Look Near, Look Far

That green pointillist flush I love!

Season’s Progress

Orchard buds on 5 May 2026

Cherry blossoms in the orchard around my house have yet to appear (still in bud), though young orchard trees out on Stony Point, on the bay side of the peninsula, were in blossom for Mothers Day, and the big black cherry trees (a forest hardwood) are blooming, too. The season is advancing, albeit by fits and starts, with overnight temperatures below freezing.  I harvested enough fiddlehead ferns to accompany two meals last week. 

Black cherry at the edge of the woods

Looking up through its crown

Blossom cluster

In Traverse City, the decorative pear trees are radiant in the sunshine. Is there a danger, though, in having planted the city streets with so many of one tree variety? What if a pest were to strike that landscaped monoculture? I looked online for an answer and discovered an even more alarming possibility: This variety of ornamental pear is now considered invasive because, while sterile itself, it can cross-fertilize with other varieties and produce thorns monstrous enough to puncture tractor tires! It also has hazardous weaknesses due to its branching habit, and some states have already outlawed their sale. Don't plant them in your yard! 

Look beyond looks!

If Traverse City follows other cities in eliminating this tree (which seems like a good plan), I hope they will do it on a gradual basis and replace the pears with two or three different kinds of trees, maybe redbud and dogwood and something else. Suggestions? 

Changing the subject: Isn't my hellebore beautiful?

What Makes a Good Book Review or Reviewer?

I hate to say it, but I can’t help concluding, after reading a raft of online amateur book reviews (I am tempted to put “reviews” in scare quotes, like so), that there are a lot of very lazy readers in our country who should not be claiming to be reviewers. Or maybe they are simply reading books that are not right for them. After I finished reading what struck me as a brilliant first novel, curious to see what others had thought about it, I looked for reviews, and three particular criticisms that I discounted as inappropriate stood out, each made by more than one person. I have condensed to give composite comments, so the following are not quoted directly: 

(1) There are too many new novels set in World War II. Here's another one. Yawn!

(2) If you don’t know Paris, you’ll be lost in this book. It's probably okay for people who know Paris, but for me? Yawn! 

(3) The action and time jumped around in a confusing way. I'm outta here!

Here is my first round of responses:

(1) Are there too many boy-meets-girl novels? Too many novels about American family life? The question isn’t the number of novels available on any given subject, but their quality and how worthy they are of readers’ time. 

(2) I know Paris pretty well, but I’ve never visited Salinas or San Francisco or Brooklyn, let alone Moscow or Mumbai or anywhere on the African or Asian or South American continent. I’ve never anywhere near Australia. And yet I have read avidly novels set in all these locales, as well as stories set in earlier centuries in America and Europe (despite my inability to travel through time except in imagination and, therefore, in books). For those of us without the means to afford constant world travel, books give us wings! In fact, I learned Paris from books long before I ever set foot in its streets, just as I recognized my first sandhill crane from having seen it pictured in bird field guides. 

(3) Fiction with multiple narrators and nonsequential time sequences has become a norm in Western fiction, from YA titles to the most abstruse literary works. At times it is confusing, and when I’m reading a book written that way it often takes me 20 or 30 pages to get into the rhythm, but seldom does the difficulty persist, and in the case of this particular novel italics that set off the ghost character's viewpoint help a lot.

And here is round 2: 

(4) If you’re tired of WWII novels or only want to read books set in geography you know well, don’t read such books! Skip them entirely, or if you find one in your hands and can’t get into it, at least don’t foist your dismissive opinion off as a “review.” If you don’t want to travel, stay home rather than go to another country and complain because it isn't like home.

(5) There is nothing wrong with preferring a simple, linear, chronological narrative, either, but readers don’t need opinions on novels structured otherwise by people who object to alternative structures. You can find plenty of books written with your preferences in mind. There is fiction for every taste. Read with your preferences in mind and review those books. You will find some successful and others disappointing, and that’s as it should be. 

(6) We all have limitations. I would not presume to review books of fantasy or science fiction, because those are genres that don’t speak to me. They never have. I get bored, and my mind wanders. People who love sci-fi and fantasy and have a strong reading background in the field apply quality standards to their reviews that I could never hope to achieve. So I’m not dissing anyone for their reading choices. All I’m saying is I don’t see the point in someone purporting to review a book she couldn’t begin appreciate and, in many cases, didn’t even finish.

Okay, that’s my opinion as a reader, bookseller, and occasional book reviewer. I don’t expect it to change a single mind or alter anyone’s practice—people will keep doing what they want to do—but I wanted to put it out there. Agree—or disagree?

I highly recommend this brilliant first novel!

You may have read other novels set in Paris during World War II, but no two are alike, and this one (as does Karen Mulvahill's The Lost Woman) shows how very particular chance events in one era continue to reverberate and affect individuals and families in following years. Also, the prose is enchanting! 

Don't miss the cowslips. They are blooming now.

As May Approaches

Do you see her?

Seasonal sights

A recurring obsession in my life, spring ephemeral wildflowers, comes into focus now for its all-too-brief season, briefer than spring itself, which began earlier with winter aconites and Siberian squills (blue flower above) in the yard and will extend beyond the days of shy woodland beauties as the first impressionist flush of returning life in the branches of trees all too quickly swells unfurling into shade-providing leaves. Right now, however, the time of ephemeral blooms is just getting underway, although my photographs here, from two and three days ago, are not an accurate report of today in the woods. 

My old news here is of Dutchman's breeches, blooming above, and of trillium and toothwort preparing to bloom. Will trillium and toothwort flowers open today before I get these words thrown out into the world?

Daily I watch buds in the orchard, as well as on my own little apple trees and solitary plum. When will the cherry trees blossom? people ask. We are all hungry for spring’s abundant, harmless beauty.

Spring rain was abundant this year, far too abundant in many places (lots of flood damage), and even in Leelanau swelling creeks and ponds and creating temporary bodies of water in low places. Some, like the ponds in my yard, lasted only 24 hours, while others deserve their lovely name, vernal pools, and these days, morning and afternoon, I visit both the ephemeral and the year-round ponds to watch ducks and geese and cranes and gulls. 

One morning I was rewarded by seeing three lesser yellowlegs, a single bird at a vernal pool and a pair on a larger, more populous body of water. The pair was gone the next day, the bachelor a day later, all of them on their way north to Canada’s boreal forest land. Hawks, too, are migrating north, but wild turkeys remain, turkeys and mallards courting and breeding here among us.

Just passing through....

A busy bookshop day

We had a lovely gathering of people for poet Fleda Brown’s reading last Saturday as we celebrated National Poetry Month and Indie Bookstore Day. I forebore photographing my guest, as it was her first public event since back surgery, and she was still strapped into a white plastic, torso-hugging brace. “A bionic poet!” I exclaimed. She may not have appreciated that name but was pleased, as was I, by her audience, and we were all very pleased with her. On the most serious of subjects, this poet manages to cast a sideways glance, providing a wry look at our human absurdity, while never losing sight of life’s priceless details. Her poems and essays are gifts to the world.

For all Saturday’s unwelcome cold (spring is a season of many short, teasing setbacks), even after the poetry crowd dispersed my day in the shop continued busy right up until 4:30. Where did all these book-lovers come from? Serious browsers, good sales, great conversations—it was like a day in July, all the more heartwarming coming as a surprise in chilly April.

Fleda Brown's 2025 visit to Dog Ears Books

Trend or anomaly?

My phone often makes a sound as for an incoming text when no text is coming in, as if the phone is tugging at my sleeve or nudging my arm to say, Pay attention to me! You’re not paying attention to me! Apparently a new "thing" for young people on college campuses these days is the phone-free gathering, where attendees sit with hands free and look into each other’s faces and talk directly to one another, making the conscious decision not to let their phones dictate their every waking minute. Isn’t that a hopeful sign?

(When an old friend and I were going to get together for the first time in many years, I suggested that we leave our phones in another room. We didn't miss them at all.)

Another development in the growing rebellion against digital technology (more astonishing to me than a return to vinyl records) is the rediscovery of VHS. Movies in boxes! Don’t have a VCR? You can rent that, too! I am told that even CD and DVD technology amazes more and more young people, accustomed as they are to streaming music and movies. What do they make of VHS tapes?

(In novels written a hundred or more years ago, we read of parties where young people gathered around a piano, singing songs, thrilled with the arrival of new, up-to-date sheet music. Country life without a piano might still feature a fiddle, guitar, harmonica, or other instruments. Stamping feet. Clapping hands.) 

I wonder (the eternal springing of hope!) if perhaps my busy spring Saturday of bookselling is related to these other stories, another turning away from tiny screens. Maybe we will have an Indie Bookstore Year!

What is on your mind these days?

This morning I watched grey clouds outside my window as they moved slowly from south to north. A south wind. Occasional glimpses of blue sky. Then a more uniform grey, devoid of contrast, reminding me of ground recently monochromatic white. My first coffee of the day, whether at 5 a.m. or 6:30, is my time to come awake to the world gradually, to look back on days past and plan the days ahead, to read or write, to—I admit it!—look at my phone to scan headlines as well as to see the weather forecast. “Violence is never the answer,” people around the world say solemnly today, a predictable chorus, as they condemn the latest lone shooter. Who would disagree? Yet if war is not violence, then nothing is. That is one of my morning thoughts.

First faint flush of green!

Trees. I think about trees daily and look forward every morning to being outdoors again among them, although I confess to taking up arms against autumn olive and popples advancing into land I want to preserve as meadow, just as I contemplate possible ways to discourage spotted knapweed in my meadow without the use of poison. Controlling nature is not possible, nor is it my wish. I am grateful for the proliferation of squills and forget-me-not in my yard and yellow-headed coneflowers in the meadow. Finding another hawthorn in the meadow delights me. I don’t want to be engulfed by autumn olive and knapweed, however, and they would take over the world if they could. Such greedy bullies! 

My constant companion

Sunny Juliet has no such concerns. Whatever grows or doesn’t around us, the outdoor world delights her, and she has a genius for turning up deer bones. It is as if she and the coyotes have made an agreement—they will make the kills, and she will scavenge the bones—while in the yard at home, life this spring involves an astounding number of tennis balls, more and more of them turning up where they had been lost in winter’s snow. 

Sunny taking a bone break from tennis ball play

It is good to have a dog in one’s life. A constraint on freedom, to be sure, but then, there are many constraints on freedom, which can never be absolute. In our family and civic lives, we are frequently held back by consideration for others; in our outdoor lives—every move we make!—nature sets boundaries on what we can do. I step carefully in the woods, watching where I put my feet and testing a slender tree before trusting it fully as a handhold. Sunny bounds ahead confidently, much more stable on four legs than I am on only two, but we are together in our enjoyment. We are here now. We are blessed to be here now.

My Unexpected Vacation Day

Orchard road

[In China] I took deep interest … in the farming problems of our neighbors, the difficulties of raising crops…. I watched the turn of seasons and was anxious with the farmers when there was no rain and yearned with them in their prayer processions and was grateful when sometimes the rain did fall.

 

-      Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

 

Up North, when days finally grow long and bright again, the question asked between people meeting for the first time in this new year is always the same: “How was your winter?” 

My answer this year: “In retrospect, it went fast.” 

I admit that individual days sometimes felt long, and yet, each week, as I looked back on it, seemed to have flown by. Spring’s arrival, however, seemed reluctant as back and forth it went, a yo-yo season, giving us hope only to dash our optimism the following day. Yet difficult as were those days of March and April, they were cold spring days, January now only a memory.

 

Cherry blossom was unspectacular this year in my immediate neighborhood. We had ice and rain and wind, and though trees bloomed, I missed the usual rolling acres of brilliantly white flowering trees in the spring sun. Either I missed it, or the wind and rain tore the blossoms untimely from the boughs. If I'm correct about there having been a shorter flowering time, will it affect the harvest? Farmers need a lot of faith to keep going, it seems.

 

Annuals to add POP to perennial borders

One of the garden centers where I buy flowering annuals changed hands this past year, and when I asked one of the new owners how things were going he remarked—this was last Sunday morning—that people were biding their time, reluctant to plant with the weather as cool as it still was. I had risked bean seeds, and they came up, but then a chilly morning nipped part of a row. I filled in the row with new seeds. Does that take faith? I don’t know that I'm brimming with faith, but I plant and hope for the best and am delighted (by what seems a miracle!) when seedlings emerge from the soil.

 

Now—suddenly, it seems!—it is June, and there are no more slow days. Between sunrise and sunset we have more than 15 hours, so the days are long, but each one speeds by. As illustration and evidence, I offer below images of trees leafing out in late May. First, a roadside woods at that all-too-brief impressionist stage, the spring day when I always long for a ‘pause’ button so as to drink my greedy fill of this delicate, tender, fleeting time that is gone too soon. Then, our Leelanau woods only two days later. The first green of spring: Now you see it, now you don’t!

One spring day --

Two days later --

And THEN!  It's a jungle!

My personal and business life take on the speed of the season, which is why my recent trip to Kalamazoo was only an overnight turnaround. I could stay there for a month and still not have enough time with family and friends, but too much awaits my attention at home, so home I came the next day to tend to it all: planning for bookstore events with book orders and publicity, and planning for summer visitors to my home (and for my own stolen moments of leisure) by getting yard and gardens in shape for the season. Marilyn Zimmerman's book launch is next week!!!

Mark your calendar for June 10, Dog Ears Books, 5-7 p.m.!
 

In the midst of all this, the disappearance of my billfold, holding driver’s license and credit cards, was a minor crisis. Did I leave it somewhere? Drop it somewhere? Was it in the house “in plain sight” and I just couldn’t see it? Over and over I mentally retraced my steps ... called places I’d been on Friday and Saturday ... looked and looked and looked ... through every bag, under car seats, at home and in my shop. It is so maddeningly tedious, having to give over mental energy to such a boring, repetitive task, don’t you find? 

 

But on Monday morning my car had to go in for a brake job in Leland, and since I could make no progress on the search while the car was in the garage, I put the whole problem on the back burner, walking from Van's garage down Main Street to Trish’s Dishes to get a coffee to go, encountering a couple of friends along the way, and then making my leisurely way back to the river to find a perch on the dock of a shanty belonging to friends there in Fishtown. I'd texted Charlie that I would be there but hadn't had a reply, so I just made myself at home, as the Artist did so many times over the years.

Looking lake ward

A glorious morning! The sun was shining, and the breeze was alive with that wonderfully familiar, fresh-fishy aroma of the river. Men were at work on the dock opposite, where a few early morning tourists strolled. Passengers gathered to board the Mishe-Mokwa for a day trip to South Manitou Island. Gulls flew overhead, and song sparrows sang. Now and then a duck paddled about near the pilings. 

 

It was very near here, just south of the river mouth, that the Artist spent a night on the beach long ago and wandered into town the next morning to the Bluebird, where Grandma Telgard said immediately to a member of her kitchen staff, “This boy needs a cup of coffee!” That was years before we met, but in later years together we spent many, many hours in, around, and near Fishtown, only a pleasant walk from our old Leland home.

Back to the present. Now, in 2025, for weeks and weeks I have been carrying my sketchbook with me everywhere I’ve gone, along with a set of drawing pens sent to me by a friend for my birthday. The last serious sketches made in the book were from 2015. A whole decade ago! How is that possible? Finally, there on the dock, I took out sketchbook and pens and applied myself to the scene. The results were laughable, but results didn’t matter. I was there and nowhere else, practicing drawing as meditation. Perfectly content.

Life proceeds at a different pace on the river, I remembered then, whether one is working or relaxing. 

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!”

 

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

 

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

 

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.” 

 

-      Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows

 

Illustration of Rat and Mole by E. H. Shepard

Since I’d seen no car, I thought Charlie and Sandy must be away, but it turned out that Sandy was home, and after a while she joined me outside on the dock with her own coffee mug, and the two of us caught up on each other’s lives in leisurely fashion. I showed her my sketchbook, and she showed me her tiny portable watercolor kit, small enough to fit in a handbag, and after a couple of hours we walked up to Main Street and over to the Cove, a restaurant on the north side of the river, to meet her visiting grandson and his wife and their almost-three-year-old son for lunch. 

 

I’d told Sandy about my missing billfold but was feeling no stress or panic. It would show up, or it wouldn’t. I had put a hold on the credit cards the day before, and although replacing cards and driver’s license would not be much fun, it was just one of those things. One foot in front of the other. Deal with it. That's life. 

Am I calmer because I’ve learned not to panic? Or is it simply a lessening of energy that comes with age? Or am I become so calm, so unlike my younger self, because after losing the love of my life nothing else that happens to me feels all that difficult? Maybe all are partial explanations.

 

Later, back home, I dared to plant seeds for tender annuals and vegetables. Launched tennis balls through the air for Sunny Juliet. Searched one more time through my car for the missing billfold and contemplated necessary next steps if it didn’t turn up. But the day was too beautiful for worry. I’d mowed grass on Sunday, and my yard, fresh and green, was orderly and inviting as I puttered about the perennial borders, grateful for my Michigan country life.

Sunny likes Michigan, too.

And the icing on the cake was that I found my billfold in the grass, right there at home! Now I don’t have to think about that any more! 

 

But have I been stingy with pictures of Sunny in this post? How about a recent scene at the dog park, Sunny and friends, with all dogs in happy motion. There! Satisfied?

Dogs having fun!

Second Thoughts

Leelanau Twp., 4/15/25

Is spring having second thoughts about getting underway?

 

You would have thought so if you were in Leelanau on tax day, Tuesday, April 15. We got out of bed in the morning to fresh snow on the ground and a biting wind! But besides being tax day, it was also “Alyssa’s Day of Kindness,” a day to put a smile on the faces of friends and/or strangers by treating them to ice cream or coffee (two of Alyssa’s favorite things) or flowers or anything else—or simply doing a kind deed for another person—in memory of a 21-year-old who died by suicide. Alyssa’s family came up with this wonderful memorial idea, which was kicked off three years ago. Those of us who participate take photos to share, and it is a lovely way to remember this beautiful girl I’m sorry I never met—though I can’t help wishing we didn’t need this memorial and that Alyssa were still here to enjoy another spring in her young life….

 

Beautiful Alyssa!

Note: Please see the number in the flier above. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 for help!

 

Biting My Tongue

 

Some people think we should always blurt out whatever comes into our minds, right there on the spot, and they call anything else “self-censorship,” meaning something bad. I disagree. Why say something I’ll be sorry I said, when there’s usually no reason not to pause and reconsider? By taking time, I may revise my expression, tempering or strengthening it, as the situation seems to require. Sometimes I’ll decide to say nothing. Not speaking right then doesn’t mean I won’t say something later.

 

And yes, once in a while I do blurt out my first reaction! Am I always sorry? Not always! You would love to have an example of that, too, I know, but those unscripted moments are not for a public showcase! Mine is not a blurting blog.

 

Life happens moment by moment, though, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum but always at a specific time, in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and it’s a harsh rule that admits of no exceptions.

 

 

Changing My Mind

 

Related to the idea of exceptional blurting is another notion of second thoughts. One recent day I had stopped by my bookshop to drop off a few books and pick up others to take home on loan. I sat down at my desk for a minute, and a woman walked in the door I hadn’t locked. “I’m not really open,” I told her. She looked disappointed but then admitted she was only looking for a restroom. I suggested the gas station next door, but then, as she was getting back in the passenger seat of a car out front, I had second thoughts and went out to invite her back in. Why not? She was very appreciative and thanked me repeatedly.

 

When I locked up shop a few minutes later and went over to the gas station myself to pick up a few items, I met a woman I’d known in Kalamazoo decades ago. She had gone out to her car and found her sister missing and been alarmed. “She has dementia!” I told her I’d let her sister use the restroom in my place and that she was now safely back in the passenger seat of the car. Everything had worked out fine.

 

Even if I hadn’t met the driving sister, though, I had already felt better about my second thought and decision. The woman’s dementia was not obvious to me, but that she had some sort of illness was, and each and every single one of us knows how much it can mean to find a restroom when we need it! As characters in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, said more than once in that book, it was only a little onion. Such a little onion I gave!

Throwing Out the Script

 

The foregoing is introduction to my telling you that this post on having second thoughts is not the post I planned to publish on my blog today. The discarded post began with the statement “I can’t do it” and went on to detail my heartbreak over the ongoing events in our nation over the past—how many days and weeks has it been?? It isn’t that I would have wanted to “take back” anything from that post, had I put it up. No, but I had two reasons for starting over: first, I have no hope of changing a single mind (you can't make people care if they don't); and besides that, I know that at least a couple of my regular readers come here for something other than politics and current events. News they can get elsewhere. News is hard to avoid! What they want from me is strength and courage and dog and landscape photos, a smile, news from my little corner of the world, and (some of them) gentle meanderings about books. 

 

And why not?

 

 

Back to My Little Corner

 

Well, today was a sunny day in my one and only precious life. Song sparrows sing again in the mornings now, and redwing blackbirds make their creaking calls from the top of the barn, sounding like the old swings of my childhood school playground, swings with heavy wooden seats hung by heavy steel chains. (At least, I presume that metal was steel. Joliet, Illinois, was a steel-making town, after all, our township high school team known as the Steelmen—though also, confusingly, as the Iron Avalanche, unbeaten until they were beaten.) Robins cry out in self-admiration, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" 

Barefoot child with grandfather c.1951

Canada geese fly overhead these days in honking Vs, and every once in a while I hear the clatter of a sandhill crane’s voice and stop whatever I’m doing outdoors to search the sky, hoping for a sight, while mallards and herring gulls find refuge in temporary ponds that have formed in fields of corn stubble. It's good to see them, too.

All of which is to say that life goes on. (Or as I have come to say in recent years, “Life goes on ... until it doesn’t.” None of us is going to live forever.) The earth rotates and orbits the sun, day alternates with night, and the cycle of seasons repeats and repeats. Our blue-and-green planet, brimming with life, has not always been in existence and will probably not exist forever, but here we are, right now, and here it is, and there is comfort in knowing and seeing that we haven’t yet killed our home.

Toe of my boot illustrates how tiny these daffodils are.

Now that the yard is free from snow (again!), Sunny and I have resumed her work on the weave poles, which she finds the most challenging of all the agility equipment. She loves jumping the hurdles so much that it’s hard for her to understanding that weaving does not require that she jump. Do we all need a challenge? “Weave!” will be Sunny Juliet’s challenge this spring and summer.  

Sunny with challenges!

Also, let’s not forget that April is National Poetry Month! Poetry! There’s a reason to celebrate! 

 

My poet of the year 2025 is Fleda Brown, and Fleda will be here on the Friday before Memorial Day, May 23, to read from her new chapbook of prose poems, Doctor to the World. There will be chairs in a circle in the Artist’s gallery next to the bookstore (I’ll have it cleaned up before the event, I promise), and we will convene at noon, so I’m inviting attendees to bring sack lunches for an informal and intimate gathering. 

Poet Fleda Brown on a previous visit to Northport

 

Finally, in closing –

 

Life! It’s what we’ve got, so take it easy, my friends, or take it hard, but take it, and don’t take it lying down! Also, don’t forget, if you can manage it, to brighten the corner where you are.

 

¡Nunca te rindas!

 

Also,

 

HOORAY FOR HARVARD!!!

Rushing Headlong!

Look out, world!

Whenever we get to the dog park or we’re playing the game at home where she chases tennis balls launched through the air by her momma or any old time she happens to spy a rabbit in or near our yard at home, Sunny Juliet goes into high gear in a heartbeat. Not the soulful bedtime cuddler, she is a speeding rocket! 

Shadows on fresh spring snow

 

I wish I could say northern Michigan is rushing headlong into spring with the same speed Sunny shows when chasing a rabbit, but – nah. We had a teasing short course of spring weather, followed by yet another snowstorm. Then the weather warmed up again, and we were visited with torrential rain before once again cold returned, bringing both snow and ice. The result of, first, the heavy, wet snow, and then the rain freezing to ice, both times with pounding winds, was a lot of tree damage—in the orchards, the woods, and along northern roads. 

Northport Creek nearly at street level

Another result for many (mostly in the northeast corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula) was loss of electrical power. Calling the ice beautiful, then, seems insensitive at best, perhaps even cruel, and yet what else to say when the sun shines on pellucid, glass-encased branches, making tiny rainbows in the bright, clear air, and every breeze brings the sound of tinkling crystal as shards fall to the ground? 

Frozen vineyard under blue sky

Workers clearing away fallen branches

Hear the sounds of crystal?

Nature can't help her awe-ful beauty.

But yes, I know, friends, that I have been fortunate while others have faced devastation, and my heart goes out to those who have had losses. Life isn't fair. That's why we have to be fair with and kind to each other.

Piles of presents!

Sunny was not forgotten, either.

As for me, personally, although I was not at all in an anticipatory mood in the days leading up to it, I had another birthday the other day. Rushing headlong through my eighth decade, I am now another year closer to the dreaded eight-oh! But I was so fearfully spoiled by cards and texts and presents from family and friends—and the day itself dawned with what seemed miraculous: a sunrise!—and then I tricked a friend into letting me treat her to a late lunch, not telling her it was my birthday until afterward (she says she’ll never trust me again)—that, all in all, unexpectedly, it was a very satisfying day. 

Tuesday sunrise - what a great gift!

Fisher's Happy Hour cream puff (K. Snedeker photo)

Sunny and I had been to the dog park earlier, and later I bribed her with a beef bone so I could spend the evening calmly and quietly, reading and visiting on the phone, all snuggled in a sleeping bag with my feet up. My old friend James, had he seen me, would have said in a voice pretending to be shocked, “Pamela! You sybarite!” It was my own personal, self-indulgent holiday.

But Sunny was not completely ignored. That never happens.

Other than advancing age, another reason I wasn’t much in the mood for a birthday is the way my beloved country seems to be rushing headlong away from freedom, democracy, and universal suffrage and off a cliff to land into the opposite of such values. (I will refrain from giving a name here to the opposites that are daily before our eyes, because you already know what words are so painfully appropriate.) After a day spent resolutely offline, though, in bright sunshine, at the dog park, opening presents, and visiting with friends, in person and by talk and text, I thought I would chance looking at headlines on my phone. Maybe only headlines. What a wonderful surprise greeted me: Cory Booker standing up in the Senate for the U.S. Constitution and the American people! I was so heartened! What a terrific birthday present! The next morning I could hardly wait to check in again with him. As you know, he stood and spoke for over 25 hours, a new Senate record. I am so grateful to him and proud of his presence in Congress. We need more standup men and women there!

Back at work in Northport on Wednesday (with some of the nastiest weather so far this year: snow turning to sneet, then rain coming down, turning to slush on the sidewalks that will no doubt freeze to ice overnight—ugh!), I had not expected anyone in my shop, but browsers and buyers appeared as if by magic, and they were lovely visitors, too, all of them. I was glad there were dog treats in my jacket pocket for the little Boston terrier who needed to come in and to warm up. 

Now before the weekend arrives, I need to put together an April display for National Poetry Month. Always something to do in a bookshop. It's my good life.

Friday, May 23, noon -- details to follow soon.