Another Holiday -- Now Past....

Holiday spirit on Waukazoo Street

A lot of people mentioned having trouble getting in the Christmas mood without snow. With daytime temperatures up to 50 degrees, it felt more like spring than winter. I was happy that the rain held off until nighttime on the 25^th, because Sunny Juliet was invited to come with me to dinner at the home of friends, and while I was already dubious about how my wild child would behave, “wet dog” would have been a whole ‘nother ball game. 

Is this a December sunrise? Where is the snow?

On Saturday evening (Christmas Eve Eve), I made cheesecake and was up early Sunday morning making the roux for a shrimp gumbo, both of which I took to the home of the friend I’d taken Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks back. He was having a good day, and we had an excellent visit: He not only recognized me but remembered my name! I guess that’s how it goes in early stages of dementia – the person can be very different from one day to another. Anyway, this visit was easier than the last. There was even sunshine.

Morning sun on winter trees

(By the way, you shouldn’t get the wrong idea about the real me. The truth is that taking dinners to a homebound friend was as much for myself as for the friend. Planning and cooking for someone else – thinking about someone else -- takes the focus off holiday aloneness.)

That evening I had a nice, long phone conversation with my son, and in the morning, after Sunny and I got out for plenty of good exercise, my sisters and a couple of friends texted each other greetings of the day. Merry Christmas!!!

Before opening presents....

Sunny and I had another walk and then stopped for a session at the dog park on our way to our friends' house, because I figured there was no such thing as “too much exercise” before Sunny visited indoors in a new place. How would she be, amid beautiful holiday decorations and while humans were having a meal? Oh, my heartstrings! She was such a good girl, I could hardly believe it! Only when we got back home, three or four hours later, did I realize I had forgotten to give her the calming treats beforehand, and then I was even more impressed with and grateful for her good company manners.

Good dog and her dog mom got matching cozy blankets!

Christmas Day 2023 for me wrapped up with finishing a Steve Hamilton mystery novel and beginning, before falling asleep, a novel by Susan Straight, one of my new favorite fiction authors of the year. And so ended my second Christmas without the Artist. I can’t say I didn’t revisit memories of other Christmases, especially 2021, our last together and a cozy, contented, happy day – David and Peasy and me -- but this most recent one was good, thanks to friends and my little canine companion. 

Now in the last week of the year I find myself looking forward to closing out this year’s Books Read list, along with this year’s business accounts, and starting fresh with new, clean pages. As always with election years (especially recent ones), I’m apprehensive about what the next 12 months will bring, but there’s no way to put a hold on Time, is there? So here is my last quarter’s list of the year, books read in October, November, and December 2023:

 

129.        Hull, Cindy L. Human Sacrifice (fiction)

130.        Minka, Dzidra Kepitis. The Empty Sleeve (nonfiction)

131.        Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed (fiction)

132.        Dimaline, Cherie. Empire of Wild (fiction)

133.        Shipman, Viola. Famous in a Small Town (fiction)

134.        Straight, Susan. I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (fiction)

135.        Bourdain, Anthony. A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (nonfiction)

136.        Markoe, Merrill. What the Dogs Have Taught Me and Other Amazing Things I’ve Learned (nonfiction)

137.        May, Katherine. Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age (nonfiction)

138.        Conley, Susan. Paris Was the Place (fiction)

139.        McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World(nonfiction)

140.        Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. To Speak For the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest (nonfiction)

141.        Lee, Leslie. We Are the Land: Ireland, 2^nd ed. (nonfiction )

142.        Nevin, David. Meriwether (fiction)

143.        Wickens, Kim. Lexington (nonfiction)

144.        Mosley, Walter. Walkin’ the Dog (fiction)

145.        Airgood, Ellen. The Education of Ivy Blake (fiction)

146.        Enright, Elizabeth. Gone-Away Lake (fiction)

147.        Smith, Alexander McCall. The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse (fiction)

148.        Campbell, Bonnie Jo. The Waters (fiction – ARC)

149.        Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther (fiction)

150.        Lee, Leslie. The Hole Made by a Waterfall: Ireland (nonfiction)

151.        Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (nonfiction)

152.        Hamerton, P.G. The Unknown River (nonfiction)

153.        Maugham, W. Somerset. Cakes & Ale (fiction)

154.        Casebeer, Karen. Calling: A Northwoods Mystery (fiction)

155.        Garvin, Ann. I Like You Just Fine When You Aren’t Around (fiction)

156.        Williams, Justin Michael & Shelly Tygielski. How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation (nonfiction)

157.        Ariyoshi, Sawako. The Twilight Years (fiction)

158.        Godwin, Gail. The Odd Woman (fiction)

159.        Hamilton, Steve. Let It Burn (fiction)

160.        Straight, Susan. Mecca (fiction)

Happy New Year, Friends!

Toasty Times Are Here

Beech leaves

First, fall color report: Red and orange and yellow are giving way to brown and gold. I’ve written here before, earlier this fall and in years past, that beech leaves in the fall make me think of buttered toast dripping with honey. Now that November is upon us, beech leaves are less yellow, more brown, and the oaks have turned a rich brown, also. Both oaks and beeches, especially the young ones, will hang onto some of their dark, papery leaves all winter.

 

Oak leaves in full sun do have a warm look, don't they?

The French have two words for brown: brun/brune (a hair color, for example) and marron/marrone,  used more often and also one of two names for chestnuts and the chestnut tree (which also goes by the name chataigner -- but see the blue box on this site if you want to increase your confusion), with marron also used as slang to refer to something strange or bizarre. C’est marron! If you want to refer to the color called 'maroon' in English, however, go for bordeaux in French. Like the wine. Oui, c'est marron!

-- Non, ce sont des chênes!

Lakeside oaks

Brown leaves, blue sky

With toasty colors outdoors, it’s time to reach for sweaters and comforters indoors, and I would willingly have sacrificed an hour of after-midnight dark on Sunday in order to have daylight seem to come earlier – I get confused by time changes -- but no! We were gaining an hour (of reading or sleep) to achieve the earlier morning light. (How we humans pretend! “It’s really 8 o’clock, but we’re pretending it’s 7 o’clock” is how I explain the time change to myself.) Earlier morning light is very welcome! Not so welcome is the increase in evening darkness, but next month we’ll turn the corner, I tell myself. It’s good that the equinox comes in December, so that each cold day in January and February we have a tiny bit more daylight.

There she is!

Meanwhile, only on Saturdays now is my bookstore open until 5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, if there’s no one browsing at 3 p.m., I turn out the shop lights, lock the door, and go home to my dog, staying until 5 only on Saturdays. My bookstore was so busy last Saturday! I was surprised and gratified by all the number of visitors, browsers, and book buyers. Most of first two groups were also members of the third group, I'm happy to say.

Last week we had sunshine three afternoons in a row, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – and then again for most of Saturday! Basswood and black walnut trees in my yard had dropped all their leaves and stood bare, letting the sun reach accumulated leaves on the ground as Sunny Juliet and I enjoyed light and fresh air along with exercise. Every sunny hour this time of year is a gift. Soon the silver maple leaves will fall, carpeting the ground, leaving bare branches holding up the sky. (Monday: I think today's bitter cold wind will achieve that result!)

Meanwhile, indoors next to my bed these books await my attention: History of the Rain, a novel by Niall Williams; Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America’s Legendary Racehorse, by Kim Wickens (this is a nonfiction account of the horse featured in the Geraldine Brooks novel); To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey From Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger; Meriwether: a novel of Meriwether Lewis and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, by David Nevin; and an ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, due to be released in January. 

I’m trying to save my reading of the Campbell book as a Christmas present to myself. Or maybe Thanksgiving weekend, if I can even wait that long.

The rest? I can’t say I’ll get through them all this month, what with the chance, as happens frequently, that something not in the stack will present itself and cut in line, so to speak -- an ever-present danger of owning a bookstore! After what seems like a lifetime of school and assigned reading, it still feels like a luxury to pick up whatever appeals to me at any given moment, and heaven knows we need little comforts and simple luxuries to keep us going, with winter’s dark and a strife-riven world pressing in upon us.

 

Previous post was my top fiction picks of 2023 from January through October, and next post will be top nonfiction. By the way, a handful of people left comments on my last post, but not a single one chimed in with a favorite novel read this year, and I know that some of you have read novels this year! One person left a new comment on a very old post, recommending a work of fiction from Scotland. Anyone else have recommendations? Anyone?

Another note, not about cold wind: If the only person who comes in the bookstore today was the one who wanted to tell me how much he loves Bonnie Jo Campbell's Q Road, my day was made!

 

Timing? Time? Something Else?

This past week the timing has been right for black locust perfume in the air

Sometimes timing is everything. Other times, as the Artist said so often, it’s lighting that makes all the difference. Then of course (for restaurants and retail stores) there is “Location, location, location!” and (with rare books, especially), “Condition, condition, condition!” This past weekend, fortuitously, my timing was perfect for planting on Saturday evening perennials purchased that morning at the Northport Women’s Club’s first perennial sale, which I hope will become an annual event. 

Beautiful aliens, I can't help loving them.

 

Earlier in the week we were promised three straight days of rain – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – with the 10-day forecast showing rain for every daylight hour those three days. By Saturday, however, the chances had thinned out, and only one measly hour was showing rain for Sunday morning. We need rain so badly! But I had gotten my three new iris (white), three lady’s mantle, and three pots of Shasta daisy plants (more than three plants in those pots) into the ground on Saturday evening, although it meant moving a few other things first and preparing soil in one new place to accomplish the task. They don’t look like much yet but will, I’m confident, be splendid additions to my outdoor surroundings. For now, iris and annuals provide lively color.

And then, Sunday morning – beautifully overcast, with a very gentle rain falling like a Sabbath benediction. Everything green seemed to be taking deep, happy breaths of cool, moist air. A perfect day for me to stay inside, vacuum floors, clear away clutter, make a pot of chili, and take reading breaks as needed. – Oh, yes, and breaks to throw tennis balls for Sunny Juliet, of course.

Busy in Northport bookstore and gallery and outdoors at home with dog and yard, I’ve been in drifting mode lately with my reading. My dinner companion on the porch most evenings is one of Jim Harrison’s novels in a French translation (strange to read the northern Michigan town and road names in such a different-feeling context!), and my Audubon Society wildflower guide is next to that novel on the table, as I have reason to consult it on a fairly regularly basis at this time of year as I consider what else to include in a planned wildflower area between barn and chicken coop. 

 

Next to my bed are Tom Springer’s The Star in the Sycamore: Discovering Nature’s Hidden Virtues in the Wild Nearby (doesn’t that sound like a book I would love? I do!); Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things; and Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Recent bedtime reading included a Saul Bellow novella, The Theft, and Michele Harper’s memoir, The Beauty in Breaking. Since drafting this post, I have slipped into the long ago of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, by Michael Frank, a time when Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Italians lived peacefully together on the island of Rhodes. At least, that’s how and where the book begins. I’m afraid it may go somewhere darker before it ends, but I will go with Stella wherever she goes….

 

On a lighter note, this coming week at Dog Ears Books should see delivery of neighbor Robert Underhill’s new murder mystery, One Cold Coffee. Customers have been clamoring for a new Underhill novel for the last couple of years, so the first two copies he brought me went out the door before I could even open one myself. “I hope you’ll read it, too,” Bob said. Well, of course! 

[Update: 6/13, 12:45 p.m. It's here now!]

Does all this drifting from book to book make me sound like a shallow consumer of the printed word? I was heartened recently to read of a study showing that reading anything in a series of short sessions, rather than all at once, actually helps us remember better what we have read. We remember longer what we don’t read all at once. Immediately I thought of meeting in a small group for eight consecutive sessions to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses. Despite everything we have read and discussed in years since, the Ulysses experience for me was our never-equalled benchmark in terms of meaningful reading, because we took so much time with it. I think of this kind of involvement with a book as not just reading but living with and in the book day after day.

 

One June I was immersed in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy for the entire month. Another time it was The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks, a history of American literature during those years of the 19^th century. I recommend the Brooks literary histories as “slow books.” He doesn’t rush his story, and a reader cannot rush through, either. One settles down to a 19^th-century pace.

 

Now as the summer solstice is fast approaching, it can seem as if we are careening toward that longest day, a day that comes all too soon, after which there will be increasingly less daylight to fill with summer activities through July and August. To slow time down now, even if you can only do so in quarter-hours here and there, make it a point to read slowly, wander aimlessly, to putter, saunter, loll, etc. Think of the best words you know to describe the voluptuous sense of wrapping yourself in slow moments....

 

Maybe, like the short reading sessions, twenty minutes of any kind of undirected leisure here and an hour there is what we will remember best and longest when winter returns – for instance, that lovely, surprising morning coffee moment when the house wren landed on the windowsill! Ah, yes! I hope so!

 

 

Grief Notes:

 

When it comes to grief, though, time is almost nonexistent. One can count weeks and months following loss, but there is no measuring its depth. One does not “get through” or “get over” it. You are involuntarily exiled from the beloved and familiar and transported overnight to a strange new place. You will never return. You will never forget. You simply go on, because there’s nothing else to do, because you are alive, because the one you loved “would want you to,” and so on and so forth. 

 

The sun shines, clouds form, rain falls. Birds sing and nest, flowers and trees blossom and grow. Young couples fall in love, and babies are born. The earth continues its revolutions, and night and day alternate, as they always have. Sometimes you smile or laugh. Everything is the same as it’s always been, and -- nothing will ever be the same again. 

 

It is love that is everything, and you had love, its joy and its pain. Now you have memories, a volume of images and remembered conversations that come throughout the day and in dreams at night. To live without this grief would be “never to have loved,” and how could anyone wish for that?

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

   I feel it, when I sorrow most;

   'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Time: The Environment of Life -- Change: The Only Constant

Time looms large over our lives!

 

It’s a generational divide, that between the digital generation and “those of us who were brought up among clocks with old fashioned dials,” writes Nancy Willard, in an essay entitled (from a poem by e.e. cummings) “When By Now and Tree By Leaf.” She goes on: 

 

For us, time is space. An hour is as round and friendly as the full moon, which often peeps through a tiny window on the dials of grandfather clocks. A quarter of an hour is a quarter of a pie, wherein the minutes nestle as closely knit as cells in a comb, and if they are joyful, every cell is filled with honey, and if they are dull, they stand empty and flavorless as wax. To the digital generation, I suppose time is linear. The minutes fall away, never to be heard from again. There is no record of the past and no promise of the future, only the swiftly vanishing present. 

 

-      From her collection Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors and Stories (Essays on Writing)

 

Two pages later, Willard tells of her childhood living room, with three electric appliances – toaster, radio, clock -- and only one electric outlet. (I pause, bemused, at the idea of a toaster in the living room.) “You could have news or you could have time or you could have toast,” she tells us, but not all at once, and then she recounts how a gift of homemade elderberry jam from a neighbor had the family choosing toast over news and time until their bread supply ran out, whereupon they started out for town, ostensibly to buy bread, but with bread really only the excuse for a day-long adventure --  over a lake, across a pasture, along the highway until sidewalks were reached. Time (without the electric clock plugged in) was expansive and stretched to make room for ice cream and for browsing dime store toy counters. It was, she says (time, that is), “not so much measured as observed.” Those six words seem worth lingering over. Maybe you want to look away from your screen for a while now, get up and walk to the door, look out at the world and see what there is to see, even go for a walk….

 

…Since childhood I have been obsessed with time, and that all-consuming subject for thought and reflection has only grown as my decades have accumulated. I am fascinated by material traces of the past that survive into my own present, whether back in historically youthful Michigan or here in the arid and older Southwest. Here in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, crumbling adobe and rusted metal attest to the passing of time. The mountains, by contrast, feel permanent. And yet, we know even they are not, that violent, prehistoric earth forces brought them into being, and that there is no reason whatsoever to believe them eternal. As my high school earth science teacher told us on the first day of class, the only constant in the universe is change. 

The Artist, my love, at Chiricahua National Monument

 

Ah, but when iconic placeholders in our personal landscapes are swept away by sudden change, something of our own, oh-so-brief individual life history erased, the shock is akin to a death in the family. In fact, it adds to the losses death has already visited upon us, because now we can no longer take our leisure in a place that feels so much like home that we still feel the presence of departed friends and loved ones there. After Leland’s Bluebird is razed to the ground, sometime soon, a new Bird will arise, phoenix-like, the old name (along with the family owners) providing some kind of continuity, but the old bar, the old tables, everything familiar where so many now gone once gathered will also be gone, as are they, the atmosphere of past years forever banished. When this news was followed by an announcement that Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern will close permanently at the end of the current year, my northern Michigan neighborhood reeled in disbelief. Far from home, I felt the tremors as if on-site. How could it be true?  

We were always happy there.

"Someone left the cake out in the rain...."

What, I wondered, would a Cochise County, Arizona, equivalent be? In Railroad Park I saw, with a shock, that the old, giant Arizona ash tree had died and been felled, and where once it offered shade, now it lies on the ground and serves as playground equipment. -- A friend questioned the safety of the arrangement, but after all, local toddlers ride horseback almost before they are old enough to talk….

How it was, only last year --

 

How it is now.

It is time, however, to change my tune, or at least to modulate into another, brighter key, because not all change involves loss. Whatever did we do in Northport before the advent of the New Bohemian Café? 

Back in northern Michigan, New Bo welcomes.

Saxon House, home of Source of Coffee in Willcox, AZ

And how did the Artist and I get along in Willcox until Source of Coffee opened two years ago in the beautiful old historic bungalow, Saxon House, on Haskell Avenue? I was at the coffee house the other day and saw the tribute to my love in his old, favorite corner, but although I took time to photograph his hat, the sight affected me too much just then to linger, and only on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (the day Source of Coffee was celebrating its second anniversary, by the way) did I look more closely and see that there was more to the tribute than the hat. A photomontage of the Artist at work was overlaid with a quotation from him, and in front of that and his hat was a statement by the custom hatmakers who had done so much to memorialize him, without ever having made his acquaintance. 

A young woman at a nearby table, working on her laptop, looked up as I moved away from the display, so I said, to explain photographing the corner, “That was my husband.” She, it turned out, was the very Teresa who with her husband, Josh, had been responsible for turning David’s hat into a memorial to him! How lovely to meet her in person! 

Teresa of Dusty Desert Hat Co.

She and Josh will be opening a hat shop and art studio (Teresa is a painter) on Railroad Avenue in the spring. Meanwhile, they are in the Air B&B business, and Josh gave me a tour of the lovely short-term rental in the remodeled casita behind the coffee house: three large, beautifully appointed rooms.

The coffee shop made a huge positive change in the Artist’s and my winter life in Arizona, and I know that his friendship was a positive change in the lives of Bear, Dana, Deb, Ben, and others. David Grath, the Artist, is part of the history of Source of Coffee in Willcox, Arizona! 

Life is a continual gaining of experiences, even experiences of loss, and an accumulation of memories. Although in the great cosmic sweep of All Time, memories and history will no doubt someday all be lost, for now, at least, while I am here (mantra: I am here now), I am happy to see my love so well remembered in Cochise County, Arizona.

Making friends wherever he went -