Cozy With Challenges

My title today comes to you from a voice in my head whispering, “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” the title of one of my nephews’ favorite books when they were little, as well as from a couple of conversations with locals, two of whom, separately, told me that winter is their favorite season. Is it yours? Why or why not? One winter aficionado said he loves it because it’s “more like the way life used to be here.” (That must have been back in the days of the “old school,” when Northporters didn’t run to Traverse City every week to do their shopping--and then complain loudly and bitterly about traffic and crowds.) I’ll have to ask the other friend why she ranks winter #1 season of the year. 

Winter is beautiful.

Winter is quiet and cozy. I have to give it that. Coming into a warm house, stomping snow off boots and pulling off jacket and cap and mittens to enjoy a hot cup of cocoa … reading by lamplight in a big chair … gazing into a cheery, flickering fire or out the window at falling snow … going to sleep under mounds of blankets and comforters--all of that is richly cozy, and the colder the wind and the deeper the snow, the cozier one’s snuggly home comforts.

Kneaded dough

Rising dough

On a snow day, too, nothing is more satisfying than kneading bread dough, although making soup is a good snow day project, too. Anything that adds warmth and mouthwatering aromas to counteract the lack of sunshine! Onion soup or a stew made from scratch (here is a yummy cauliflower soup) is good, but sometimes shortcuts work out well, too. One recent evening I had leftover shrimp fried rice and added it to a can of Progressive tomato soup, throwing in a generous handful of okra and drizzling with hot sauce at serving time, and that made a very satisfying supper. 

Shortcut

You’ll also want to wash out and save the Progresso soup can for making English muffins. It’s just the right size.

 

Desk work can be enjoyable while it’s snowing and blowing outdoors, especially if the “work” is writing letters to friends. You don’t even have to sit at a desk. A cozy reading chair with a big book for a lap desk works equally well, and you’ll want a cup of tea or cocoa nearby as you write, chatting on paper and picturing your friend’s pleasure when she receives your news in the mail. More and more of our visits, I’m thinking, will be this kind as we grow older….

 

It goes saying (but why would I deny myself the pleasure of saying it?) that reading is a most delicious winter pleasure. Grass doesn’t need mowing, and gardens don’t need weeding, so after you’ve shoveled snow and exercised the dog, maybe done a bit of laundry, who can blame you for sitting down with a book? And if you’re like me, you’ll want several throughout the house. You need something to page through idly, perusing and skimming while tea water is heating. Cookbooks or art books, even a volume of cartoons work for those times. For me, the loveliest of my casual browsing books is one I'm keeping these days on my dining table: a book of the history and geology and agriculture of the canton of Blesle, in France’s Alagnon valley in the old Auvergne province. It was in the medieval village of Blesle that the Artist and I spent one magical evening, night, and morning. Everything about the place made such an impression on me that I find it hard to believe our time there was so brief.

Just right of center is the old fountain,
across the street from La Bougnate, where we stayed.

I usually have at least one serious nonfictionbook going, and right now that is John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Wow! Talk about a writer who can make economic history come alive! Such a witty and pithy maker of sentences, a clear distiller of thought! Still, economic history isn’t something to read straight through cover to cover, at least for me, so although the book is generously illustrated as well as entertainingly written, I take it in small doses.

 

For bedtime, I tend to choose novels or memoirs, because I almost invariably fall asleep and then wake up at 3 a.m. to read a bit more before my second sleep, and if I attempt something serious or, worse yet, something horrifying (think political!), how will I ever get (or get back) to sleep? Margaret Hard’s A Memory of Vermont filled the bedtime bill for two or three nights, followed by Miss Buncle’s Book, a humorous novel by D.E. Stevenson about a woman who wrote a novel about people in her little village and then found almost everyone in the village up in arms over the way they had been portrayed. Before those, Albert Murray’s four autobiographical novels carried me through many dark evenings, and after them Moberg’s Unto a Good Land lasted three nights. The bedtime book doesn’t have to be fluff, though a little fluff now and then never hurt anyone.

 

Having enjoyed The Book Charmer, by Karen Hawkins, a while back, I yielded to the temptation of its sequel, A Cup of Silver Linings, another tale set in the little town of Dove Pond. I wouldn’t call it fluff. I’m also hesitant to classify the series as chick lit, though it has some of the earmarks. And despite lurking love interest, the books are certainly not rom-com. Each story presents men, women, and young people in the Dove Pond stories, but the most important relationships – at least, those in the foreground  – are between sisters or mothers and daughters or friends. There are secrets that cause problems, but there are also problems that aren’t so secret and can’t be eliminated but have to be faced. Not heavy but not fluff. Interesting without being obsessing. Perfect for winter bedtime.

 

Problems that can’t be eliminated but have to be faced, I just wrote. That is the other side of winter: the challenges. Like cold. Like higher bills. Expenses go up, income goes down: that is one big challenge of winter in a nutshell. Heating is expensive, as is snowplowing. But walking and driving can be hazardous, too, without summer’s firm footing or clear roadways. 

 

Then there are the holidays, which present their own challenges. The Artist and I had long ago stopped traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather and traffic being productive of stress, at best, and completely out of our control. Our last Christmas together, in Dos Cabezas in 2021, he pronounced “the most relaxed” he had ever had, when after a big breakfast and opening a few presents, we lay around snacking and napping and watching movies and petting the blissed-out dog until dinner time, enjoying the quiet, peaceful lack of fuss. 

What is “lack of fuss” with a soulmate, however, is different with just a dog. --You should excuse the phrase “just a dog,” please! Sunny Juliet is a great comfort but not a conversationalist or even much of a cuddler! Oh, and she needs and wants to go out and play in the snow, too!

Do I want to go out and play in the snow? When the temperature is hovering in the ’teens and the wind is more than nipping at my nose--biting my face, rather? It doesn’t matter. We must go out!

Out! What if the power goes out? It has happened before, but the Artist was here with me. Still, I am as prepared as I can be. With propane, I can use my stove and gas fireplace; I have candles and oil lamps; a couple of stock pots are filled with water for emergency use; and I have charged up the little portable phone charger my sister gave me last year. I’m also well stocked with dog food and paper products--life’s essentials!

 

So that’s what I think of winter—cozy with challenges—and I can’t call it my favorite season. In the old days, with the Artist, I might have named autumn my #1, since we traditionally took a little vacation every September, but now I’ll probably go with spring, the season of promise, of new growth, of lengthening days, long days not yet bringing the hectic pace of summer. 

Spring will come again, I remind myself.

And yet, truth be told, there’s no telling when a nearly perfect day will drop down on you. An unexpected encounter or an errand unexpectedly turning into a delightfully surprising and wonderful time, the making of a new friend while visiting old friends. It happened to me last Tuesday, and it can happen in any season of the year. There is no foretelling life’s gifts.

 

An old friend told me a few days ago that he often quotes me. “What on earth--? You quote me?” “You said,” he reminded me, “that what bothered you most about the thought of dying was that you wouldn’t know how things turned out.” True. I did say that. Delights and torments, adventures and schemes, will continue, but I’ll have to leave the party while it’s still going on. 

All the more reason, while still here, to get out of bed every day, even in winter, and bundle up and get out there! As the Artist and I said to each other so many mornings, throughout so many years, as we wondered what a day might bring, you never know!

 

Sunny Juliet is always ready!

And on Saturday the horses came to Northport!

I'm glad to be there for that!

What Might You Love?

Mountains at last!

Arizona is not all desert, because so much of it is mountain. Scores of separate ranges, each with a name of its own, are sprinkled here and there, and in the southern part of the state they often rise abruptly from the desert floor itself. In fact it is impossible to move anywhere so far away from them that the horizon is not ringed around with peaks. 

- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist’s Interpretation

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine, the naive young heroine of the novel, has an opportunity to travel far from her small home circle for the first time and to meet people with views and experiences wider than her own. She is introduced to new kinds of reading and also new ways of looking at the world. Her impressionability is not lost on Henry, at first a chance acquaintance who very soon becomes a major figure in Catherine’s mental and emotional world. 

Older and more sophisticated, Henry is also possessed of a subtle, teasing nature not always understood by Catherine and only held partially in check by his more gentle sister. Though their conversation often leaves her uncomprehending, Catherine is enchanted by both siblings and begins to look at the world through their eyes, finding beauty where she had never previously looked for it, in small, easily overlooked details — for example, a blooming hyacinth. Henry is amused but does not taunt, instead saying approvingly, if tongue-in-cheek, “It is good to have as many holds on happiness as possible.”

Henry might have been teasing Catherine, but I think he was absolutely right to say that about happiness — though as I reflect for a moment I can see that a Buddhist might disagree, for is love not attachment? Never. mind, though. I am not going down that road this morning. Neither the Buddhist path nor that of philosophical debate. Love and the holds it gives us on happiness are my theme this morning.

Thrilling mountains in New Mexico!

On our way west, as we crossed the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and the first, flat stretch of New Mexico, I was impatient for mountains. Finally, in New Mexico, seeing our first mountain of the trip in the distance. it, I couldn’t help smiling happily. Soon, larger ones appeared. Now, surrounded by mountains every day, I wake in the dark eager for dawn to light up my high desert neighborhood. Though the sky was cloudy for our first couple of days here, there was sufficient daylight to show the contours of the slopes, and as we made the first drive from Dos Cabezas to Willcox I began mentally drawing the mountains on the other side of the playa in soft pencil, a very sketchy mental drawing, mostly broken planes of light and dark, and I felt that smile again on my face.

“I guess I love mountains,” I mused aloud, wonderingly, to the Artist. 

“I guess you do,” he agreed.

“It’s something I never would have known about myself if we’d never come out here.” I went on, enlarging upon  my theme, the strangeness of surprises lying in wait in the self. “It’s like being predisposed to be allergic to something,” I went on, groping for expression. “If you’re never exposed to it, the allergy doesn’t get triggered. It never manifests.” Then my epiphany burst full-blown: “Love is like an allergy in reverse!” 

Strange notion, is it not? My darling might have argued with me, citing counterexamples to my claim,  different kinds of love and different ways of looking at love, but instead he agreed, understanding me instantly and perfectly, and I sighed and thought contentedly how fortunate he and I were to encounter one another so many years ago, giving our love a chance to be born when we might easily have gone a lifetime without it.

A more conventional way of expressing my idea, I realized a few days later, is to say that there is a contingency to falling in love, and I’ve known that for a long time. That which comes, over time, to feel necessary to our happiness — a partner, a child, certain places and activities — was not always so, pre-ordained by the stars. If we had never met … if we had not found Sarah that day at the Humane Society shelter … if my father had not studied French in high school and been stationed in France after the Liberation … if I had not been born to literate parents, with books and music in our house for as long as I can remember … if I had never seen a horse … if we had not gone camping on Lake Michigan when I was 12 years old … if, if, if … then I might not have had the opportunity to fall in love with David and Sarah and the French language and books and horses and Michigan. 

My friend and correspondent in New South Wales, Australia, for instance, also loves books and dogs (we share those passions) but has otherwise an entirely different set of loves from mine. She does not love horses and has never seen Michigan — and yet her life, too, is full, with many holds on happiness.

I’ve thought before, many times, of how the contingent in a life becomes necessary, but my thoughts were mostly terms of specific persons and places or, if in categories, familiar ones one might encounter anywhere, such as books and horses. Discovering in myself a love of mountains surprises me. For most of my life, I looked at photographs and paintings of mountains and remained unmoved, even while recognizing their beauty. It was beauty that had nothing to do with me, I felt. Really. I could look objectively at the most impressive mountain image and turn away with a shrug. It was not Michigan, after all. Perhaps the landscape of Mars is beautiful, too, but what has it to do with me? Surely no one can expect me to feel love for it.

And yet, somehow, where I least expected it, a new love has crept upon me, so gradually that I can hardly say when it began. I have learnt (as Henry put it) to love mountains. Mountains in general. The sight of them now makes my heart glad. I love that wherever we go in our winter neighborhood, we are surrounded by mountains — the Dos Cabezas, the Chiricahuas, the Pinaleños, and the Dragoons that separate our Sulphur Springs Valley from the San Pedro Valley to the west.

That is the generality of my new love, but the particular is even stronger. When, three miles or so from the New Mexico-Arizona state line, I discern for the first time the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas, then I have a feeling of coming home similar to what I feel when crossing from Indiana into Michigan. Closer to home in Michigan is catching the first sight of Grand Traverse Bay and what my friend Laura calls “the coming home tree,” that beautiful old willow standing against the water at the T intersection, and then turning left to re-enter Leelanau County. Similarly, here in Cochise County there is one long curve at last, my "coming home curve," the sight of my mountain and the land opening out below it, exposed rocks along the side of the road with prickly pear cactus and century plants against the rock face, and then a reverse curve as Highway 186 climbs up again, and there it is — the cemetery, the Dos Cabezas sign, the cattle guard, and the sign with the image of a horned cow, while up and to the left is the single cabeza that presides over the ghost town, over the Philadelphia Wash, and over our little winter cabin. 

Yes, I now love mountains in general, but these mountains — this range, its distinctive twin peaks, and my peak in particular — are special. Not the tallest mountains in the Southwest, they are the mountains where my heart now feels at home. 

What will you open your heart to and fall in love with in 2019? A world of possibilities awaits....

After Breakfast With “The Girls”

Driver Cheryl & Guide Terry

I didn’t ask permission from the whole group to picture them on my blog, so you’re not seeing eight women here, but I was pleased to be invited out to breakfast with a group of our ghost town neighbors. We met at the Hitchin’ Post in Willcox and all had a real good time around the big round table. After breakfast came more fun, a delightful surprise, though not actually planned for my delight. Here’s what happened.

We were four in the car on the way to town, but Dorothy’s husband picked her up at the restaurant (they were driving down to Sierra Vista on errands for their B&B), which left Cheryl, Terry, and me to return to the ghost town together. While I was saying good-byes to other women I probably won’t see again this year, Cheryl and Terry were conferring in the car, and when I got in they asked, “Do you mind if we swing by the sale barn? Do you have time?” I asked what the “sale barn” was, thinking it might be some kind of rummage sale I’d somehow missed. No, it was the cattle sale barn, the Willcox Livestock Auction! Terry had worked there for years, first on horseback, working cows, and later in the office, and she needed to stop by to pick something up. As it turns out, the auction wasn’t set to start until 11 a.m. (which surprised me; I’d thought they would start earlier), but we took time for a short tour. I’d been afraid I wouldn’t get to the auction grounds this year at all (after a memorable time there in 2015) and had never been in the office area before, worth seeing for its signage. 

Two diff'rent fellas? 

I remembered the sale arena, with wrought-iron designs made by Future Farmers of America students marking the end of each row of seats. Terry pointed out the scale and explained that the whole process is much easier now with the scale in the auction “ring.” But there was no action yet in that area, so we quickly proceeded out to the pens and chutes, where gorgeous sights met my gaze — cowboys on horses, cows and calves of all colors and sizes — along with the incomparable, heavenly aroma of sweet hay and fresh cow manure. Ahhh! Cheryl and Terry kept asking if I needed to hurry back home, and I kept assuring them we could take all the time we wanted!

“Do you know how the auction works?” Terry asked when we were back outside. She pointed out the area where cattle for sale were unloaded and their ear tags recorded before they went by the state inspector who checked the brands on each animal. It’s a good system, protecting the ranchers from having rustlers steal and sell their cattle. I remembered that cattle are sold either individually or by groups, with prices offered per hundredweight, and I got the basic gist of the other rules and procedures but was somewhat distracted, honestly, because — well, what is better than the sight and smell of cows? You guessed it, right?

The big blond beauty had the sweetest horsey temperament in the world! At last, after three months in the Southwest, I get my hands on a horse! Was it love at first sight (on my part)? Another horse, a little paint, was a more appropriate size (for me) and had the prettiest little head, and it wouldn’t be right to have only one horse, would it? Horses are herd animals, after all, so if a person is going to have one, that person had better have at least two. And look at the pretty little mini-braids in the painted pony’s mane. 

As if this weren’t enough, further distractions (albeit minor in comparison) were provided by the presence of poultry wandering aimlessly wherever they pleased. Handsome roosters, aren’t they? “People just drop ‘em off,” Terry said. “One day someone dropped off ducks!”

Later, when Cheryl pulled up in front of Terry’s house in the ghost town, I understood the significance of the faux license plate on the fence. Terry not only worked at WLA but grew up on a ranch (as had three other women in the group around the breakfast table), and out here, on the ranches, it’s all about the cows. Well, and about the horses, too, even in these high-tech days, thank heaven! 

And thank you, Cheryl and Terry, for a wonderful surprise breakfast “dessert”!

MR. ROCHESTER Is Coming to Northport!

This coming May 9 may be the first book launch I’ve hosted on the official publisher’s release day. And in the case of Mr. Rochester, by Sarah Shoemaker, we’re launching a novel being simultaneously released in the United States, England, and Australia, so I think I have the right to call this one a world premiere book launch!

I’ve been dying to have this book for sale in my shop (no, it has not arrived yet and will not be for sale before the evening of May 9) ever since first reading it in manuscript three years ago, coming to the last page on June 1, 2014. Sarah, on the other hand, had the original idea for her book on March 28, 2012, so she has had a five-year journey. Is it any wonder we are excited?

We scheduled a 2-hour book signing and then recently decided to move the venue across the street from the bookstore, to Spice World Cafe, due to space considerations. Then, as I was arranging for the space with Angela Dhami of Spice World Cafe, Angela suggested she could do a dinner. Good idea! How about a Jamaican dinner, since Mr. Rochester spends several years – and a good chunk of Shoemaker’s novel – in Jamaica? Angela responded with “Sure!”

People can come to the book launch without coming an hour earlier for dinner, but the few people I’ve talked to already all want to come for dinner, too. Well, it was a mild winter, but it was long, and locals who escaped for a while are now returning, eager to reunite with friends. And Sarah is connected to Northport in many ways. So? Party time!

Sarah Shoemaker, Author

Launch is in only two and a half weeks, so I’m taking reservations for dinner now ($15 per person) to make sure we’re able to feed everyone who wants the dinner option, and I’m also taking prepayment for signed copies of Mr. Rochester ($28.62 with sales tax), though we should have sufficient copies of the book for everyone, including last-minute drop-ins.

Dinner will be served beginning at 6 p.m. on May 9. Then around 7 p.m. I’ll introduce Sarah Shoemaker with a few words, and she will give a short reading and answer a few quick questions before we sit her down to sign and sign and sign and sign. Punch and cake and brownies will be offered along with the book signing at no extra charge.

To make reservations for the 6 p.m. Jamaican dinner, call Dog Ears Books, (231) 386-7209. If you get the machine, please speak slowly and clearly when you leave your name and the number of people in your party. You’ll pay Spice World Cafe, not me, for dinner on the evening of May 9; I’m only taking reservations so Angela will have some idea how many people she’ll be serving.

To prepay for the book or to purchase it on May 9, please remember that Dog Ears Books does not accept plastic. Bring your checkbook (cash also accepted), and all will be well. Or stop by the bookshop when we’re open to prepay or mail a check in the amount of $28.62 (sales tax included), and I’ll put your name on a list of prepaid signed book reservations.

Remember, dinner and book launch both will be held at Spice World Cafe, on the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba, in downtown Northport.

There is precious little sleeping going on at our house lately, because after my May season opener extravaganza, we’ll go into high gear to get ready for another exciting Grath event in mid-June. Prepare for more excitement! But more of that anon. One day at a time. I keep reminding myself....