Spring in Warwickshire, Winter Continues in Leelanau

March 20, 2025: snow

March 31, 2025: ice

Is this March all that completely different from the Marches of other years? I look back at photographs on my phone from March 2025 and see snow and ice, snow and ice. If the snow was not as deep last year, the ice was more damaging that what we have had this year—so far! Some say with Shakespeare that April is the cruelest month. I say March is crueler— more a steady, harsh prolongation of winter than a teasing alternation of winter and spring.

May 14, 2025: pear blossoms

Spring! Will we really be granted another? Will we see May blossoms again if we only hang in there patiently? Surely, yes! And every hour of beautiful May will be filled not only with that hour’s beauty but also with memories of former springs, memory deepening perception to swell each moment to overflowing.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

William Allen Neilson, who edited the Harvard Classics edition of The Mill on the Floss, calls the novel “substantially true [to the author’s life] though intentionally altered in details,” as George Eliot took her own girlhood as a model for that of her heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and the terrain of Warwickshire in the English Midlands as the inspiration for Maggie’s beloved home country. That much is hardly surprising, is it? Neilson notes that Dickens did the same in David Copperfield and Thackeray in Pendennis. Never having been an English major, I know of great literature and writers only what I have read and so was taken by surprise to learn that Mary Ann Evans (as she was born), in addition to writing novels, was first assistant editor of the Westminster Review in London and at the same time translated Essence of Christianity, by the German philosopher Feuerbach into English! Translated Feuerbach? Really?

Another surprise awaited me in the novel itself. Nothing I ever heard of George Eliot had led me to expect humor in her writing. And yet, why be surprised? Thackery’s satirical portrayals of church and society, as well as the unforgettably broad characters of Charles Dickens, surely delighted their authors in the hours of their creation, so why should George Eliot, in the same literary-historical period, not do her own skewering of pretense and eccentricity? Early on in the story, Eliot gives us a conversation between the parents of young Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The husband is more or less thinking aloud, meditating on further schooling for their son, Tom, hardly expecting thoughtful contributions from the wife he chose because she was not quick-witted enough to challenge him with ideas of her own, so he is not at all taken aback when plump, pretty, blond, shallow-minded Mrs. Tulliver replies only to what she hears and understands, rather than to what her husband says.

“But,” continued Mr. Tulliver after a pause, “what I’m a bit afraid on is, as Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish. He takes after your family, Betsy.”

“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs. Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s way, and my father’s before him.”

Besides lyrical descriptions of natural beauty and sharply satirical portraits of human beings in relationships, the author makes the occasional general observation on humanity. Here is one that struck me forcibly today, as violence unleashed around the world triggers repercussions nearer home:

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Men, women, and children, we understand George Eliot to be saying, as Tom and Maggie suffer their father’s bankruptcy, as well as the primary blame their mother’s family places squarely on their father and secondarily on their mother for having married him. (So in today’s reckless, ill-considered war, undertaken principally by two dictatorial heads of state, repercussions are being felt around the world. Will unmerited pain or “justice” will be greater in the end? What are the odds?)

Even as the girl Maggie’s repeated bursting into tears annoyed me, I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss much more than I had expected I would and put off reaching the final pages by setting the book aside over and over again. 

Thursday I got to my bookshop for the scheduled four hours (as I had on Wednesday, also), entertaining a total of two drop-in visitors in all that time (a quieter day than even Wednesday had been), and then the forecast for Friday was so dire that I planned a snow day, along with all the schools in Leelanau County, and made a lazy day of it at home, with a lot of reading and the reorganization of one cupboard. The forecast for Saturday was sunshine, however, and I planned to get back to my shop. 

Friday sun and shadows

So much for plans! My driveway wasn’t plowed until 5:30 p.m.! Sorry I couldn't get my shop open for a sunny Saturday!

Which brings me to Sunday, my usual at-home day, with a near-blizzard raging outside my blessedly warm farmhouse. I say “near-blizzard” advisedly, having been instructed that ‘blizzard’ is a very precise category of storm. So far our winds are only 23-25 mph, not the 35 mph that they would need to be for blizzard designation. In addition, we would need not just blowing snow but whiteout conditions for three hours. So today’s snowstorm is not a blizzard, but if it dumps two feet of snow, a lot of us may be snowed in for another couple of days. One can be snowbound without a blizzard.

Sunday morning

Does Sunny like the snow? She is eager to go outdoors, happy to run around the yard and "make snow angels" (in her own way—you wouldn’t recognize them as such—I think she’s only scratching her back), but there’s not much reluctance on her part when her momma tells her it’s time to go inside again. 

"Ready for breakfast, Momma!"

Sunny and I came indoors for breakfast about 9 o'clock. By 4 p.m. the walk I had cleared in the morning was buried eight inches deep in new snow. Sunny was floundering in it, up to her belly. And it was still coming down....

I hope my snowbound friends have plenty of books to get them through these days!

Again!

 

Sunday, 1/25/26: Another sunny January day!

We had another sunny day on Sunday. Sunshine again, for the third time this month!

Thursday--sunshine again!

On Thursday’s sunshine (sunny day #4), I locked up my shop just before noon, leaving a sign on the door telling anyone who might wander by that they could find me down on the corner to the south, where I stood with a group I call “the stalwarts.” They were a much larger group back in the summer, before the thermometer took a dive and the larger segment of Northport’s population took off for Arizona, Florida, and other points south, but nine or ten or eleven of them still get out there on Thursdays for half an hour or so, standing where they are most visible to drivers coming down the hill and turning left onto Waukazoo Street, and I decided it was time for me to join them.

 

I was sure I had posterboard somewhere, either at home or in the storage area behind my shop, but it stubbornly refused to reveal itself, so my sign was black felt marker on the raggedy top of a cardboard file box—not as big as it might have been and nowhere near as “professional” in appearance, but I justified the look by assuring myself that no one could mistake me for a “paid demonstrator.” 

 

(Does anyone really believe that there are paid demonstrators against ICE in American villages and towns and even large cities, Minneapolis or any other? I know the people who turn out for these events! They are my friends, my family, my neighbors! But I guess the same people who think it’s okay for right-wingers to carry assault weapons to demonstrations  and even kill people (do your own online search if you don't remember the names) but wrong for an ICE nurse from a VA hospital to carry, holstered not drawn, a gun he had a legal permit to carry—those people will clearly swallow any blatant lie or absurd argument in the world, as long as it comes from the “leaders” they follow blindly.)

 

Winter. Snow. COLD! Although even a sunny day without wind is darn cold when the temperatures are in the single digits, there are important reasons for not huddling indoors full-time, e.g., meaningful gathering of people aiming to protect democracy, e.g., getting a dog out for regular exercise.

Very COLD week!

Is a "warm-up" coming?

Thought-Stopping

A friend of mine who had trouble with anxiety was taught a method of overcoming it called “thought stopping.” When an anxiety-provoking thought or image comes into your mind, you say aloud, “Stop!” and then visualize something calm and beautiful, replacing a negative with a positive image. Some people have good results; however, the method is of very limited or no value for others, particularly anyone with OCD. By attempting to block the thought rather than dealing with it, the thought itself develops resistance to your resistance, studies have shown. Despite occasional temporary relief, you may be strengthening the fear you are trying to avoid by stuffing it into a closet. (See alternatives here.)

The other day another friend sent me a link for another kind of thought stopping, the kind that seeks not to conquer chronic fears but to avoid critical thinking, i.e., to avoid questioning whatever orthodoxy someone has accepted, to silence one's own doubt. The man who posts on Instagram under the name “epistemiccrisis” (great name!) says he was “born into” the MAGA culture and learned ways to avoid questioning the ideology by reaching for handy mind control techniques. Thought stopping, as epistemiccrisis explains it in this ideological world, holds questions and doubt at bay with phrases that short-circuit critical thinking and keep believers comfortable. One such phrase is “Fake news!” The phrases are used as shields to block a person's own intrusive thoughts but can also be used to block information from other sources that could lead to doubt.

One phrase that epistemiccrisis doesn't mention (please excuse me for not spelling it out completely) is “Tr__p Derangement Syndrome,” commonly shortened to TDS. Confronted with any unpleasant fact about the current president, his followers block thoughtful doubts with the catch-phrase, “TDS!” (That is supposed to imply that the person criticizing the president or simply bringing up an unpleasant fact about him is completely unhinged on the subject of the president, not that the president himself is unhinged or deranged, which would make much more sense.) A true-believing follower might follow up the thought-stopping accusation by asking the person who has criticized or brought up the unpleasant fact, “Are you off your meds?” 

You will notice that this method of avoiding critical thinking also has the general effect of shutting down discussion by sideswiping anyone with a different perspective, sending the clear signal that no challenge to the received orthodoxy will be received by the blocked mind.

Recent Reading

Ah, but we still have books! Not only my own interests but semipopular demand has determined me to enlarge my offerings of classic philosophy writings. Notice also Mary Webb’s novel, Precious Bane, for which I am an evangelist. Escape to the quiet world of Shropshire, back when plows were drawn by livestock and the Saturday market was as good as a county fair. Don’t worry, though. There is plenty of conflict and drama in the story; it isn’t all sweetness and light. Simply one of the Western world’s great books, too long overlooked.

The story told in journalist Martin Sixsmith’s work of nonfiction pictured above was partially familiar to me from the film version, “Philomena,” starring Judy Dench and Steve Coogan. While the movie focused on the mother searching for the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, however, the book follows the life of the child from birth to death and also delves deeply into political struggles within Ireland (between Church and government), as well as in the United States, where the adopted Irish child grows to be a successful lawyer working for the RNC on (of all things!) redistricting, so book and film are complementary, and I recommend both. 

This Week Up North

 

Despite single-digit temperatures and subzero wind chills, Leelanau bodies of water are not yet covered with ice. Looking past the mountains of snow that hide most of the Northport Youth Sailing School buildings, you can see the blue water of Grand Traverse Bay. How long will that be the case? How soon will ice boating and ice fishing be possible on Lake Leelanau? Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

Blue water in Grand Traverse Bay is still visible.

Where Do We Stand?

 

(That sign needs refreshing and straightening up, doesn't it?)

Oh, where to begin? 

 

With the weather? Warmup and sunshine, then soaking rain, and now, coming up, back to snow. The sunny days were a pleasure, but it is March in Michigan, after all.

Omena Bay, Monday, March 3, 2025

With books? Recently I set aside, unfinished, yet another, this one a biography of a famous author, because after 180 pages read I could not stand to spend another minute in that man’s life. A biography of photographer Edward S. Curtis, by contrast, held me to the end, by which time I concluded that his life was as tragic as that of his subjects, except that he did manage to get his work done, and the tribes he photographed appreciated his work, and he had not succumbed to despair at the end but had in mind yet another project, though that late-life idea was destined not to be realized. Amazing perseverance! An interesting side note in Curtis’s was his correspondence with Belle da Costa Greene, the subject of a book of historical fiction I read very recently (The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray) and whose biography (An Illuminated Life, by Heidi Ardizzone), I now have in my to-read stack. Curtis and Greene were connected through J. P. Morgan, who employed Greene as his personal librarian and who finally underwrote Curtis’s expenses for his 20-volume work, although Curtis himself received no pay for all the years he put in.

 

With the dog? I can hardly “begin” with her now, my paragraph above on books having gone on as long as it did, but I know my readers enjoy having dog notes squeezed in among the books, so, first, here she is in black and white, looking more like our old Sarah than she generally appears to me. One morning I told her, “You are all my dogs,” meaning that she has inherited my love for them and that I see them all now in her. Isn’t that the way it is with dogs, when you come right down to it?

Sunny looking like Sarah --

We got to the dog park two days in a row, too, first with hard-packed ice underfoot and then with melting snow and the reappearance of mud. The dogs, of course, don’t care. They could not care less! (And isn’t it strange how easily Americans in general—I have to watch myself!—have slipped into saying, “I could care less,” when they mean exactly the opposite?) At home, we had not only morning Frisbee time but even the return of tennis ball play one sunny afternoon!

 

Meeting friends!

So there you have weather, books, and dogs, and now I’m going to dip into politics, so if you can’t stand the heat, you can exit the kitchen now. Fair warning!

Late winter thaw

The nation-wide economic boycott of online and big box giants set for Friday, February 28, was largely overshadowed by the shameful spectacle that took place at the White House. There was a pretty strong view, anyway, that a one-day boycott would have no effect whatsoever, either economically or politically, and yet, in solidarity with the idea, I finally made a plan to support it in my own way, because it felt good to be doing something at last. And then I realized, from all the feedback I received to my announcement, that other people felt the same way, that there is a great hunger for ways to take action, other than making repeated calls to our so-called Congressional “representatives” who could not care less than they do about our opinions or what we would like to see happening in Congress. (What we would like to see: evidence of backbone!)

 

So that felt good, but what next? The answer came when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with her to a public protest in Traverse City on March 4. We would be protesting not only the administration’s shameful treatment of the president of Ukraine but every other destructive and hateful thing he has done in the last – is it possible that it’s only been six weeks???!!!

 

The thing is, I have never before taken part in a public demonstration. Mind you, I was paying attention in the Sixties and arguing against the war in Vietnam, and I certainly supported civil rights in principle, but I never marched once. And I was young back then. Now? Well, I can do it for my great-grandchildren!

 

My friend and I were nervous before we went. We didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the only thing that would have made the experience more positive than it was would have been a larger crowd, but there had been at least two other protest gatherings earlier in the day, and some of the people standing with us on Bayshore Drive at the intersection with Union Street in Traverse City had been to all three demonstrations, and while the rain held off (thank heaven!) it was a gloomy, grey day, not to mention cold for a couple of aging “protest virgins” who had forgotten their gloves.

 

But what a wonderful experience it was! 

Wearing my knitted cap from 2016--do you remember?

The vast majority of motorists who passed our intersection honked car horns in solidarity, waved, gave us thumbs up, and even cheered. (In the half-hour we stood there with our signs, only half a dozen people at most were negative.) It felt good to be standing in public for our principles, and to be affirmed by people passing by was icing on the cake. At one point, I was near tears, I felt such love for my country and for my fellow brave Americans out there in the cold wind! It was a happy, joyful feeling!

 

Will public demonstrations make any difference at all? 

 

We know protests will not change the positions or alter the plans of the divider-in-chief in the Oval Office, but he is not our target audience. We want to motivate Democrats in office to unify and raise their voices, to motivate Republicans with eyes open to join in bilateral resistance, and to show any Americans still on the fence—or wavering in their support of the administration as they see the gutting of programs necessary to their livelihood or even to their lives—that they are welcome and that we can prevail if we join together. 

 

I did not (how could anyone think I would?) watch or even listen to Tuesday evening’s hour and a half rant. And on Wednesday morning, why would I “read the full transcript” or “watch highlights”? I know all too well the “state of the union”: It is in a perilous state, brought low by the divider-in-chief whose bloviating fantasies illuminate nothing, ever. What would that 90 minutes provide? Boasting and blaming, threats and lies and name-calling. Why would I subject myself to that yet again, even after the fact? 

 

First thing Wednesday morning, though, I did watch Senator Elissa Slotkin’s entire rebuttal (link in list below), and I was so proud that she is a Michigan senator! I am looking toward not the haters but the helpers, not the dividers but to those who would reunite us, those with a positive vision of an American future that is sometimes these days all too hard to see. 

 

As for those who disagree with me, I am through playing Whack-a-Mole. Put the pieces together—or don’t. Here are some places to start, if you care to see what I see. I have chosen a variety of sources and have made each choice for clarity and basis in fact.

 

Fact-checking the State of the Union address.

Senator Elissa Slotkin rebuts president.

War in Ukraine.

 

Full meeting with Zelensky in the White House.

 

Lech Walesa weighs in.

U.S.-Russia-Ukraine recent history

 

Current administration’s ties with Russia.

Russia and U.S. cybersecurity.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

 

What does Musk’s own chatbot say?

DOGE savings?

 

Cost of president’s trip to the Superbowl.

What tariffs could cost Americans (from Fox).

Ontario’s response to tariffs against Canada.

What constitutes an “illegal protest” in the U.S.?

 

Voter fraud, facts and myths.

Beautiful Michigan!

Beautiful Northport!

Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Back at Last

 

…Time slowed until individual moments separated and grew plump, and I picked them, held them in my palm, and popped them one after another into my mouth, savoring them as if they were berries. I remembered childhood was filled with moments like that: plump and succulent. And, as in childhood, every snowflake and cedar frond, every fox and goldfinch, every car passing on the road and every cloud passing in the sky was unique, vivid, and vibrating with actuality. The world brimmed with an astonishment of things, and each was adjoined by all other things. 

 

-      Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes

 

It’s coming again, our Great Lakes winter. Or is it? Last winter we had a little snow in January and none to speak of (at least, none to plow) other than that. Then spring 2024 was early and wet, and after that summer descended into drought, a long, dry spell that, while it lasted into early autumn, did nothing to dull the fall colors, which were seemed to go on and on and on until November winds came to strip branches and topple trees, until now, here we are looking for snow. There was a bit on the ground Thursday morning, our first, but it didn’t last long, and our long-range forecast is for a “wet” winter, 40-50% chance of wetter-than-average weather, as in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, and hail. Does that mean the yo-yo continues to bounce back and forth, never a settled season? 

 

Whatever the weather, winter's increased darkness always brings an increase in indoor reading time. More on that in a minute, but for now I hope you noticed that Jerry Dennis's sentences are as savory and mouth-watering as the moments they describe.

One January day in 2024 -- real winter!

Where have I been?

 

Since September 13, 2007, my initial post on Books in Northport, this is the longest I’ve gone between postings, the most recent one before this dated October 29, 2024. The main reason for the long hiatus was the death of my laptop screen. I tried one day to work from my phone, posting directly to the Blogger platform, rather than working through a Word draft first, then uploading it, the result not quite an unmitigated disaster but when done at last I realized -- too late! -- that I’d uploaded to my photo blog rather than either this (primarily, or at least initially) book blog or even my dedicated bookstore blog. (Here is where that post ended up, for those of you who never happened on it.) With the laptop, I could have rectified the error easily. Of course, with the laptop I wouldn’t have been posting from my phone in the first place. 

 

Then one day last week a friend called and said, “I need your blog!” She clarified by adding, “I mean, I need you to write something new!” So now that I have a clean new screen and keyboard at my disposal (and all my old programs and files right where I want them, too), I’m jumping back in. Perhaps not a peak performance, but at least something to indicate that there still are books in Northport!

And bookmarks!

 

Still reading – and rereading

 

Away from my email for three weeks (that part, I have to admit, felt like kind of a vacation), I made a few feeble stabs at handwritten notes for a future blog post and kept my “Books Read” list up-to-date with handwritten additions but didn’t bother with long descriptions of or reflections on the books added to the list. I also wrote a few letters to distant friends, made notes about new books to order for the shop, and set aside Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi to reread Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, one of my favorites among his novels, which inspired me to pull RL’s Dream off the shelf next, a Mosley novel I read so long ago it was as if I were reading it for the first time. With the main character a musician originally from the South, and with Mosley’s brilliant sentences, I sensed many echoes of Albert Murray. There was also a historical novel squeezed in there, a 24-hour spell with The War Began in Paris, in which a former Mennonite woman from the American Midwest, working as a small-time journalist, becomes entangled with another American woman journalist with Fascist sympathies, glamor and excitement dulling her sense of danger. 

 

Oh, the world, the world! Even in fiction, there is no escaping it! Not that escape should be a relentless quest. Understanding, empathy, living other lives in other skins – that’s the magic offered us in fiction, don’t you think? I’m curious what my readers have to say on this topic, especially as not long ago I stumbled on a website where a writer proclaimed something like “Life is too short to read depressing books,” and her readers all agreed in their comments that they wanted nothing but escape from novels and therefore avoided any book that received a major prize and/or had been recommended by Oprah! Novels without conflict, characters without challenges? To me, this is a peculiar narrowing of the entire idea of reading, although I certainly understand the need at times for “happy endings.” But what do you think?

 

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A little “playing tourist” –

My son and his wife came up for three nights, making for cheery alterations to my usual schedule. After their Monday of hiking Whaleback and tasting at Tandem Ciders while I took Sunny to the dog park and did a bit of housework, the three of us reconvened for dinner. Having company is inspiration to the cook in her tiny Paris kitchen: On Sunday evening there was a curried soup made from Hubbard squash and coconut milk; Monday’s vegetable dish of cauliflower and mushrooms with parsley exceeded my expectations, and the leftovers were even delicious cold. As for the rice pudding, while it was hardly a failure, next time I’ll let the rice steam much longer so that it disappears a bit more into the custard.

Tuesday the three of us went out together, visiting Samaritan’s Closet in Lake Leelanau and the Polish Art Center in Cedar before dinner at Dick’s Pour House in the evening. Shopping! Dinner out! Not things I usually do on my own, and it was even more fun to know that Ian and Kim were enjoying their little Up North vacation. Kathleen at the PAC in Cedar is delightful, too, as is her shop. 

Deer season and outdoor dog activity

 

Sunny and I are challenged in our outdoor time during firearm deer season, although she has no idea why mornings are different. When it isn’t raining, we still have tennis ball play in the yard or even in the two-track, but there is no off-leash running along the edge of the woods these days. All the more reason, then, to take Sunny to the dog park when I can. But the extra round trip to Northport is only worthwhile on days my bookshop is closed (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), as the morning’s first regulars don’t arrive early enough to provide Sunny with playmates if we get there at nine o’clock. By ten, though, we can usually count on another Aussie, a couple of Pyrenees, a Bernadoodle and a smooth-coated collie. A few times there was a little fierce barking (some from my Naughty Girl, some from others), but a tennis ball hurled through the air quickly distracts everyone from conflict. And it is so good to see dogs running off-leash!

  

New Books: Arriving Soon!

 

My new book order, usually sent in on Mondays, finally (after not happening at all for a couple of weeks) got done on Thursday this week, a bigger order than usual, making up for weeks missed. There will be an assortment of new board books for the pre-reading crowd of babies; a fun book of dog poems for “kids” of all ages; Robin Kimmerer’s new book, Serviceberry, as well as a version of Braiding Sweetgrass for young adults; a couple editions of Wind in the Willows for those who need to re-immerse in it or discover it for the first time; and, as usual, a few surprises. The order should come in early next week, so I may be in the shop on days you’d expect me not to be there, because opening boxes of new books is a delight not to be postponed but indulged as soon as possible.

The run on jigsaw puzzles has already begun, though, so don't wait too long to make your selections for those long winter evenings ahead.

  

And the season rushes on!

 

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving already -- the best, I always think, of American holidays, being all about gratitude rather than hoopla. Hoopla fun will come two days later, though, never fear, with Saturday evening’s lighting of the Christmas tree in Northport and a visit from Santa – and then the race is on! Hanukkah begins at sundown on December 25 this year and continues to January 2, with Kwanzaa from December 26 to January 1, so the end of one year and entry into the next will be rich with holidays. 

 

We need our holidays. We need to shift focus from competition to celebration, from conflict to love. We need festive lights during the shortest days and longest, darkest nights of the year. We also need to take time to remember those in less fortunate circumstances (far too many!) and do what we can with our end-of-year contributions. Writing those checks, like writing a holiday letter or addressing cards to friends, is a good December ritual.

A couple of longer bookstore days

 

My 11 a.m. -3 p.m. hours will be subject to some stretching for the days following Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how late I’ll be open on Friday, November 29, but I’d love to see local shoppers in my bookstore on that day, and if there are enough of them, I’ll be happy to stay open as late as 5 p.m. 

Indie Bookstore Day!

The next day, Saturday, will definitely be a later business day, as Northport's tree lighting doesn’t take place until 6 p.m., and I don't want to miss that!

Lights are strung, ornaments are on. All systems are GO for a week from Saturday!