflowers finished and purple coneflowers and asters yet to come), while here and there young wild apple trees and small hawthorns appear. Oh, and poison ivy, of course, because except for discouraging autumn olive, small silver maples, and black walnut trees (enough is enough with the latter two, and even one is too many for the former), my meadow plan is pretty laissez-faire. I seeded the prairie grasses and wildflowers over twenty years ago, and they spread slowly but steadily. Hawthorns have been a gift from nature. What will be, will be.

Too many queens to count!

Tall and elegant --

It has been an intensely vivid season, but our summer is fleeting, September already in the air these late August days….

 

My garden is offering hard, green tomatoes and mature purple beans, but only blossoms as yet* on the jalapeño pepper plants. Next year I’ll plant beans and tomatoes again but forego peas (too much trouble for small crop) and okra (the latter did nothing) for potatoes and cucumbers. As with perennials in the front yard, I’m thinking less about what I want and more about what works for me. Phlox has been great this year. No mildew!

 

*Postscript! Little peppers are forming at last, as of Monday!

Too early to pick this pepper....

Bookstore Days

 

Saturday, August 10, was Northport’s annual dog parade, the biggest ever, bringing a huge crowd of people to Northport, some seeing the parade for the first time, some seeing Northport for the first time. It felt to me like summer’s last hurrah, especially in retrospect, with the following week much quieter, even through the following Saturday. And soon it will be September, and I’ll start taking Sundays and Mondays off. September = locals’ summer, dontcha know.

 

On Sunday, August 18, however, I had the shop open for several hours. Friends were coming up to meet me there, and I had things to do, so it made sense to be open. Also, I made a very large purchase this summer -- a lifetime collection of books from the late collector’s widow, not all moved yet from her place to mine -- which has meant endless sorting through boxes and incorporating as many as possible, little by little, into my own collection on Waukazoo Street. Bottom line: Whenever customers purchase large volumes these days, my happy thought is, shelf room!  

 

There are many exciting treasures in these additions to my stock from George Ball of Good Old Books in Leland. For example, there are enough volumes in the ‘Rivers of America’ series to fill almost an entire bookcase, and I am fascinated by the story of Constance Lindsay Skinner, who dreamed the series into reality. 

The authors [she insisted] would be poets and novelists, familiar with the regions they were to write about, and their illustrators respected regional artists, familiar with the subject river. Until the day she died, this remarkable vision dominated her life.

- Carl Fitzgerald, The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Biography

Rivers and lakes, lakes and rivers

Books about rivers and lakes, however, are only the beginning. I am now nicely stocked with Jim Harrison and Edward Abbey titles, and the World War II, Revolutionary War, U.S. presidents, and fiction sections have all been newly enriched.

 

There is also the bargain cart, where books are $3 each or four books for $10. Books in the cart are hardcover and softcover, recent and very old, cookbooks, fiction, and other. They are a very good deal!

Deals galore await here!

 

Reading, Lazy and Otherwise

 

Winter is a good time to catch up, but meanwhile my reading has been rather haphazard of late, much of it time travel. Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand (fiction) took me back to Nebraska in the late 1800s; then, via the diary of a young woman traveling from New York to Ohio, I’ve been traveling muddy tracks, often on foot, in 1810; and finally, a book of biographical sketches called Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days, beginning with Anne Hutchinson, gave me a tour of colonial and Revolutionary America. That last was something I ordered by mistake, and a happy mistake it turned out to be. The author’s name was Geraldine Brooks, and the book was newly published – but, I discovered when it arrived, it was one of those photocopied reprints anyone can make when a book’s copyright has expired, and this particular Geraldine Brooks was not the author of today but someone who published her book originally in 1900. Had I known what it was, I would not have ordered it, but a delightful volume it turned out to be!

 

Jim Olson’s People of the Dune, now, is no escape into the past! Jim is a well-known environmental lawyer in Traverse City, and his book, while basically fiction, is not really a novel, as the judge is the only character with any presence or depth, and he, Judge Odom, begins to come clear only a hundred pages or so into the book. (A secondary character is a hermit who lives at the base of the dune.) I say this not to discourage anyone from reading the book, for it is thoughtful and important: you just need to know before you start what to expect, or you’ll initially be confused, as I was. 

 

In the Sixties, there was a big “Save the Dunes” movement in northern Indiana (the organization still exists today), and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was created as a result. I recall a smaller, more localized movement in the 1970s, somewhere between South Haven and the Indiana line (Bridgeman?) that had to do more with a proposed development than with mining, although sand was already being mined in the area. The threatened dune in Olson’s book, thought by some to cover an ancient Native burial mound, seems to be set farther north, closer to our home here in northwest Michigan, but its exact location is left unspecified. A fictional dune?

 

In the book, a group calling itself People of the Dune, along with an intertribal group known as the Mound People Coalition, join forces in a lawsuit to stop a mining company from destroying the Voyager Dune. Olson introduces the issues involved with imaginary headlines and news stories, and the author’s own sympathies are never in doubt, as we see in the prehistoric legend and history he gives before setting out the modern issues. But the law is the law, and the mining company, after all, does own the land it wants to mine. Hence the legal conflict.

 

Judge Odom initially rules in favor of the mining company but is then plagued by second thoughts. What are the limits to property rights and when does the common good take precedence over them? Ever? What precedents can be found that might apply in this case to protect the dune? Or, if property rights are considered absolute under the law, could that not eventually destroy the value of property itself? Such are the questions that keep the judge awake at night.

 

Whatever your sympathies and/or intuitions about rights before you come to Olson’s book, you will find yourself challenged. Clearly, the author has wrestled with these ideas for years, and so this is an important book, with everything in our world at stake in our country’s court system in the legal outcomes of cases, large and small, such as the fictional one described.

 

What do you think (assuming you have read the book) of Judge Odom’s solution? Or no, maybe don't leave a comment about it here, because -- no spoilers, please!

Politics

If you're looking for a rant, see my other blog for the latest post. If not, don't.

 

 

But Now, Yes, the Dog!

Always ready, always willing

Sunny and I had an excellent agility session on Monday morning. It’s our third summer working in the sport, and only now are we beginning to function as a team. It feels good! 

 

I wish I could tell Sunny that her Arizona buddy may be visiting soon. It doesn’t seem fair that dogs are deprived of the joy of anticipating future events, though I suppose that living-in-the-moment stuff balances out, as they are also spared many worries about the future that humans bear. I hope so. They give us so much.

*More!

The wild roses and blackberries...

...and a small volunteer willow by the other volunteer trees.

Rain, Weeds, Books, Lists, Laughter

Beautiful custom outdoor table cover by Dolls & More

Rain and Weeds

We finally got a bit more rain. Not enough, but better than none. On Wednesday evening I finally began digging up spotted knapweed, having ignored its invasion for too long in my fixation on the larger and more obvious autumn olive. Both are plants that want to take over the world (at least here in northern Michigan), and while autumn olive grows to be a massive shrub and knapweed dies back every fall, both are tenacious and create a circle of death around them as they grow. Spotted knapweed turns Leelanau hills a beautiful lavender color in late summer, and bees enjoy it and produce delicious honey from their foraging, but left on its own it creates a nasty monoculture, with no room for the colorful diversity of native plants, and so, like autumn olive, knapweed is a plant I want to discourage as much as possible around my old farmhouse.

Clearing the way to my apple trees....

The rain started Wednesday evening. I don’t know how much fell during the night, but Thursday morning arrived wet and refreshingly cool. The temperature and humidity reminded me of a September vacation week the Artist and I enjoyed once on Manitoulin Island, but I got a grip on the reminiscing and told myself that the rain would make weeding easier – and since I didn’t have to water my gardens (rain having done that), I spent a productive hour with long-handled weed digger and spade, with many a pause to launch a tennis ball for Sunny with the Chuckit!©️. The fact that I kept busy otherwise with my weeding encouraged her to bring the ball and drop it at my feet (to get my attention), rather than keeping it to herself and grabbing it away when I reached for it, in her customary teasing way. Every day she learns a little more about cooperative play. 

(Sunny on a sunnier day)

Meanwhile, In the Garden

First monarda (bee balm)

Embryonic daisy

Hibiscus and turtlehead awaiting their entrance

Little chrysanthemum jumps the gun

Red daylilies coming along

Vegetables and herbs

Porch table sweet peas

 

Second Quarterly Report, 2023

Since the June page has already been torn off the calendar, it’s time for me to list books I’ve read in the past three months, April through June, and here they are: 

 

59. Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh (fiction)

60.             Logsdon, Gene. The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (nonfiction)

61.             Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman (nonfiction)

62.             McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood(nonfiction)

63.             Sprigle, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow (nonfiction)

64.             Bellow, Saul. Herzog (fiction)

65.             Salinger, J.D. Catcher In the Rye (fiction)

66.             Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (nonfiction)

67.             Queen, Ellery. Cat of Many Tails (fiction)

68.             Backman, Fredrik. Anxious People (fiction)

69.             Lamott, Anne. Hard Laughter (fiction)

70.             ]Horowitz, Alexandra. The Year of the Puppy (nonfiction)

71.             Queen, Ellery. The Scarlet Letters (fiction)

72.             Jance, J. A. Nothing to Lose (fiction)

73.             Smith, Betty. Maggie-Now (fiction)

74.             Tyler, Anne. Noah’s Compass (fiction)

75.             Davis, Kyra, trans. (English to French) by Alice Boucher. Crimes, passion & talons aiguilles (fiction)

76.             Hubbard, Harlan. Payne Hollow (nonfiction)

77.             Tyler, Anne. A Beginner’s Goodbye (fiction)

78.             Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love (nonfiction)

79.             Darkshire, Oliver. Once Upon a Tome (nonfiction)

80.             Weinstein, Lawrence. Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us(nonfiction)

81.             Bellow, Saul. The Theft (fiction)

82.             Harper, Michele. The Beauty in Breaking (nonfiction)

83.             Springer, Tom. The Star in the Sycamore (nonfiction)

84.             Ozeki, Ruth. The Face: A Time Code (nonfiction)

85.             Harrison, Jim. Sorcier (fiction – Warlock in French translation)

86.             Harding, Paul. Tinkers (fiction)

87.             Frank, Michael. One Hundred Saturdays (nonfiction)

88.             Ingall, Marjorie & Susan McCarthy. Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (nonfiction)

89.             Raphael, Lev. Assault with a Deadly Lie (fiction)

90.             Bloom, Stephen B. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality (nonfiction)

91.             Underhill, Robert. One Cold Coffee (fiction) 

Sweet peas and bachelor buttons

Books That Have Made Me Laugh Out Loud

This might be a hazardous list to make public -- one person’s belly laugh is another person’s groan, after all -- but I’ll chance it. Just for laughs. In no particular order, then --

 

Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods: David and I laughed so much over this book that “Big mistake!” became one of our favorite code phrases.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: If someone had told me this was a funny book, I would have read it years before I did.

 

Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Just thinking of a certain sentence in this book makes me laugh. (It’s near the top of a left-hand page.)

 

Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life: Her observations on parenthood at the beginning hooked me right away.

 

Gogol’s Dead Souls: The conceit (in old-fashioned sense) of this novel, left unfinished by its author, cracks me up every time. 

 

Matt Cook’s In the Small of My Backyard: --Which is poetry!

 

Helene Hanff’s Underfoot in Show Business: Stage-struck young woman goes to New York City in the 1930s with big dreams. How could this not provide laughs?

Goofy girl! She always makes me laugh!