My Little Life

One little begonia bloom

Does it ever strike you (my sister will forgive me for repeating here something I wrote to her in a letter) how focused each of us is on our own personal lives, even as we recognize how small they are on the global scale? The other day I noticed a woolly bear caterpillar on my boardwalk and wondered what concerns were occupying that small creature in its own brief little life and if it had the slightest clue of the big changes it would undergo if it survived! I know the diminishment ahead for me as I grow older, but let’s not get into that. 

 

 

Let’s Begin Instead with Beauty

 

We have had some gorgeous fall mornings lately. I’ll start with that and will try to end on a high note, too, wedging my gripes somewhere in the middle, where you can jump over them if you like. Sometimes we have what my grandmother called “red sails” both at sunrise and sunset—and what does that tell sailors? I guess “Red sails at morning/sailors take warning” is about the day to come, and “Red sails at night/sailors’ delight” predicts overnight calm, so there is no contradiction, but I am not a sailor, so don’t take my word for it.

What is prettier than sumac in autumn?

As fall color begins to paint Leelanau, Sunny and I continue to take long walks or mini-vacations in the morning. You can see one of our mini-vacations down into Leland Township here. It’s all still Leelanau County, after all, beautiful in the big picture and in the details, as well.

 

Griping About Grammar

 

Call me petty, but I will never get over incorrect pronoun usage. As one of my sisters remarked when I quoted an example to her, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard to hear or read these errors. Consider, please:

 

They gave it to Jim. They gave it to me.

 

There you have two statements. Now conjoin them, and you have:

 

They gave it to 

Jim and me.

 

You would never (I hope!) say, “They gave it to I,” would you? 

 

An or conjunction works the same way: 

 

Call Mary.

Or you can call me.

Call Mary or me.

 

 

If there is a question about which pronoun to use when a sentence involves a proper name and a pronoun, just drop the proper name, and the correct pronoun will be obvious. 

 

Sunny and I had a glorious morning!

The morning was good to Sunny and me.

 

Here’s a factoid that I find interesting. In logic, the conjunctions and and or are equivalent. There is no logical difference between them. 

 

Sun was shining. The air was chilly.

Sun was shining, and the air was chilly.

Sun was shining, but the air was chilly.

 

Do we hear the second and third compound sentences the same way, though? I think we hear them differently, that in sentence #3 we hear “chilly air” as somehow detracting from the “shining sun.” It’s the old “Yeah, but” phenomenon. What do you think? We would never say “Everything worked out perfectly, but I was happy.” The oddness of that sentence sends a mixed message beyond grammar or logic.

 

 

I spent much of last night in Algiers.

 

“I don’t expect to sleep the night,” as the Paul Simon song says. Almost every night, I wake up at least once and often as many as three times, reading myself back to sleep each time rather than lie awake staring into the dark. My current read-myself-to-sleep book is an unfinished autobiographical novel by Albert Camus titled Le premier homme (The First Man), which I’m reading in French, though not rapidly. I run into unfamiliar words and would be hard pressed to give any kind of smooth translation of the text, but I just keep going most of the time, only rarely stopping to look up a word, figuring things out from the context, and it's quite astonishing to me how vivid the scenes are in my mind as I read. Page after page, I am seeing what the author describes. As when reading the novels of Niall Williams, I am elsewhere. 

The First Man (to use the English title) is as different as can be from The Stranger. Typical sentences in The First Man are not short, staccato, Hemingway-like statements but long, voluptuous, descriptive meanders, with many phrases separated by commas between the subject at the beginning and the verb near the end. A sentence may begin two-thirds of the way down one page and go on until halfway down the next page. It comes across (to me, at least) as generosity in the writing. Here is an article I found online that seems to capture very well the soul of the work. 

 

Besides sentence structure, another enormous difference I notice between The Stranger and The First Man (Eve Webster, in the article linked above, notes many important reversals from one story to the other) is the absence of emotion in the narrator of the first contrasted with its overflowing presence in the narrator of the second. Jacques Cormery, thinly disguised alter ego of Albert Camus, is full of both joy and anguish. Rather than accepting each day without question or reaction, like Meursault, Camus/Cormery’s life is a quest for meaning from boyhood through to adulthood. 

 

I recommend The First Man (David Hapgood translated the English version published by Penguin Random House, paperback $16) for anyone who wants to know le vrai homme Camus, as well as he can be known at this distance in time. 

 

On hot days the thick blue sky lay over the street like a steaming lid, and the shade was cool under the arcades. On rainy days the whole street was nothing but a deep trench of wet shiny stone. Under the arcades were rows of shops; wholesale textile dealers, their façades painted in dark colors, piles of light-colored cloth glowing softly in the shade; groceries that smelled of clove and coffee; small shops where Arab tradesmen sold pastries dripping with oil and honey….

 

The passage above is from Hapgood’s translation, a copy of which I have in my shop, handy for this post. 

Did it set you dreaming?

Look Behind You!

 

I turned around, and, with the sunrise is behind me, I loved this view.

Sunny Juliet is always ready for outdoor fun, but our style will be somewhat cramped for a while, because after spotting a very large porcupine in the yard (luckily, Sunny was in the house at the time), borrowing a live trap, and watching a couple videos online, I decided I did not have the necessary confidence for Stage 2, i.e., the release of the porky into the wild (far from my home) all on my own. And so, while Trapper Ron is on the job for the next two weeks, Sunny and I will be coming and going from the house with a stout leash between us. 

 

A friend suggested “maybe he’d leave you alone if you put out a salt block. They like salt." I thought, How about a welcome mat, too? Really, they are so cute, so droll! But they did a lot of expensive damage to a neighbor’s house and ate many tires off cars in my husband’s woodland past, and, if a dog tangles with a porky, consequences can be potentially life-threatening. It isn’t simply an inconvenient, no-fun headache, like a dog-skunk encounter.

 

So that’s a little news from the outdoor home front, where we also had our second morning of hard frost at our place. The two frosty mornings were not consecutive, however, and now Leelanau is in for a nice little stretch of sunny days, with highs of 60 degrees and above – perfect for enjoying the beautiful fall color, which is what inspired several of today’s photos.

Sunrise, still from behind me, has reached across the field to trees.

Looking at sunrise-lit trees glimpsed under cherries still in shadow.

As for the bookish home front, I have been doing everything possible to postpone coming to the last page of Precious Bane, by Mary Webb. Since bane is something poisonous, toxic, while what is precious is dear and beloved, the title (which comes from an oft-repeated phrase of the narrator) presents us with an oxymoron. Or should we see it (as Susan Cain might) as paradoxical but all the truer to life by reason of acknowledging paradox? Do you think a paradox is a contradiction?

 

Rather than provide a link to a standard source for Mary Webb's novel, I’m sending those of you who can’t wait to hear more about it to a blog post I found online, because I think the “literary gypsy” loves Precious Bane as much as I do, and I love it so much that I ordered a couple of new paperback copies for my shop, in hopes of sharing the book with others. It is a story in which we look behind us to a very different time, and the dialect is archaic and regional, but a reader falls right into its magic. At least, this reader did.

But here is the rising sun, which I can't deny you.

  

The porcupine’s appearance and a couple other minor challenges, on top everyone’s current major obsession (campaign season, dontcha know), had me in a rather downbeat mood for a day or two, and I feared that if I came to the end of Mary Webb’s novel during that time, it might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, so I set Prue’s story aside for two nights and read a couple cozy mysteries back to back, and by Wednesday evening, with Trapper John’s promise of action on the porcupine front and a beautiful sunset, my courage returned. Below is the brilliant sky following the setting of the sun on Wednesday -- but for a more unusual and even more enthralling sight (in my opinion), take a look over on my photo blog, A Shot in the Light, to see what I saw when I turned around. At sunset as well as sunrise, it often pays to turn around and look in another direction. 

Spring Break Trilogy: Poetry, Dog, and Sunsets

another dawn

Until it does no longer more (an hour that comes eventually for us all), life goes on, here in the high desert and mountains as well as back in northern Michigan and everywhere else that that shelters family and friends. Sunrise, sunset, both moving north now that the equinox is past. Who knows how long we will be here or if we will be here again? But we are here now. 

 

Spring has played hide-and-seek this year in Cochise County, Arizona (as it always does back in Leelanau County, Michigan), and I see in my photographs of previous springs that wildflower blooms are tardy this year, compared to the last two. This is also the dustiest year we (the Artist and I) have ever seen here, though not necessarily the dustiest that has ever been. Dry, dusty, and very windy. I attribute late wildflower bloom and more frequent dust storms to a common source, drought, but that is not one of my three topics for today, so let’s move on. 

 

Poetry

 

Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems

by Thomas Lynch

Boston: David R. Godine, March 2021

Hardcover, 256pp.

ISBN: 978-1-56792-701-6

$25.95

 

When a mature poet offers us “new and selected poems,” it’s cause for celebration, but such a best-of-plus album is not to be hurried through in an evening or two. Initially I wanted to publish a post about Thomas Lynch’s new book for St. Patrick’s Day. Then for the book’s March 23 release date. And now – well, here I am, still gratefully reflecting as I linger over pages and turn back and forth to re-read.

 

Reflection invades poems that first appear to be simple snapshots. All the “heaving, tidal pulses of creation” are here. Do they rise from quiet hours of preparing bodies (the poet a funeral director in the family business since 1973) or simply any Irish man or woman’s penchant for dreaming and regretting? Or, most likely, the gift of poetry itself, bestowed unpredictably, like grace and then refined and distilled by the earthly craftsman. Particular poems pull me back to church, to Michigan waters, and then across larger salt waters to the land of my mother’s father, land I’ve never seen,

 

                                          …the land

between hayricks and Friesians with their calves

considering the innocence in all

God’s manifold creation but for Man,

and how he’d perish but for sin and mourning.

two parishes between here and the ocean:

a bellyful tonight is what he thought,

please God, and breakfast in the morning. 

 

The Sin-eater fills his belly at the bedsides of the dead, consuming their various sins along with bread and beer provided by the family of the deceased, that their dear departed might not languish forever in purgatory. After he“feasted on Easter Duties missed,” along with more repulsive sins that upset his digestion and gave him bad dreams, from time to time he considered retirement (or raising his rates, at least) but feels his living to be a mission equal to that of the priests. Although the twenty-four pages of poems selected from an earlier collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary, initially struck me as longer than I wanted to spend with old Argyle, I find now that it is these poems that haunt me, much as Argyle himself was haunted by the dead whose sins he had consumed by their bedside.

 

Which is not to ignore new poems that stopped me in my tracks. America and Ireland; families and outsiders; landscapes, realities, and fantasies (the fantasy of “Casablanca”); the quick and the dead; cats, cows, dogs, and horses – not only the Bible-inspired but all Lynch’s poems are about “the spiritual life” as he understands it, which (he tells us himself) is faith in “the life of language and its power to make us known to one another and to ourselves,” a faith in the possibility of connection. And to a poet, more than the meanings of words matters in making connections with language. Vowel sounds matter, line lengths matter, enjambment or its absence, internal rhymes rather than an end-of-line rhyme scheme. There is so much here, so many levels, that the table at the rich ongoing feast is fuller every time one looks. Thus does art work miracles.

 

As I’ve already said, this is not a book to hurry through (no book of real poems is), and I salute not only poet Thomas Lynch but also Boston publisher David R. Godine. Thank you both so much!

 

 

Dog: Peasy Tales Continue

 

I’m not sure what to report about my rescue dog. “You’re a better dog every day,” the Artist tells little Peasy in all seriousness, and it’s true that my sweet Pea is much calmer and quieter in the mornings now (usually) ... and that we are able to take him with us in the car or leave him alone for hours at a time, as weather and inclination dictate ... and that the three of us adore our evening “pack time” cuddling and snuggling. Such a good dog in so many ways! But you know how some people will say, “I’m a people person”? Well, Peasy is not a people dog. He is in love with me and looks up to the Artist and is happy being part of a family and having a home but still very fearful and skittish of other humans. Not a take-anywhere dog like Sarah. So (words of my mother that I dreaded above all others), we’ll see. 

 

 

A Sunset Drive

 

Sometimes, if we have an early supper and don’t immediately sink into our reading chairs with current books, the Artist and I like to drive a few miles to the east and take quiet leave of another day with the long, open views down across the buttes of the Sulphur Springs Valley to the the Chiricahua Mountains and Cochise Stronghood in the Dragoons, driving back to the ghost town after sunset. I’ll let images tell the rest of the story and wish you a pleasant, restful, and safe spring break, however you will be spending it.