What About Adventure?

 

In past years when we’ve returned to northern Michigan springtime, more than one friend there has said of my desert and mountain adventures in the Southwest, “Your blog got me through the winter!” Those readers must be disappointed so far in this season’s posts, but as the Good Book says, there is a “time for everything,” and the Artist and I are starting to get out again. We have yet to explore any thrilling new roads; however, many familiar roads continue to thrill. Such for us is the drive up Fort Grant Road out of Willcox to Bonita and on through the Pinaleño Mountains by way of Stockton Pass. 

See this building in Nicholas Cage movie "Red Rock West"

Last Wednesday we made that trip once again, and as we were driving east from the little crossroads of Bonita (long ago a town of 1,000 people, with a population that doubled when soldiers on leave swarmed in to visit taverns and other houses of pleasure) toward the pass I remarked to the Artist that one of my favorite words is bajada. I like the word for itself, for its sound, as well as for giving a name to something I see in mountain country – and also because it calls to mind one of my favorite Dos Cabezas wildflowers, the lovely, shy little bajada lupine.

As I was explaining this landform to the Artist, I compared it to a river delta: as I see it, bajada is to mountain and range as delta is to river and ocean. Then it occurred to me for the first time -- and I haven't checked on this anywhere, but it makes perfect sense to me -- why a delta is called a delta. Look at its shape: Δ. Like the Greek letter, n’est-ce pas?

How could this road ever grow old for us? Besides its breathtaking beauty, every one of the 20 scenic miles (from Bonita to Hwy 191) is by now saturated with memories for us of stopping here and there for picnics and photo shoots and explorations among rocks and alligator junipers with each other and Sarah and, later, Peasy. We miss them (little Pea we miss dreadfully!), but in the mountains, my spirit still soars.

 

Stockton Pass is up in Graham County, but familiar travels here in Cochise County please us, also. Sometimes we take the Kansas Settlement Road down to the Mustang Mall and come back what we call the Chiricahua way. That’s “going around the block” 100 miles, and as we pass the road to the Monument (or come out the road from the Monument and turn back to the north before the road once again heads west), I am always happy to see the sign announcing the distance to Dos Cabezas. It is only a ghost town, with “no services” – no gas station or convenience store, nowhere to get a cup of coffee – but for us in winter it is home.

Chiricahuas in background

From Chiricahuas home to Dos Cabezas

My armchair travel too is filled with adventure. Reading Edwin Way Teale’s North with the Spring for the third time in my life, I’m feeling as if it’s my first encounter with the book, more immediately meaningful now that I have my own memories of the Everglades and have seen for myself a painted bunting (here in Dos Cabezas two years ago this coming spring). 

 

…How many times, on overcast winter days, had we looked at pictures of bathers toasting in the Florida sunshine and thought of how happy, happy we would be if we were only there! And here we were, where we had dreamed of being, on our trip with the spring we had so long planned, in the very midst of days we would look back upon as long as we lived—and we were unhappy! I viewed myself with amazement. Yet still I wandered irritated and disconsolate along the Sanibel beach.

 

-      Edwin Way Teale, North with the Spring

 

 

Even the noted naturalist had these feelings, you see, for we take ourselves with us wherever we go, and the Teales had a special heartache, having lost their only son in battle in World War II before they set out to follow spring north from the Everglades. Weary and heartsore, they were pushed by bleak February, “the shortest and longest month of the twelve," as he calls it, to flee northern winter. Unhappy passages in the book are few and brief, however; I only mention them because they stand out to my notice now in ways they never had before.

 

Here is a wonderful, thoughtful passage more like Teale’s general outlook:

 

…Gathering driftwood for a fire is a comforting occupation. It is direct and obvious in a world of confusing complexities. The benefits can be seen at once. There are no lost or hidden links in the chain of action. Cause and effect, effort and result, are apparent at a glance. 

 

Isn't that lovely?

Another book I’m reading this week is one I was delighted to find by chance, never having heard of the author before. My delight comes from the fact that Susan Cummins Miller is a geologist and has set her mystery in the Chiricahua Mountains, right down the road from our winter digs! Serendipity comes to my rescue once again! And the boots came to me the very same day, so how lucky is that? 

 

Finding Treasure -- in Northport!

The book I was so excited to find at a sale recently doesn’t look like all that much at first glance. Unfortunately, the dust jacket is missing. The spine ends are somewhat, though not horribly, bumped. Slight fraying starting to appear at the ends, too. But I was excited, because the title is one I remember from my girlhood and have never forgotten, though this is the first copy of the book I’ve seen since the library copy I read in the 1950s. 

The flying sand and salt spray were in her eyes, in her mouth, in her hair. Her lips tasted of brine and her teeth felt gritty with sand. She was too occupied keeping out of reach of the roaring surf to care, and she had to jump about constantly to avoid the crawling, spreading edges of the breakers that frequently crept up on her unaware. For this was a howling northeaster on lonely Heron Shoals Beach. But Posy had no thought of its inconveniences or dangers. She was enjoying it to the full, chasing retreating waves and flying before oncoming breakers. This was life! This aroused a fire and enthusiasm that she had never known before! 

from The Vanishing Octant Mystery, by Augusta Huiell Seaman

Then Posy spots a treasure on the waves! It eludes her grasp, and she spends the rest of the book searching for it on the beach, where her family has rented a house for the summer.

I cannot recapture my feelings as a youthful, first-time reader of this novel, but I do remember that it was one of those books (like The Silver Nutmeg, by Palmer Brown) that I checked out of our grade school library to read over and over. Today I read online that Augusta Huiell Seaman’s novels for young readers predated the Nancy Drew books in offering adventures and mysteries to girl readers. I may not have read any of her other books and first read The Vanishing Octant Mystery (originally published in 1949) years after the author had died. (Not that I knew or cared about that at the time!) But Seaman was born in 1879, for heaven’s sake, and published her first book, The Boarded-Up House, in 1915, before either of my parents was born! In fact, The Vanishing Octant was her last book, appearing) in 1950, the year before her death, and by then Nancy Drew and all manner of other mystery series and stand-alone titles for young people had appeared. 

(Another favorite of mine was The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner, though I could never accept the idea of sequels to the original book — sequels I only learned about as an adult — since the entire premise at the beginning was that the children had no family and had to fend for themselves in the world, and in that first book they are reunited with their grandfather. But I digress….)

When I first read The Vanishing Octant Mystery, it transported me through time and space in more than one sense. Let’s say I must have been nine or ten years old; the girl sleuth in the story is 13. At that time in my life I had never seen the ocean, let alone studied ocean navigation. (Still have not done the latter.) But also, the instrument at the heart of the story, the octant, was originally invented around 1699 and produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until superseded by the more familiar sextant. I’d never heard of such a thing. The description and history of the octant fascinated me. For me, then, the octant itself would have been a mystery, even had it not disappeared.

We see very little of the inner life of characters in this story — only a hint, now and then, of Posy’s thoughts, no one else’s. There are no murders, no dead bodies, no guns or knives or other weapons. No characters are involved in flirtations, let alone love affairs, doomed or otherwise. The most vivid “character,” if I may put it that way, is the ocean itself. The story opens with a foretaste of the ocean’s violence, violence that reappears, magnified, in the form of the hurricane that blows through several chapters, bringing various other characters together and the story to its surprisingly undramatic conclusion. I am tempted to summarize the finale, but that would constitute a spoiler.

Local sweet water equivalent: Lake Michigan

Many of the author’s books are now in public domain and available as cheap paperback reprints ($9-10 range). Some were published earlier in paperback by Scholastic. Note that The Vanishing Octant Mystery was published 1949, which is 70 years ago, so will it be coming into public domain this year? I don’t have an answer, but a signed first edition with worn, chipped dust jacket is offered by one bookseller for $327, and another, not signed but priced at $80 online, is described as follows: No dust jacket. Ex-library. Cover is bumped to boards on corners, spine tips are missing, spine is faded, cover is rubbed with water spots on front. Front binding is loose. When you are looking at descriptions of books online and can’t hold them in your hands to examine, it’s imperative to understand the grading system — and, if possible, to know and trust the dealer from whom you’re buying. As my copy (not ex-library) is much better than the $80 book online, I’m pricing mine at $100. 

In the story, Posy’s father explains to his housekeeper the instrument his daughter saw in the surf in these words: 

“[It’s] … an old instrument they used to have on ships, to sight the sun with at noon every day and get their positions, like they do now with a newer kind called a sextant. This one was an earlier kind called an octant. They don’t use octants any more, and they are considered rare.”

There are enough copies of The Vanishing Octant Mystery available online that I wouldn’t call it rare, but it is fairly scarce. As I say, I haven’t seen a copy since the 1950s, and since entering the book business I’ve been looking for favorite old titles in bookstores, thrift shops, and antique stores, at estate sales and garage sales. 

It’s always exciting when the wind and waves toss up something I never expected to see again. So I can’t help imagining some unsuspecting browser in my bookstore suddenly coming upon this book — or another from his or her past — and exclaiming over it in delight. It’s like finding treasure on the beach. Serendipity! That thrill of discovery is difficult to match with online searches, and I know, because I’ve done plenty of those, too, over the years. 

Recent Reading Serendipity

There as many kinds of readers as there are kinds of people and as many different ways to sort them into groups, too. Today I’m thinking of the preferences readers exhibit when it comes to new vs. old books. Some want only new releases and disdain anything old, while others restrict their reading to works on “classics” list, the older the better, and find nothing worthwhile in current literature. Some seek only books fresh and crisp from publisher or distributor, while others may prefer rich leather-bound volumes or even content themselves with dog-eared paperbacks, as long as they can find a book that has passed through the hands of various owners. Many are the happy approaches to building a personal library!

Personally, I can never rule out a book simply on the basis of its age or even its condition. That beat-up paperback volume of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle that accompanied me across the Great Plains and prairies of the continent on our spring odyssey home to Michigan from the Southwest conveniently broke along its spine into two separate pieces, halving the bulk I needed to carry — first the first half, and then the second as I progressed through the book — in and out of the car and at various stopping places along our route. A large, handsomely bound Voyage would not have suited my traveling needs nearly as well. When at last, home again, I finished with the story, I made the two halves fast together with a rubber band and set the whole aside for a friend, having promised it to her as a hand-me-down. I hope she appreciates its condition suits her as well as it suited me. 

On the other hand, every year sees the advent of wonderful new titles, and I wouldn’t want to miss a treasure simply because it wasn’t available in an old form. It’s always a holiday when Dan the UPS man arrives with a new book order from my distributor. A box of books to open! Though I made out the order myself, when the box arrives I am as excited as if I hadn’t been expecting it. And then, sometimes, a new book comes “over the transom,” as it were. Do you know that expression? Does it bring an image to your mind?

Two recent book discoveries have brightened my reading life, if I can call “discoveries” what it was my good fortune to encounter when not even searching. One was a new book, the other old.

Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World, by Jan Shoemaker, came to me as an inscribed gift from the author after she visited my bookstore for the first time. Ms. Shoemaker (coincidentally, the same last name as a writer friend I have known for several years now) writes personal essays, and as essays are a favorite genre of mine, and as the book came to me as an unexpected gift, I was eager to begin reading, and her book, I’m happy to say, pleasantly exceeded my hopes and expectations. Many of the the writer’s experiences will be familiar to other women in our general age range, but she brings a depth of reflection and a writerly sensibility such that every piece is gracefully and thoughtfully achieved. A trip to shop for bras with and for her aging mother, who in need of constant care due to Alzheimer’s, offers Shoemaker a startling vision:

I glimpsed the web of my future in the straps and clasps of that impossible bra. Who is less capable than I am of working any apparatus? I have never walked, by my own wits, through a turnstile in any city subway. Where does the token go? I can’t replace an ink cartridge, hang a picture evenly, or reset the clock in my car to daylight saving time. I can just barely manage a bra myself. All those loops and hooks — it’s like playing cat’s cradle just getting dressed. It was no wonder I was crabby when my mom asked where her parents were, why I winced when she whispered, “Am I an orphan?” 

- Jan Shoemaker, Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World

Will you be surprised to learn that I ordered copies of Flesh and Stones for my bookstore? Icing on the cake: Shoemaker lives in Okemos, so she’s another Michigan writer I can happily support.

On one of my bookshelves at home I found a slim little paperback I’d apparently begun long ago and set aside during a busy season, so long ago that I had no memory of the pages leading up to my bookmark. So it was fortuitous, this second coming into my life of Where Nests the Water Hen, by the Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, the author’s charming story of the Tousignants, a large, happy French Canadian family residing on an island in northern Manitoba. The mother is a particularly engaging personality. Here is Luzina coming home from a trip she makes away from home roughly once a year, happy with the success of her journey and grateful to the driver carrying her toward home:

When they were tired of talking, they rested by reflecting on the pleasant things that had been said. Her life, at the only times when she could give it much thought, while she was jolting along on her travels, seemed truly wonderful…. 

Abe Zlutkin [her driver] took advantage of an interval when the road was a trifle less slippery to show her a photo of his wife. It portrayed a plump young Jewish woman of dark complexion. Abe bethought himself that he loved her dearly. For a moment the business he was in such a hurry to transact ceased tormenting him. Such was Luzina’s power. She disposed people to become aware that they had reasons for being happy. 

- Gabrielle Roy, Where Nests the Water Hen

It is not at all irrelevant to my delight in these two books that both authors describe settings in detail, Shoemaker her natural surroundings wherever she travels as well as at home, Roy the familiar habitat of her native Manitoba. That means a lot to me in much of my reading for pleasure. 

Here is another snippet from Jan Shoemaker:

…If you climb behind Olson Waterfall in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you hear the brash staccato of water vaulting before your glistening face into a big half-kettle hollowed from shelves of sandstone. Later, retracing your steps below fifty-foot ledges of mossy rock, you pick up the slippery vowels of its creek, chuckling over pebbles and fallen limbs.

And from the wilds of northern Manitoba, in the words of Gabrielle Roy:

Hippolyte … went off to take a stroll along the shore of the Big Water Hen. At its middle the river ran free; outside the current it was encumbered with sedges. They spread everywhere, gaining ground from year to year, just as did the crops elsewhere, the tilth, the forest — a country really made for the birds. Each year they came from the depths of Florida, two thousand miles as a bird flies, hastening and following a cunning course in order to reach this sure asylum! Perhaps more than two thousand miles! The mother birds must have remembered the water which came halfway up the length of the rushes. Here were the finest hiding-places in the world in which to have their ducklings when they first began to swim….

Two very different books -- one fiction, one nonfiction -- set in two different north American countries, one in Manitoba’s remote North, the other in Michigan’s most populated corner. Both beautifully written by women with a strong sense of character and of place, and it was only by serendipity that their paths crossed as they came into my early summer reading life this year. 

May you have similar good reading fortune! And remember that the best way to find these surprises is to put yourself in a promising environment....

A Ghost Town New to Us -- and More Serendipity

For one reason and another, we have not been adventuring far from our usual daily track as often as we did three years ago. The Artist’s birthday, though, was a perfect occasion for a road trip. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and we set off down the Kansas Settlement Road for the first time this winter. As things turned out, we never did reach the destination we had originally set for ourselves but instead found ourselves surprised along the way. We had not foreseen, for example, that we would discover another mining “ghost town.” But all in good order....

We had both been curious for quite a while about the name of the Kansas Settlement Road. The name definitely seems to indicate a story, and I thought perhaps a historic monument we had never detoured to see might provide the explanation. It did not. And that only makes sense, since the monument is not on the Kansas Settlement Road but a few miles down  Birch Road to the west. The monument’s story, as you see, tells how the Sulphur Springs Valley got its name, along with the sad episode of the short-lived Chiricahua Indian Reservation. We came, we read, we moved on.

Instead of turning back to the Kansas Settlement Road, however, we kept to Birch Road until it reached Hwy 191, a road we would have come to eventually, anyway. Along our resumed southern direction, however, temptation came along again, and we detoured once more, this time to the town, or “townsite,” of Pearce. 

For a population center that once boasted 1500 residents, there is not much remaining of Pearce, but the handful of buildings are definitely historic in appearance. There was indication of several current, ongoing business ventures — an antique shop, pottery studio and shop, and a local goat’s milk soap production (that last not pictured here — my omission — sorry!), but we saw no OPEN signs and no sign of any living human being. The Artist’s first question in any remote location is, “Where do they go for a cup of coffee?” It looked as if a cup of coffee would be hard to come by in Pearce. 

There was a rail to tie up horses, but there were no horses in sight, either.

[4/5/2018: Correction to paragraph below. It is not Cowboy Mall, but Mustang Mall. See here for more.]

Back onto Hwy. 191 and down on a stretch more familiar to us, we stopped at the “Cowboy Mall,” which is not a mall at all but a combination grocery-convenience store with a glorious selection of tack — saddles, bridles, bits, spurs — and a couple gas pumps out front. A birthday celebration was going on among the women working the counter, the “birthday girl,” just turned 22, being serenaded in Spanish, English, and American Sign Language. When I told them it was the Artist’s birthday, too, his coffee was on the house. What a great place! There is so much to see at the Cowboy Mall (including a couple sections of used books) that we were there a long time and got into conversation with a retired laborer from New Mexico, now living out of his camper. He was a reader and a bookstore lover, too. After a while, though, I left the two men talking and wandered around by myself, looking at more of what was on offer, and so it was that I found, to my delight, goat’s milk soap from Pearce! Very satisfying!

We never did find the elusive road we wanted out of Tombstone and finally decided to save that for another day, but we did not return to our own ghost town empty-handed. We had not only seen another ghost town, but I also managed to find one of its modern products, and that was reward enough, especially since unforeseen, for our day’s exploring.

Sunday afternoon serendipity again played a role in our winter life. All we had planned was a trip to the laundromat. One funny thing did happen there. As I was folding clothes, I was completely inattentive to the television playing behind me, had no idea of or interest in whatever might be on, and then suddenly the word “horses” hit my ear, and I spun around to face the screen. It was some kind of medieval reenactment, nothing I was particularly concerned to watch, but how funny that the single word “horses” should leap out of undifferentiated (to my mind) background sound with such urgent clarity!

When the laundry was done and packed away in the van, I had an idea. We could drive out to the rodeo grounds (officially known as Quail Park but always “the rodeo grounds” to me) and I could let Sarah off the leash to run and then work her through a few commands. We drove out Fort Grant Road, expecting to find an empty field. But that’s what comes, I said to the Artist, of not reading the Range News regularly: it was Junior Rodeo weekend, and we had nearly missed the whole thing! I’d left my camera home, along with my cowgirl hat, but we parked and got out to hang on the rails and watch the calf-roping. Nothing smells as good as fresh horse and cow manure! With all the rain we’ve had, this year’s rodeo wasn’t nearly as dusty, either, as the one we’d attended three years before. 

Well, that was serendipity indeed! Horses, horses, horses! I didn't have my camera with me, but I had my eyes and ears and nose to take in beautiful sights and sounds and aromas. Nothing better in the world! Why would I, how could I, not love a place with so many horses collected together? My heart is not yearning to be anywhere but Cochise County, Arizona, this winter.

Junior Rodeo, Willcox, AZ, 2015

Don't Turn Your Back on Serendipity

She is not amused!

‘Serendipity’ is one of my names for Sarah. (A far less obvious endearment is Triceratops, and I am still amazed that someone guessed that right off in the bookstore one day when I mentioned I’d come up with another pet name for Sarah, along with Sarasota; Serafina; Che Sera, Sera, etc.) It was a happy accident indeed when we found her at the Cherryland Humane Society shelter south of Traverse City. We could not have planned a more congenial companion than she has been all these years.

Most of my reading proceeds by serendipity, as well -- unplanned for the most part. I did plenty of assigned reading in my many years of school, after all, and while not regretting those years (or those books), and while continuing to along with group choices in our reading circle (which is the self-assigned reading of the group), one of the joys of my time of life now is being open to accidental discoveries. For instance, I’ll think to myself that it’s about time to read another modern novel. Here’s an author completely unknown to me. What does the back cover have to say about the book?

On a farm in western Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters.

Well, that sounds promising. The little I’ve seen of Missouri when passing through was beautiful. I am one of three daughters: perhaps we should have been more “headstrong”? I enjoy reading of farm life, biographical or fictional. And so I open and begin to read The Moonflower Vine, by Jetta Carleton. The first chapter is comfortable, somewhat like the opening chapter in Little Women except that here the girls are grown up and only home on the parents’ farm for a summer visit. One of the highlights will be the evening flowering of the moonflower vine, so for that and for a picnic jaunt to cut down a bee tree, it seems all else must give way. Family priorities come across homey and simple. It looks as if living for a while in this book will be a pleasant, comforting escape from Michigan winter and general American political angst.

Further along, the sisters veer from their own assigned task, picking lettuce, to meander their way through the woods and down to the creek. There is time, Leonie tells the others, for her to catch a fish.

As they walked through the cornfield a freight train passed, a half mile beyond the creek, squeaking and laboring on its way to Renfro. 

 “See, I told you,” said Leonie. “There’s the Katy—it’s not three o’clock yet.”

Well, there’s a pleasant little surprise! David and I met the Katy train two years ago this coming April in Boonesville, Missouri, on our way back to Michigan from winter in Arizona, having gotten off the expressway for Paris.

Any novel presents surprises along the way, and so it is when an unexpected funeral prevents the bee tree expedition. Questions arise, too. Where is the fourth daughter during the annual summer reunion? Who are the absent husbands of two others, described only as a farmer and a mechanic? Only at the end of the first section of the book, “The Family,” do I turn back to read Jane Smiley’s introduction, telling me that after the “overture” of the first section I will meet with family secrets, sins, and tragedies. I close the book to read on the front cover “a rediscovered classic,” on the back the Chicago Tribune’s praise, “a distinguished achievement.” Well, I can’t say any of this is disappointing. On the contrary, it only whetted my appetite for the story to come. Seduced by the overture, there was no way I was going to leave without the experience of the entire symphony, and I spent most of Sunday in Missouri with the Soames family, people I’d never heard of two days before and am now very, very happy to have met.

“Do you have such-and-such?”

A common bookstore question, sometimes asked only a few feet past the door, and far too often a seeker receiving a negative response will turn back toward the door without coming another step in, saying apologetically, “I just thought I’d ask” (sometimes adding, “I just wanted to give you the business”). Well, I’ve been known to ask for specific titles and authors myself in other people’s bookstores. Of course! But to leave without even glancing at what’s on the shelves and tables? Other books in the same subject area or genre? The bookseller’s “Some of my favorites” shelf? The newly arrived used books?

I would not be so fastidious for quids! I’m sure that somewhere in Jane Austen there is a character who begins a line with something like “I would not be so fastidious as you are...,” but my aging brain has not yet turned up the character who uttered the line. Certainly, the line did not end with “for quids,” an Aussie expression I learned from a correspondent in New South Wales.

There’s another thing, I realize: The correspondence Kathy and I have enjoyed for six years began entirely by serendipity. Previous to its beginning, we had no idea of each other’s existence. She went looking online to locate an old beau, remembered the name of one of his college friends, searched online for that friend (David) and found me. I almost deleted her first message without opening it, not recognizing the sender, but I’m so glad I didn’t. We have shared so much over the years since that serendipitous beginning. Quite amazing, really.  I’m glad too that I did not pass up The Moonflower Vine because I’d never heard the name Jetta Carleton before. Say, I’ll bet Kathy would enjoy it, too!

A glance at the U.S. map shows how far Missouri is from Michigan, and a world map makes clear how far New South Wales, in Australia, is from both M-states. I love maps. Maps are magic. Lists can be magic, too. But maps and lists are not the territory, and sometimes there is no joy to compare with getting lost and being surprised.

Hint: There is more to Dog Ears Books than the dog.

When Sarah was a pup....

Flowers, Books, Insects, and Curiosity

June slid into July, as it always does, and the march of mad summer blooms continues. Again on Thursday morning I was greeted by flowers on the bookstore doorstep.

Bruce had come in to work for me on Wednesday, for the first time since last fall. Hallelujah! A day off for the bookstore owner! Naturally, I had a bookstore errand to run, an excuse for a morning drive down to Glen Lake, where I picked up the new book from Leelanau Press, Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions, a book about which I cannot say enough good things. That was exciting! We even made a brief dip into Traverse City.

I finished my reading of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a much livelier and funnier book than I had expected it to be. Our reading circle has decided to meet in August but without an assigned book to read and discuss. Instead each of us will bring something we want to share with the others. I’ll be sharing Samuel Butler.

A bookseller from Powell’s, out in Portland, Oregon, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post, and to every paragraph I wanted to shout, “Yes!” Here’s the link, if you’d like to read “Love and Bookstores” for yourself, because if I start quoting I won’t be able to stop.

And then, as always, there has been the serendipitous picking up of the odd volume and finding treasure:

There are for each one of us, according to his turn of mind, certain books that open up horizons hitherto undreamed of and mark an epoch in our mental life. They fling wide the gates of a new world wherein our intellectual powers are henceforth to be employed; they are the spark which lights the fuel on a hearth doomed, without its aid, to remain indefinitely bleak and cold. And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstances, a few lines that happen somehow to come before our eyes decide our future and plant us in the appointed groove.

-      Jean Henri Fabre, The Hunting Wasps

Who but Fabre, “the Homer of the insects,” would begin a book about wasps with a paragraph on the serendipity of book discovery? It was, admittedly, his way of introducing a monograph he had happened upon that set his mind in a new direction concerning the habits of wasps, but still – a curious mind, open to the discovery of whatever was nearby, guided Fabre’s learning about insects as surely as it brought the right books to his hands and mind. About my only disappointment in the trip David and I made together to France years ago was that Fabre’s house, now a museum, was closed for renovations the month we were there. Anyone wishing to visit the grounds, however, may do so by viewing the film “Microcosmos.” I recommend it highly.

Don’t forget that this Sunday Kathleen Stocking will be at Dog Ears Books from noon to 1 p.m., signing her latest book, The Long Arc of the Universe. I’m continually surprised to find there are people who have not yet read her first and second books, Letters from the Leelanau and Lake Country. In the car this morning, on the way to Northport, I thought of what I needed to tell those of whom this is true: “If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau County.”  So get started now!