Death and Donkeys

Donkeys outside Arizona ranch bookstore

Death, donkeys, and books, that is. Let me explain.

We can probably agree that life is a mystery, and love is strange, but nothing is stranger or more mysterious than death, and not that every death feels the same, for each brings its own universe to bear upon the bereaved. When one’s mother dies, whatever her age, a watershed comes to divide life into before and after. And, as I’ve noticed with other people in their days of mourning, the most trivial and contingent encounters can become magnified into significance within the aura of death.

My son and my mother

My mother would have been 96 years old in October. She was still living in her own home, doing her own laundry and fixing her own meals, very active socially and in her church (overlapping domains, those), enjoying meals out with friends, spending time with family, reading books and newspapers, working crossword puzzles, and caring for her two companion cats. We (daughters and sons-in-law) worried about her going up and down basement stairs to do laundry and tried to persuade her to think of selling the old family home and moving to an apartment, but she “wasn’t ready,” she said. And so one day her youngest daughter took her to the doctor (she was fine) and downtown to pay her property taxes, and later that day she talked to her middle daughter on the phone. I would have been calling or sending her a postcard from Lake Huron or both the next day but instead got a message that she had fallen asleep in her chair and not awakened. 

A good, long life. A good, peaceful death. And yet, now, for her daughters, nothing will ever be the same again. 

An old cookbook I had never seen before

The Artist and I had looked forward to a little getaway after our work-filled summer, so we were over in Alpena, after an overnight in East Tawas and breakfast with friends, when the news came to us. We had crossed the state west to east on Tuesday, recrossed it from east to west on Wednesday, and covered most of the lower peninsula from north to south on Thursday. I took with me the book I’d taken to Lake Huron, A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin. In every story that mentioned death, that event jumped out at me, but Berlin’s writing, so moving, affected me deeply on every page. Yet the sentence that engraved itself in my heart, because of the time of my reading, was a tearful exclamation from the author’s sister, dying of cancer, which Berlin made part of one story: “I’ll never see donkeys again!” 

My mother will never see Michigan again. I’ll never see my mother at Sunrise Landing again. Donkeys…. Yes, I can easily imagine shedding tears at the thought of never seeing donkeys again, although in my case it would probably be horses. My mother, though — I don’t think she had time for a thought of anything she might never see again, dying peacefully in her sleep as she did. 

She had a lot of clothes but wore this jacket a lot

My husband and I were staying in my mother’s house, the house she occupied for 68 years (I lived there for almost 16 myself), when I came to the end of Lucia Berlin’s book, and I needed something else for those dark but wide-awake 3 a.m. hours. My next choice might seem a strange one — a murder mystery, Critical Mass, by Sara Paretsky -- but circumstances made it a logical choice. Not only are Paretsky’s novels are all set in the Chicago area (my mother lived 45 miles SW of the city), but my mother and one sister and I (the other had a scheduling conflict) had gone to see and hear Sarah Paretsky in person onstage in Traverse City where she appeared as part of the National Writers Series in the fall of 2013. 

This particular volume was also a copy signed by the author and with one of my mother’s address labels on the front-facing endpaper. So whenever I picked up the book, and as I turned the pages, I was reading a book my mother had held and read, written by an author we had gone together to hear speak, and when Paretsky described farms, cornfields, and small towns south of Chicago in the novel, the terrain described (minus murdered bodies) evoked memories of my Illinois girlhood, 4-H and all, and all of us were connected by the physical book as well as the story it told. 

In her kitchen

Years ago, someone I knew only slightly wrote a quasi-philosophical paper around the time of her father’s death, and I was perplexed by some of the books she mentioned in the paper, books that spoke to her at that time in tones of deep significance but that seemed to me tangential at best to her theme. I understand her state of mind better now. In such circumstances, everything is highlighted, foregrounded, important — but by “everything,” I don’t mean contemporary world events as much as the weather, the season, chance encounters and random remarks.  

Both of these books are well worth reading, whether or not you pick them up in a state of grief. For me, though, they will always have added depth, due to the associations that will always cling to them for me. 

Through Michigan Eyes

It is another cold Michigan winter morning, and again I wake in the dark, a common experience for me at this time of year. Eyes closed, I cling as long as possible to shreds of dreams, but these gradually evaporate and are replaced by the day’s first thoughts. I think in the dark about the now-distant landscape I will soon re-enter, that of the arid and sunny American Southwest, and a phrase comes into my mind: through Michigan eyes. Immediately I recognize its truth for me, that this is the way I see the world: through Michigan eyes.

Michigan, the place I have called home since the age of eighteen, was for some years prior to that first residency the home I desired, and in years since, when living elsewhere (whether for only a week or for as long as five or six years), I have often been homesick. Not always. But wherever I have been, whenever I have yearned for home, that home has been Michigan.

The truth (again, truth for me) is that home can sometimes be a place one is glad leave behind, if only for a while. There is a feeling of expanded possibility in entering new worlds, worlds that bear in them nothing of one’s past, worlds empty of personal memories, holding no failed expectations and no regrets at having disappointed others. I had a wonderfully carefree time at my husband’s small town high school reunion, for example, where everyone was meeting me for the first time and no one remembered what a little oddball I had been, somewhere else, in my own high school. Travel to new places is like that. To be a stranger is to begin with a blank slate.

Escape from one’s own life is not, of course, the only or even the primary reason to travel. Some of us, like Anthony Bourdain, seem to be born with an insatiable hunger for sensory experience, and we can never have too much of the earth’s different sights, sounds, tastes, and smells. We have to touch for ourselves the ancient rock and the horse’s soft nose, run the powdered sugar white coral sand through our fingers, and feel the different breezes — prairie, lake, mountain, and seaside — on our skin. We collect impressions hungrily: the heady perfume of flowering chestnut trees, the odor of drains in a foreign airport … a perfect cup of coffee in an absurdly themed tourist restaurant or the heady mix of tastes in a hot dog, smothered in condiments, from a city sidewalk stand … a blinding desert sunrise, pictographs at the end of a path leading to Lake Superior, mountain vistas that go on and on, a cathedral presiding over a dusty plaza, the coziness of a motel room with screen door open to the scent of falling rain … and so much more.

Once I worked in an academic setting for a practicing gerontologist. My boss somewhat whimsically kept in her desk drawer a jar of someone’s ashes. I forget the name of the deceased, but she never did. She always called him by name. Was it Henry? No matter now. The jar with its bone-dry contents was a prop she used in her class on Death and Dying. One of the written exercises she gave students in that class, early in the semester, was a list of possible reasons (they were to consider carefully and choose the reasons they felt applied to them) one might fear death or at least approach it with reluctance. Though the list was long, I remember very few of the items and must paraphrase those I do recall, the ones I would have chosen had I been a student in the class. One was the sense of having to leave a party that would continue after one’s departure. (“We’ll never know how things turn out!” I complained irritably to a friend after we’d just had a long discussion on politics.) Another item, the one I found most poignant and heart-wrenching, therefore my #1 choice, was the end of sensory experience.

My first experiences of Michigan were of what we later came to call fondly the Big Lake — sun-warmed sand, incessant waves, shockingly cold water, rising dunes and white pines with their crisp, spicy aroma. Clammy, wet bathing suits and beach towels that never completely dried. In Arizona, by contrast, one practically feels one’s body moisture being pulled out, skin sucked dry, minute by minute.

And there it is. Whether my focus is on agriculture and vegetation, geology, architecture, climate, local turns of conversational phrase, common regional snack foods, native or migrating birds in a given region, or the feel of the air, wherever I am my impressions do not come simply by themselves but always as they compare or contrast with a lifetime’s store of Michigan impressions. 

In Cochise County, Arizona, when I recognized that I was learning to orient spatially in relation to various local mountain ranges, immediately I contrasted that with the experiences of my peninsular Michigan home, where we orient by bodies of water. The aridity of the high desert stands in contrast for me with the humidity of northern summer woodlands; the desert’s winter sun with overcast Michigan skies; the Sonoran hot dog with a U.P. pasty; cactus and catclaw and mesquite with spring morels and violets, apple blossoms, and the ubiquitous, admittedly hateful (one can’t love everything, even at home) autumn olive. That is to say, all my senses have been shaped by the world of the Upper Midwest, and wherever I am, I cannot help seeing the world through Michigan eyes.

Quite recently I made a short trip to Mexico and fell in love with the country south of our border. My new love is different from my love for France, newer in every way, but along with parallels and differences between France and Mexico, parallels and differences between Mexico and Michigan kept springing to mind. I did not experience culture shock in Mexico, however, but climate shock on the return home. Coming back from a bright place filled with greenery, where I had happily perspired in the sun, to the gloomy, frozen world of Michigan winter — that was the shock. My home country was the one that now felt alien, its colorless landscape almost foreign to my eye.

Could it be that my attachment to home is loosening with age? And is this the first stage of a gradually loosening attachment to earthly life itself?

My husband likes to quote a Jim Harrison phrase, that “advancing age brings a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.” So far I have not found that true for me. My lifelong enthusiasm for horses has been augmented in recent years by an enthusiasm for cattle. Love of Mexico and for the Spanish language are new passions. And then there was octopus, first in a cold seviche and then in a hot seafood soup! So is it only the seasonal discomfort of Michigan that wearies me?

Sometimes questions are more interesting than answers. A good thing, too, since sometimes questions are all we have.

Occasionally I have thought that travel to other parts of the country, let alone outside national borders, hardly belongs in a blog called “Books in Northport,” and yet this blog has always been about more than books and more than Northport. A reflection of my life at large, it ranges from books in my bookstore, to books at home, to reading aloud to the driver of the car on long trips, from home and family to travel and strangers, including dogs and gardens, woods and shore and distant scenes wherever life takes me. After all, everything is connected, right? 

What this little site has always been, however, I am finally realizing — after more than a decade of making these posts, and whether or not this truth appears on the surface of every line I write — it has always been the world through my Michigan eyes. Bookish eyes they are. Near-sighted without glasses. But never, I hope, close-minded or provincial. Just grounded. Michigan eyes open to the world.

Up Early to Write Myself

I wake in the night--or what my mother calls “the wee hours of the morning”--and find myself writing a blog post in my head. The blog has become my confessional, although there is so much that I never say in it. It has become an obsession. It is photo album, memory book, diary, reading record, a place to think through ideas and issues. Through it I escape the bounds of time and space. In it I am free. Mine will never be a “blog of note,” with thousands of readers, but even so it has more daily readers than my bookstore has customers, and so I turn from the anxiety of bookselling to the comforts of the blogging.

Other times I wake with fictional characters in my head. Perhaps they are thinking silent thoughts (I hear them) or talking to each other (I hear them), or maybe they’re going about their working lives, striving and stumbling along the way (I see them and feel for them). In my imagining mind they are very real. I can only see a few minutes ahead in their lives until I sit down and begin writing, and then those lives unroll. Their struggles are real to me, but they are not my struggles, and so with them, writing their lives, I am free.

Too often I come awake in a wash of pointless worry, swamped before dawn with awareness of crises, personal and global, present and impending. David beside me, Sarah at our feet, I am not even there in the warm refuge of bed but scrabbling to keep my hold on some cold, treacherous mountainside, my feet slipping and rocks tumbling all about me, or on Linda Ronstadt’s “heart like a wheel,” that little “boat out on mid-ocean,” about to capsize in a storm.

Is it too early to get up and turn on lights and make coffee and pull out lines of visible words from the chaos and confusion in my head?