"Locals' Summer" Comes 'Round Again

No, summer isn’t over!

‘Locals’ summer’ is what Up North residents, especially the non-retired, like to call September, these idyllic days when air and water are still warm enough to lure us to the beaches, and when the beaches themselves are much more sparsely populated than in July and August. For those with children back in school, even with college-age students gone off to begin classes, as well as for teachers and professors at all levels of instruction, September is the beginning of fall, but for those of us no longer returning to classrooms, this month of the first turning leaves is summer’s last hurrah.

Cathedral of trees

So it was that Tree Guy and Naughty Barker and I packed up the car and headed for the Mackinac Bridge the day after the annual Labor Day bridge walk. Tuesday found us stopping once more at Lehto’s for our dinner pasties, wrapping up the day with a long forest walk and a spell of quiet riverbank sitting before bedtime. 

Sunlight on the river

Tree Guy had important errands to accomplish in Marquette on Wednesday, which were taken care of with surprising and delightful ease, leaving time for a visit to Snowbound Books. Hurrah! Years ago—and for many years—Snowbound was an annual visit for me, and I hate to think how long it’s been since I was last there, so long that needed a brief tour to orient myself. Current inventory is about 70% new books and 30% used, which I judge is about the opposite of my own shop’s offerings.

How far to Dog Ears Books???

Bonnie at Snowbound Books

I’d have loved to linger twice as long … and to have time to stop in at Dead River Coffee, as well … but even with a shaded parking space, we didn’t want to leave Naughty Barker in the car too long, and we were as eager as the River Rat to get back to our “bijou riverside residence” for the rest of the gloriously summery September day.

Everywhere, goldenrod!

Only small pockets of fall color in the trees

Thursday we did little projects around the cabin, took more long forest walks, and made a short jaunt over to the famous Kitch-iti-kipi spring, not far from Manistique but challenging to locate (for us, at least), which I had somehow never seen before in all my U.P. travels. The spring is within the boundary of a state park, but though the parking lot and grounds were swarming with late-season tourists, a respectful hush fell over visitors as they neared, on foot, the destination spring. The hush surprised and pleased me. “Medicine Water” and “Mirror of Heaven,” Ojibwa names for the spring, express very well the sacred feeling of this North American freshwater cenote. 

Spring water's route to Indian Lake

The 10,000 gallons of water per minute that burble silently up from bedrock flow gently out via Indian Lake, six long, wide miles, the Indian River then flowing into the Manistique before entering Lake Michigan. The river has a peaceful look. We paused at the Bishop Baraga site (his first mission was at this location) and wondered about the path that had brought him to the spot.

Bishop Baraga's first mission: Indian Lake

A lot of cabin time is taken up with simple pleasures: watching water flow, walking in the forest, throwing tennis balls for Naughty Barker’s entertainment, reading, and observing wildlife. NB directed my attention to Mr. Toad. I was pleased that she did not harass him. Later she was surprised and puzzled by a garter snake. A bulge in the snake’s curves seemed to indicate a satisfying meal, and I hoped the meal had not been Mr. Toad. Surely the bulge would have been larger had she swallowed anything that big?

As for my reading, it was all over the map. A Dave Barry book from the privy had me in stitches, and after that I dove into Agatha Christie, first the book I’d gotten halfway through on our last visit to the cabin, A Holiday for Murder, and then a second Christie in my mini-binge, The Moving Finger, which may be (in my opinion, you understand) her best. Finally, then, my mind had had enough relaxation that I could get into Anatole France, The Gods Are A-Thirst, our reading circle’s selection for September. This one was—I should say is, as I have over half the book to read yet—anything but “escape reading,” as the politics of the French Revolution are both background and foreground to the story.

I learned to my great delight, in André Maurois's introduction to The Gods Are A-Thirst, that the author's father, François Noel Thibault was a bookseller, specializing in—guess what!—the French Revolution. 

In 1862, shortly after leaving the Collège Stanislas, his son had set to work in the family bookshop cataloguing the Comte de la Bédoyère's collection. Thus Anatole France had come to be on intimate terms with Robespierre, Marat and their clan down to its humblest members. 

It pleases me to think of the young Anatole France, not yet using the name under which he would become famous, busy in his father's shop on the Quai Malplaquais, 

hard at work over the correspondence and papers of revolutionaries of almost a century before. His novel's title, Les dieux ont soif, comes from a periodical article that got its editor beheaded in 1794 (pleas for moderation and freedom of the press not popular with the Tribunal) and supposedly comes from Aztec culture and justification for human sacrifice, the gods being “thirsty” for blood, a taste Anatole France did not share, I am happy too say, either in retrospect (in his views on the Revolution) or in his own time (his sympathies were with Dreyfus). 

Tree Guy is not a meandering kind of traveler—more “Point A to Point B”—but he was persuaded to take a 2-mile detour off our road back to the Bridge so I could visit another old favorite bookstore. The bookseller, my friend Mary, was off on a book adventure, but her daughter Holly took care of me. Again, it had been years since I had been inside this shop I used to visit on an annual basis, so it felt good to be able to make purchases there again.

That American flag hanging over the Mackinac Bridge — “Is that something new?” I asked as we drove over above the Straits (always a thrilling part of any trip from one peninsula to the other, as far as I am concerned). Was it because of 9/11? We had noticed other flags along the way at half-mast, and, when writing a check for my books at First Edition Too, I’d had to ask Holly the date. Twenty-five years. All of us remember that day, just as those of us my age remember the day President Kennedy was shot. Adam Kinzinger wrote something very moving about the 25th anniversary of 9/11. 

September continues, and we came back home.

September 12: A warm, open door day in Northport

Back in my shop on Saturday, I wasn’t sure if it felt as if I’d been for a long time or hardly any time at all, but on Sunday Tree Guy and I played tourist right here in Leelanau County, exploring roads north of the village of Northport and finding ourselves eventually at the Grand Traverse Lighthouse in Leelanau State Park, a place I hadn’t visited for many years, back when the first 1990s renovation was done and the public invited to celebrate. More work has been done since then, and there are further exhibits planned. It was good to be there, and a lot of what I felt had to do with local people connected both with the light itself and the preservation of its history. 

Grand Traverse Lighthouse

Library furnished to lighthouse keeper & family--
one of my favorite exhibits, of course!

View from the light tower

Back at home and back at work after a rest and a long walk (in that order), Tree Guy got busy with black walnut brush, and I undertook the very necessary annual wild grapevine tear-out. Oh, yes! We are home again! And the good news is that it rained while we were gone, so nothing died in my gardens, not even the annuals in planters.

Bacopa's third blooming

Black petunia

Blue & black salvia with citronella

We are now halfway through September, with Leelanau UnCaged coming up just a week from this coming Saturday, the last Saturday in September, this year 9/26. Fall color is also yet to come. Summer ends, eventually, but reasons for being in Northport do not. 

Anticipating our big street festival!

Of Farms and Books

 

The days were long and fine and very warm. They practically abandoned the house. They worked together, all three of them in the hay-field.

- Adrian Bell, Shepherd’s Farm

If Shepherd’s Farm is, as I suspect, typical of Adrian Bell’s fiction, many readers I know would not care for it. I can easily imagine some literary critics calling it a weak novel, if a novel at all. There is little drama; what there is of conflict never boils over. Our main characters work hard and strive patiently and gradually achieve their goals, and while they ultimately lose, in a material sense, all they have gained, it is not through tragic flaws of their own or wickedness on the part of some antagonistic force or other character in the narrative, and they are not driven to despair or madness by their losses. Simply, life goes on.

Since I don’t believe Shepherd’s Farm has ever been published in the U.S. (Bell's stories are set in England), I'll give here what would be ‘spoilers’ if I expected any of my blog readers to be picking up the novel: 

We fear initially that Miriam will choose the wrong man and create tragedy for three people. She does not. When the wrong man marries elsewhere, it seems he may go frightfully more wrong and lose himself entirely. Nothing like that ensues, and his life goes on as it was expected to go on, in conformity with his family values. When Miriam’s uncle, who is her guardian, opposes her marriage to Luke, threatening to have Luke's dear-won farm bought out from under him if she persists in wedding plans, she and Luke quietly agree to wait, not seeing each other at all for the time being. Eventually the uncle dies, and they marry. Again, quietly. Everything is done quietly, without, as I say, drama. The gypsy girl does not seduce Luke. The horse does not trample the child. There are no murders, no suicides, no hatred-fueled feuds. 

I loved the book and only wish it had been three times as long and three times fuller of agricultural and environmental detail, all those descriptive passages that readers longing for action find tedious. 

All summer, market day at Winslowe was desultory and unsatisfactory. People would run in for half an hour and then hurry back to their hay-carting. There was a sense that the centre of gravity was elsewhere. But now winter bore in; the town was cheery; farmers came early and left late. Down the street pigs and cattle went in droves; barley, wheat and oats lay spilled about the steps of the Corn Exchange, where farmers appraised each other’s samples.

Or --

…It was a bad time with the ewes. The weather had been so wet that they had strained themselves heaving their heavy bodies through the mud from the field to the yard, and several lambs were born dead. In the living room of the farmhouse there were always one or two new-born lambs before the fire hand their bleating sounded loud indoors.

On the shepherd’s farm, horses are of prime importance. It’s horses that make or break a farm, and it’s best to have a pair that pull well together, plus a third that can do other jobs when the pair are harnessed together. Feeding the horses is Luke’s first job every morning. Miriam will make the fire, milk the cow, and churn butter. Luke loves the feel of the horses’ oats running through his fingers. Miriam pitches into the hay-making from the start of the book to the end.

A dear, loyal bookstore customer and reader of this blog once mused that perhaps I romanticize farming life, which is in reality dirty, hard, repetitive work, but I don’t see the contradiction. A career in fashion design or event planning would never have suited me, but if I had married differently and had farm work all my life, I don’t think I would have been discontented. Outdoor work that challenges physical strength and perseverance is much more to my liking than housework, although without livestock or poultry and with no field crops, my work life outdoors is limited to mowing grass, planting and tending gardens, pruning my apple trees once a year, picking fruit in season (soon, black raspberries; later, apples), and keeping the dread autumn olive at bay—that last a never-ending chore but one I keep at, year after year, because I will not give over my small piece of land to the invader. There is satisfaction both in the work and in surveying the results, temporary (the grass grows back, and the autumn olive rears its head in new corners) though they will always be. 

The other day I was thinking of books I love and feel are not well enough known, and I realized how many of them have agricultural or at least outdoor themes: Mary Webb’s Precious Bane; Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm; Conrad Richter’s The Trees and The Fields. Richter was awarded the Pulitzer for The Town, the third book of his “Awakening Land” trilogy, but it’s the first two that I love. Even in Mary Norton’s series of children’s books about the little people called borrowers, it’s the second in the series, The Borrowers Afield, that is my favorite, the time in the little family’s life when they live out-of-doors and must live off the land. 

Why would anyone think life has to be easy to be good? Where is the pleasure in not working? In my winters of seasonal retirement with the Artist, our seasons in the Arizona ghost town cabin, my days were filled with hiking, learning the desert vegetation, feeding wild birds, cooking and baking and writing and studying Spanish, all that indoor activity with sun flooding through the windows and, whenever possible, doors open to the air, so that—not in the middle of winter but as winter segued into spring—indoors and outdoors became one.

Indoors and outdoors as a seamless whole, going from one to the other without putting on or shedding extra clothing—that is another glory of summer, along with the outdoor work. “They practically abandoned the house,” writes Adrian Bell, and I smile happily at that sentence, although I certainly do love my porch!

For now, the grass in my yard is mowed (hours of satisfying work for me, my exercise, lots of “steps,” as people say) and Sunny’s jumps set up again so we can keep at our agility teamwork, also. She and I did well at last Monday's session after a winter away from the sport.

Getting there --

Black raspberries are beginning to ripen, and I have warned Tree Guy that soon we will be harvesting berries morning and evening, day after day, filling the freezer against the time of jam-making. In the orchard surrounding me, many varieties of grasses grow tall, and there is alfalfa blooming now, its flowers from deep purple to pale lavender and even a light yellow. Alfalfa is so lovely! Farmers Tom and Kathleen Koch down on South Lake Leelanau (he also has the Polish food truck in Cedar, behind his wife’s wonderful shop of Polish wares) feeds his animals on barley, not corn. It was good to enjoy Polish food and farming talk one evening with Tom. I'll bring photos from Cedar the next time we go.

Grasses in morning rain

Alfalfa, coming back year after year --

Adrian Bell again --

Hill Field was the best of it: this field would grow the finest malting barley, with that delicate almost silky look to the skin and pale golden. And when one cracked a grain it was not steely inside like that which grew on the light land, but white and mealy.

Meanwhile, of course, for me, my bookshop life continues, and lest I grow melancholy over reminders that I am not a farmer and don’t have time left in my life to become one, I thank my lucky stars ever day that I am a bookseller. (Especially, yes, a bookseller lucky enough to live in the country!) Schlepping heavy boxes of books, I think of my graduate school friend James, who when we were graduate assistants to professors called us “donkeys for philosophy” and then of the Artist, who, loving James’s phrase, when joining me in a big book move (such as Tree Guy and I undertook last week), called himself a “donkey for literature.” Bookselling is a much more physical line of work than many casual shoppers might imagine! 

Just as many people claim affiliations to larger groups, groups so large they can never know all the members personally, some political, and others consider themselves related by a sports team or a university (and of course there are many other possibilities), thinking it over I realize that book people are my tribe. 

Ah, yes, book people are my tribe, farmers are my neighbors, and I am a lucky woman!

In the shop

Outdoors

Visual fruits of my labors

P.S. To see some cool barn stuff, visit here.

P.P.S. I come back to add a few lines from Delacroix’s journals written in the 1850s, a page I opened to only because it was a July entry. He notes that man can often take comfort in misfortune, thinking himself so much better than his situation —

...but it far more frequently happens that man is bored in the midst of prosperity, that he even considers himself unfortunate while possessing. LaFontaine’s shepherd, when he had become prime minister and was surrounded in his elevated position by jealousy and intrigue, must have been an object of pity and must have felt himself to be one; he must have experienced a vivid moment of happiness, when he had donned his simple shepherd clothes and when they gave him his standing in the eyes of all men, so that he could return to the scenes and the life where, with this costume, he had tasted the happiness the most genuinely suited to man, that of a simple life devoted to work.

- Eugène Delacroix, Journal, the Walter Pach translation with a new introduction by Robert Motherwell

The Summer Blur Is Underway

(Reminder to self and others: Make time to write letters.)

Calendar and community are full to overflowing.

When summer hits, it’s hard to keep up. Everything—grass, gardens, weeds—is growing; everyone is shopping and visiting; and not a single day on the calendar is empty of some sort of meeting or concert or lecture or art opening. There are more temptations and obligations than there is time to fit them all in, but we do our best. 

This Friday--today!--is the Friends of the Library book sale in Northport, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. It's also the weekly farmers market, and when I was at the market I saw that people had already staked out territory, with folding chairs and tablecloths, for tonight's Music in the Park. 

On Saturday, the 4th of July, tomorrow, there will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence in front of the post office at 10 a.m. The Cancer Run for Funds race also begins at 10 a.m. on the 4th. And of course, in the evening there will be fireworks, best in the county. 

Northport Flood, 2026

The big news this past week in our village, though, was a flood of historic proportions on Monday. It made the news far from northern Michigan, with distant friends calling and texting to see if we were all right. We’re fine. No loss of life, and as far as I know no injuries, but lots of road damage and some structural damage to buildings. Second Street was a river, and the edge of the parking lot at the visitors center was the top of a waterfall, as a cascade descended from there to the overflowing creek. More rain pounded down on Wednesday, but not as much, for which all were grateful.

A few of the delicious dessert offerings! Can you say "sugar buzz"?

Then there was a lovely gathering at the Willowbrook on Tuesday evening, hosted by Mimi and Joel Heberlein, to celebrate the life and honor the memory of the late David Chrobak. David’s specialties were flowers and delicious, beautifully decorated cakes, so along with shared stories we enjoyed all manner of sweet desserts and then tossed flowers wild and tame into the creek to be carried down to Grand Traverse Bay in his memory. The Fabulous Fish Queens were on hand in their regalia. David Chrobak loved the Fish Queens. When asked if he had invented them, he is reported to have said, "No, but I made them famous."

Note one of my favorite wildflowers top left. Can you name it?

The FABULOUS FISH QUEENS!

The preceding Saturday (unfortunately, on the same evening as a village choir concert at the auditorium), the Northport Arts Association hosted an open mike night (now called open mic, but I am old-fashioned) for writers, poets, and story-tellers. Featured guest was Traverse City author Jerry Dennis, whose readings moved me to tears, but all participants were excellent. 

I was glad I went that night and also on Tuesday night to the Willowbrook and am sorry I can’t get to everything, but my energy runs out faster than it used to, along with my young dog’s patience. People are getting used to hearing me say, “I have to get home to my dog."

Farm news is news for everyone. 

It’s been 12 years (is that possible?) since I first wrote a blog post about where I get my news. Yes, way back in 2014. I did an update in 2021 and am coming back to add what has become my #1 source of information on current events, because more than anything else I now rely on a weekly midwestern newspaper called the Farmers’ Advance to keep up-to-date. Published in Mansfield, Ohio, Farmers’ Advance (since 1898!) focuses on Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan but covers issues from local to global. It is way more than a report on soybean futures. 

Almost every policy decision our federal and state governments take affects farmers one way or another. The Farm Bill is only one example, but naturally that gets coverage, the July 1 headline on the topic reading “Senate farm bill omits E15 [biofuel], Proposition 12 [which would have imposed California standards on animal housing across the nation] and pesticide labeling.” Another article in this same issue bears the headline “Missiles, drones and rising prices: What Trump’s war in Iran has cost the US.” There’s more. Farm production costs, like fuel and grocery prices, are up and expected to hit record highs next year, according to the USDA. Fewer Americans are now receiving SNAP benefits (rolls down 10%), and administrative costs are moving to the state level. New immigration policies, it turns out, are lowering legal immigration faster than illegal entries—2-1/2 times faster in the first nine months of 2024, which makes it more difficult to find farm workers while reducing the number of workers paying into social security (non-citizens have to pay in, though they do not receive the system’s benefits), the generally declining workforce also leading to lower economic growth. These policies affect all of us: Farmers just see it more easily and faster than the rest of the nation. 

The July issue tells of fairs in Ohio, equine therapy for people with physical disabilities, what to do for monarch butterflies, and a rare goat-sheep hybrid born in Olmstead Falls. Most issues have at least one story on organic methods. There are warnings of invasive plant species and unwelcome animal pests. (July 1 issue shines a light on invasive elm zigzag sawfly, not nearly as terrifying as the horrible screwworm found in Texas recently!) There is a Bible trivia quiz in every issue and, often, memories of family jam-making sessions. 

One ongoing saga since I started subscribing is data center developments in rural communities. Well, naturally, that’s where “empty” land can be found, but rural areas usually constitute also what might be called news deserts, something like the food deserts found in poor urban neighborhoods. Even in cities, local newspapers have been in steep decline, but in rural areas if there is one newspaper in a county, it may have only one reporter. Add to this the rash of nondisclosure agreements insisted upon by developers and the middlemen who scout locations for them, and you can see how difficult it is for local residents to have the information they need to govern their rural communities. The July 1 issue of Farmers’ Advance directly addresses the question of middlemen, while previous recent issues have looked at acreage lost, volume of necessary water inputs, etc. 

There’s no way I can get everyone in Michigan to read this newspaper every week, but I did the next-best thing and paid for a second subscription to go to our local township library. As I read my own copy, I generally pass it along to one friend or another. 

Leelanau Township Library

What I have been reading lately

A couple of new memoirs went home with me recently, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery and the Currents That Carry You Home, by Kimberly Warner, and What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis, by Theodore Richards. The Warner book has a northern Michigan connection, and Richards promised a bit of philosophy. I found both engrossing enough that I rather raced through them. 

John M. Barry’s history of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is impossible to race through, and there are a lot of interruptions, as I’m reading it at the shop, but I have made my way into Chapter 5 and don’t intend to stop. Quite extraordinary, how the issues of Englishmen in the 17th century feel so relevant in our United States of the 21st century! King Charles I, who succeeded King James, warned Parliament in his opening address to them that if they failed to give him

“What the state at this time needs, I must, in discharge of my conscience, use those other means which God hath put into my hands…. Take not this as a threatening, for I scorn to threaten any but my equals.”

Barry notes that Parliament “bristled” at the king’s words, telling them they were not his equals (as if they didn't know that!), and they reminded him of the “many necessary liberties and Privileges” that belonged to the king’s subjects, “by the common laws and acts of Parliament.”

Freedom of conscience—and, by extension, speech—was one those liberties exercised by the brave and repeatedly punished by the king. Also habeas corpus and due process. Plus ça change…. Oh, my, what drama Chapter 5 holds! Is the king above the law or the law above the king? Can the king imprison his subjects, seize their private property, even have them executed on a whim? This is the issue at stake. Chapter 5 alone is worth the price of the book, and if I could quote the entire chapter here, I would. 

As for fiction, I have ventured a few pages into an old novel but not far enough to tell much about it yet except that the pace and setting please me. More on that next time.

What is blooming these days

Bee balm, bergamot—call it what you will. The species Monarda is one that both bees and butterflies appreciate, and I like it as much for that reason as for its deep colors. Pansies are annuals always worth having around to fill in between blooms of perennial species and for their own cheery faces. Snapdragons, now: I did not buy new snapdragons this year but took last year’s pots in onto the front porch, where they overwintered in freezing temperatures, without any water, and came back again this year. That is one hardy annual! 

Second summer for these snapdragons

Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, has long been one of my favorites. I like the way it takes care of itself, the way it multiplies, and the way it lasts for days and days as a cut flower, its leaves possessing what I think of as architectural interest. And it’s blue. Blue like lobelia, blue like false indigo. Blue makes such a statement in a garden border, impossible not to notice.

Purple? Okay, that's in the blue range.

And everywhere, for the monarchs, milkweed!

On the home front

We three --

Besides gardens, the big news at home is that Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and yours truly have formed a new household. We are embarked on a new adventure, unforeseen a year ago, and it feels exciting and entirely natural at the same time. Tree Guy hit the ground running, as his first two evenings with me involved packing and schlepping heavy boxes of books. I told him my life isn't always this arduous: It's not every week I buy a three-carload private library, in the middle of a heat wave, with 4th of July coming right down the pike at us!

Happy 4th, everyone! Be safe, celebrate the holiday, count your blessings, smile at your neighbor, and signal all your turns, whether in an electric or gasoline-powered vehicle or on a bicycle. And watch out for deer and pedestrians on the roadways!