Are you looking for color?

Equinoctal moon --
color only beginning now

Glimpses of color:

Tree Guy tells me that the red and orange and gold and yellow colors of autumn leaves are there all summer long, hidden by green. When the green seeps away (chlorophyll “breaks down” and/or stops being produced—obviously, I’m pretty vague on the science), other colors sing forth. 

Already in early September the green of our deciduous trees was noticeably less bright, red undertones darkening the overall effect of the woodland edges. Where I notice brighter color most in September is in pockets—peony foliage in my border, columbine in the shade garden, an isolated, stressed tree here and there along the road, the first red sumac leaves and berries. But the big color show, once it gets underway, will develop quickly—and then be over all too soon, as happens every year.

And oh, already the pin cherries! How often do we pay any attention to them? Look at their vivid color with the low, almost-setting sun behind the leaves!

Flowers and Gardens of the Shoulder Season:

When bee balm goes to seed and phlox begins dropping its petals, I sometimes, with a wave of sadness, almost panic, that the time of blossoms is past—and then the asters begin to bloom. Asters in the village, asters in my meadow, asters along the roadside! Tiny white and pale pink ones and splashy big deep purple flowers. The bees love them, and so do I. 

My old corner from long ago!

Busy bee --

Chrysanthemums in pots appear around the same time and certainly fill an important niche, but it’s the wild asters that make me stop and smile. Carefree as weeds, bright and varied in their colors, they are Nature’s free will offering. Thank you!

Meadow asters

More

There are colors in my garden, too, though. A few marigolds from last year’s seeds, some dwarf hollyhocks (why they came up where they did and why they are so small, I have no idea), a handful of zinnias. My strawberry tower did not yield fruit but survived the summer, and I’m considering bringing it to the bookstore for the winter to see what it will do. Any thoughts on that?

Garden gold

Strawberry tower

Look out for this invader!

I had a nasty shock while Tree Guy and I were working on reducing the number of (total elimination is a pipe dream) young black walnut trees and the ever-invasive autumn olive. A large shrub I had been walking by for years was covered with black berries. What were they? Anything edible? Imagine how I recoiled in dread when the identification turned out to be the horrible buckthorn! That, too? No fair!

Chainsaw, loppers, pruners, poison, and a bag to contain the berries stole an hour from our pursuit of other goals, but I will be on the lookout from now on, and if you see this invader on your land, don't let it get the upper hand!

Buckthorn! Very unwelcome!

What of the 2026 apple crop?

Judging only from what I see as I travel county roads, it looks like a fantastic apple year! My own little trees have produced nicely after two off-years (first because of codling moths, then the next year a late spring killing frost nipping the blossoms). This year I was ready with traps for the moths at the end of winter, and spring frosts were unproblematic, so my only regret now is having neglected to thin the crop, because there are too many undersized apples, too much fruit competing for the trees’ resources. Three years ago, I did a good job of thinning, but this summer I forgot all about it. Oh, well! There are some good-sized apples in the mix, too.

One of my overloaded trees

Orchardists will not have made my mistake. Their crops look great! A place on Swede Road makes the most delicious fresh sweet cider with theirs. 

Cider stop, Swede Road

Wild apple trees look to have had a boom year, also, so there will be plenty of fruit for wildlife this winter.

Big wild apple

What people have been reading this year:

Three categories of fiction frequently requested this past year stand out, along with one of philosophy: (1) science fiction; (2) fantasy; (3) romance; and ((4) Stoicism. Even given the dystopic, post-apocalyptic trends in (1) and (2), the first three genres, as I see them, spell escape from present reality. 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours….

So wrote William Wordsworth, noting further that “we are out of tune.”  

Out of tune. Not in harmony. Out of tune with nature, surely, tragically. Out of tune with our times—perhaps not such a bad thing, since the times themselves are out of tune with nature. 

So where does that leave (4)? Why are American readers—at least in Northern Michigan—turning to an ancient school of philosophy? Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus. As with the escape reading, the Stoics seem clearly a response to the times in which we live, with the difference that Stoicism would have us deal with our challenges, accept our limitations, and keep our cool rather than explode in anger, simmer and shiver in anxiety, or fearfully burrow down the rabbit hole of escapism.

The Serenity Prayer is an example of the Stoic approach to life: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

 

Courage to change the things I can, 

 

and Wisdom to know the difference.

Stoicism is not resignation. Change what you can and then don’t give your one brief precious life over to agonizing about what you cannot control.

It has been an interesting summer of bookstore requests, this one of 2026, with three frequently requested categories of reading to escape reality and one to help us deal with it.

I am reminded by a recent customer request that there have also been more older adults than usual looking for the simple stories of their early years. Women have always been ready to revisit Nancy Drew, but in 2026 I’ve had men in their 70s wanting to re-read Hardy Boys books. Comfortable familiarity is another welcome escape, so there is a fifth popular category.

What I’ve been reading and thinking about:

For myself, I read and think and attempt to deal with life as it is and also periodically plunge from the present day to a previous century and another continent, escaping the here and now, or binge on two or three murder mysteries in a row. (Murder mysteries are a satisfying escape because the genre generally dictates that justice triumph in the end.) I recently finished my reading of the Anatole France novel, The Gods Are A-Thirst, a novel of life immediately following the French Revolution of 1789 (which is not at all escape reading, given the Terror and all that it involved), but I fell into a nonfiction book that turned out, to my surprise, to lead off with an introduction to Stoicism, and while I can’t go the whole nine yards to believing that “everything happens for a reason,” i.e., according to some kind of grand plan, the idea of imagining a worst-case scenario is long familiar to me, something I’ve done for years, though I never gave it a name or realized it was part of Stoic practice. 

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Thinking about a possible worst case, I can decide ahead of time how to deal with it, should it come to pass. That gave me a measure of control—not over the outcome but over my response—and thus a reason not to fret overmuch.

Memento mori thinking is something else that has meaning for me, so encountering it in Stoicism is like meeting an old friend. Before my husband died, we had already lost many good, lifelong friends, and the Artist would often say in the morning, “It’s a beautiful day! And we’re alive!” The implication, sometimes voiced, always implied, was that we would not always be alive—obvious, but not something everyone wants to contemplate daily but for us a happy reminder to rejoice in the day we were beginning together. Now that he is gone, remembering that I too will die still reminds me to appreciate the moment and hour I have while I am in them. Not only will I die, but so will Tree Guy, and so will Naughty Barker, and so will all the people I know and love, but we are here now, and life is all the more precious because not unlimited. 

Stoicism, though, isn’t just about feeling good. That would be a shallow and simplistic reading of it. As Oliver Burkeman notes in his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, when a Stoic thinks that any day could be her last, she doesn’t go wild and max out her credit card because she won’t have another chance to buy things and besides, she’ll be dead and won’t have to pay the bill. That is not memento mori thinking at all. Rather, the Stoic idea is that every day is an opportunity to live a virtuous life, to be courageous, practice healthy moderation, and to pursue justice and seek wisdom. We won’t have an eternity of chances, but we have today. Here’s a quick introduction that may lead you to want to read more.

Dogs are natural stoics, a friend reminded me. So true! The dog with a sore leg avoids straining it as much as possible, and even a dying dog doesn’t weep and wail, “Why me???” Which makes me think of Sarah's last day of life and the photo I will put here of that day, and, as for taking the opportunity to practice doggie virtue, the way she staggered to her feet in the late afternoon, four hours before her last breath, and asked to go outside. She needed to pee. We would not have cared if she had peed on the floor, but she was still concerned with doing right, as a good dog sees right.

Our last day together: Dos Cabezas, Arizona

Brief comment on the news:

I really will keep this brief. My response today is to the Vice President of the United States, who defends the President's actions against media networks whose coverage he doesn't like. (The president has barred those networks from future press conferences. They are suing.) The Vice President says that negative coverage of the president is (I'm going to paraphrase rather than look this up) “not representative of the American people's views.” Huh? Does he understand the difference between news and opinion? Or is he like my stepson's grade school teacher? That teacher told the class, “We only like nice news.” VP also called negative coverage “left-wing propaganda.” Hmmm, propaganda. News ≠ opinion ≠ propaganda. I could say more but won't. You all know what propaganda is, I hope.

A common enemy?

It’s often said that nothing unites people as much as seeing a common enemy. Without one, we find reasons to feud with each other; with one, we make common cause. 

With election year competition and conflict and vitriol building to fever pitch, there is at the same time a growing sense that the American people see AI as their common enemy. Will this be the future conflict? Humans vs. (for lack of a better word) “robots”? Sounds like science fiction, but if it would unite all human beings on earth, I can imagine worse scenarios (e.g., the one we've been living most recently).

How agile are we?

Sunny and I had another agility session with Coach Mike on Monday morning, and he had us doing some complicated new things that we did, I must say, very well. Sunny seemed happy to do what I asked of her, and I was happy with how well we both did. One more reason to keep the grass mowed in my yard is to keep the stage clear for agility equipment. Ah, but Sunny is just as happy with her beloved tennis balls. She is demanding but only within a narrow range!

(I can't photograph her when we are running the course.)

I cannot leave this unsaid.

I learned this morning that one of my oldest and dearest Leelanau friends died last night, Wednesday, Sept. 22. I saw her the previous Friday and a couple Mondays before that and thought there would be more visits, more time to hold her hand and tell her I loved her and what a good friend she had always been. The next-to-last time I was with her, I'm not sure she knew me, though she had called me by name two weeks earlier, and we had shared some laughs. Last Friday, though, she had a beautifully lucid moment when I mentioned all the good times we had had together. She said, “There's one thing we didn't do. We didn't go to the U.P. together. We need to make that trip.”

Ellen, you will be in my heart wherever I go!

As August Slip-Slides Away

Note for 2027: More phlox!

Blooming early or late or repeatedly?

I did not start life as a bookseller until until I was 45 years old, Tree Guy was 41 before he “found himself” as an arborist, and several friends of mine have now published first novels after retiring from life-long careers, so I have to smile at a little book by Brendan Gill called Late Bloomers. It is encouraging to turn the pages and see how many other men and women can legitimately be called “late bloomers.” Artists, composers, writers, scientists, and more. One wonders what answers they give when asked in grade school what they wanted to be when they grew up. 

Book cover

Some late bloomers knew all along what they were destined to do with their lives. 

One of the most agreeable forms of blooming late is to have bloomed early without the knowledge of the world beyond one’s doorstep and then, on being discovered in old age, to find the world crowding that doorstep and singing one’s praises.

That is the paragraph introducing the reader to photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, though Julia Child’s discovery of French cooking is more in line with what we usually think of as a late bloomer’s blossoming. It is a friendly little book, each biographical sketch only a page long, with a photograph of the bloomer on the page opposite. And what a cast of characters!

List of book's "late bloomers"

At this time of year, however, I can’t even think the words ‘bloom’ and ‘blossom’ and such without thinking of wildflowers and gardens. The little grey-headed coneflower is one of my favorite native meadow flowers, and I’m pleased to see it appearing in more and more yards and fields, as well as noticing it spreading to new areas in my meadow. 

At home on the porch

In front of Northport Area Heritage Association building

Daylilies take their name from the all-too-short length of their blossoms, but for the single day that each flower blooms it is glorious!

One of my favorite annuals for three or four years now is bacopa, which seems to go through at least three periods of flowering throughout the season. I didn’t used to care much for snapdragons—until I realized how extraordinarily hardy they are: Two pots from last year survived on my unheated porch all winter, without watering, and came back to life this spring, blooming all summer long. Then there was this year’s exciting discovery of the black petunia! Wow! Not a big petunia fan in general, I am in love with the black ones and the way they set off green plants without flowers of their own. 

Counterclockwise from lower left:
Bacopa, rose, black petunia, ivy, blue salvia

Summer is too short! It flies by too fast!

Back from a quick overnight to the U.P., we plunged into laundry and yard work, and I had one of my these-days-rare author events on Thursday afternoon with Jennifer Sager. Naturally, I would have liked three times as many people in attendance, but those who were here had a very good time. Jenny read, people asked questions, and the room rang with many bursts of laughter, always a sign that people are enjoying themselves at a book event.

Monday following U.P. and author event, Sunny and I got back for another session with Coach Mike, only our third this season. We had done well the first time, but I was very muddled in our second session. This past Monday we were on top of our game! My sisters had arrived on Saturday afternoon and stayed until Tuesday morning but didn’t get to see the agility teamwork, as they were on vacation and not getting up early (and who can blame them?). 

What did sisters and Tree Guy and Naughty Barker do together? There were lots of meals, of course, and lots of tennis ball throwing. We humans also made a visit to Good Harbor beach (my first Lake Michigan day of the season!), and on Monday, with perfect temperatures and a sweet little breeze, the sisters made a brief stop at Tandem Ciders, just long enough to taste three ciders and come home with a bottle of Smackintosh to go with our porch supper. Tree Guy pronounced the three sisters “Amazing!” Aw, shucks!

A handful of links, given with as little comment as I can manage:

If you do not regularly read Robert Reich's substack, please take the time to read this one. Do it for me!

Adam Kinzinger is someone I follow daily. Here's what he had to say about the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

Another Kinzinger post, this one reminding all of us that we can be brave and what it takes.

I read this morning that SCOTUS has “halted the pause”--or was it “paused the halt”?--on the new ballroom for the White House. If only I could include a friend's response here! But I'm afraid my blog would explode. As for my response, I can only hope that there will soon be a suspension of the halt to the pause (or pause to the halt).

Need a change of pace? Here's an esoteric bit from the literary corner, something about a children's series author whose name is completely unfamiliar to you. Or should I not assume?

Heads Up for October

Michigan author Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Q Road, Once Upon a River, The Waters, as well as several volumes of short fiction, will be in Northport on Thursday, October 30, at 4 p.m. (MARK YOUR CALENDAR NOW!) with her new novel, The Spirits, a contemporary Christmas Carol billed by her publisher (Norton) as "a tale of love, transgression, and the miraculous healing power of the holiday table.” I do wish I could have Charles Dickens here on that day to meet Bonnie Jo Campbell, as I’m pretty sure they would have a lot to say to each other—and what a lively conversation that would be for the rest of us to hear!

BJC has written a Christmas story!!!

Taking a Short Break

Besides my usual Sunday-Monday closure, my shop will also be closed Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, as Tree Guy, Naughty Barker, and I make another dash to the U.P., this one for three nights instead of only one. I’ll be back in the shop on Thursday, 27, and then no more absences until maybe the second or third week of September. I’ll let you know. At least one reader of my blog has requested a “travel” post, though, and you know I have to leave home to produce such a thing.

"Will I have to be a good girl in the car?"
"Yes, Sunny, you will."

But yes, I shall return, because we are nowhere near the last rose of summer yet! And when I come back, I will have a new book to share!

Escaping Thoughts and Impressions of a Wandering Mind

Geese in smoky sky

Our Outdoor World

June’s weather story in northern Michigan was a flood. July’s is smoke. 

With over 800 wildfires burning in Minnesota and Canada, we are having evenings without sunset and mornings without sunrise. We catch a brief glimpse of the mid-morning sun before it is swallowed up by thick smoke (not haze, though it looks like haze), aromatic as a campfire but impossible to escape by walking away. A shifting orange-brown shroud hangs over almost half the country, though the flames are hundreds of miles away from us here in Leelanau. Will we get rain, and will it help dampen down the smoke? Time will tell. Meanwhile, I break out a mask for brief outdoor sorties.

Uncomfortable, but 95% protection is better than zero

“How’s your summer going?” It’s half-over! comes the unwelcome thought. But that’s only if summer is June, July, and August, right? If it’s July, August, and September, as I like to think, it is barely underway. After all, my cucumbers and beans have produced only flowers as yet, edible portions still to come. 

Black raspberries ripen continuously now and require twice-daily picking. 

There will be only a handful of gooseberries, but I’m hoping for a good apple crop this year, after two dud years (first codling moth worms in 2024, then in 2025 a late freeze that killed blossoms).

General garden knowledge can be gathered from books, but site-specific knowledge home accumulates only through the years. Monarda, a.k.a. bee balm, seems happy in my hard and has been blooming steadily in the border, a number of plants providing various colors in sequence—pale lavender, bright fuchsia, deep pink, pale pink. Hellebores are very happy in one spot; in another they were miserable, and I’m hoping they will be happier in a new corner. Hollyhocks by the backyard clothesline didn’t come back this year at all. That was disappointing, as I thought I would have them for the rest of my life, thinking of my grandmother’s hollyhocks growing by the outhouse. (Maybe if I’d had a working outhouse, my hollyhocks would have lasted?) In wild areas it’s all Black-eyed Susans and sweet peas now. 

My World of Books

Acquisition: It’s been two years since I made the big book buy from a former dealer in Leland. This year’s largest purchase wasn’t quite as big (only three carloads in 2026 rather than the eight trips in 2024, two with a pickup truck accompanying my car), but I am so well stocked that I almost passed on a chance to look at books from an estate—until I realized it was the home and the books of a very close friend of many years. The old friend’s house … his enormous book collection … some books he had written himself and many others by mutual friends … stray photographs and snapshots and prints by and of old friends … the yard engulfed by brambles, deck railings broken, electricity off in the house. As I went through shelves, selecting books, more and more memories kept coming to light. An emotional evening....

Authors: This past Tuesday Barbara Stark-Nemon was onstage at the Willowbrook, interviewed by another Northport author, Karen Mulvahill. It was the second in this year's Friends of the Leelanau Township Library summer author series and a lovely evening in every possible way!

Barbara's first embroidery project, a copy of her new novel's cover

Reading: Although I’d only gotten to Chapter 6 of that fascinating book about Roger Williams (a little about it in this recent post), more recently I fell into another that I’d never heard of before, its contents spellbinding and thought-provoking.

THE GURU PAPERS: MASKS OF AUTHORITARIAN POWER, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad.

Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., 1993

Here are some lines from the preface: 

…We found authoritarianism embedded in people’s psyches, affecting much more of day-to-day existence than is generally conceived. This is because in most people’s minds authoritarianism is associated with political systems such as dictatorships rather than with worldview…. In the process of writing this book, we deepened our understanding of how authoritarianism in its varied guises has been and largely still is a primary mode of social cohesion—and also how it has now become a major factor in social disintegration.

Then toward the end of the preface: 

This book presents a point of view and ideas that we want to stand or fall on their own merit. … Our major concern is clarity—namely, that anyone who cares to follow the train of thought will understand it, whether in agreement or not. 

The authors' “enemy,” so to speak, is any individual who (or institution) that would encourage people to mistrust their own minds and impressions and perceptions. They hope to foster “self-trust as a foundation for living.” 

Their view of authoritarianism, therefore, is broader than simply a study of dictatorships, and they use the guru relationship not as the only variety of authoritarian structure but as a paradigm. The first, early stage of the relationship they call messianic proselytizing, with the guru preaching a message of higher good, such as saving mankind. This phase offers a “celebratory, party-like atmosphere” to new recruits. The fully enlightened guru is at the peak of the group’s hierarchical pyramid, his inner circle just below, etc., but even the lowest can feel superior to outsiders who have not yet even realized their need to be on this particular path to enlightenment.

Then, 

A time inevitably comes when the popularity and power of the group plateaus and then begins to wane. 

People begin to doubt and must be pulled in more tightly. Our authors say either one of two things happen (I’m wondering if both can occur simultaneously): either the guru’s message will turn to a doomsday forecast of disaster, or he “makes increasingly extreme promises and bizarre claims….” It is dangerous, he tells his followers, to associate with anyone not on their path, and the mistrust the believers have for outsiders is 

...not totally paranoid (there is a reason for it) because as the group becomes more closed and bizarre, outsiders react more negatively. 

The chapter on “The Attractions of Cult Hierarchy” (the cult offers certainty in a tumultuously changing life or world—though the authors are careful to point out that a hierarchy in itself need not be authoritarian) ends on page 90, so I have a lot of ground yet to cover, but this is a fascinating book! I will not draw explicit parallels to our world today, which you can do for yourself. Oh, but here is one more bit before I get off the subject: 

Looking carefully at a guru’s inner circle is extremely revealing. Those closest to him, his most dedicated students, display better than anything else where his teaching leads…. Are they strong and interesting in their own right or are they boring sycophants who continually feed his ego? It is also very enlightening to observe how gurus treat and refer to those who leave their fold.

Bad News/Good News/Bad News

The death-dealing ICE traffic stops struck once again. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work, as usual, and he was not even the target ICE was seeking, but he is now dead (his wife a widow, his children orphans), and so is Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran, and so is a 28-year-old man in Florida—three deaths in one week—no charges made against them, let alone any opportunity for a trial.

One day we had surprisingly good news: ICE did not plan to cease traffic stops completely but would scale back on the number. Unexpected relief! Because otherwise, what could we do? Protest each succeeding death, with no hope that there would be an end to them? Hope surged.

The very next day came the bad news: the president told ICE not to reduce the number of traffic stops. The idea, apparently, is to keep people running scared.

It was hard for me to work up a lot of enthusiasm for the 4th of July 2026, the 250th birthday of our nation. I love my country. I love its ideals, and I love the progress we seemed to be making for decades. Now, from where I stand, we are going backward at rocket speed. I cannot think of a single aspect of our national life that has been improved under the current administration. In fact, it’s difficult to see any positive aspect of that same national life that has not been reduced, degraded, or outright eliminated. 

Protections for workers and for the environment are stripped away. Public health is on the trash heap. There has been no real help for health care costs and inflation in general, despite the campaign promises. Is discrimination against minorities even illegal any more, or is bigotry what is now protected? The United States has become an aggressor country in the world theatre—the bully, not the one protecting others from bullies. And the president is so terrified that his party will be voted out of power that he threatens the election process itself. No surprise there. No surprise—and yet it is heartbreaking, maddening, so shameful!

One night I woke up with the thought: This isn’t even murder. It’s vivisection. A living entity, our country, is being tortured and torn apart and cut up in pieces. No more sleep that night!

Yet all of us go on with our lives, because we are alive and have no choice. Both those who oppose the current administration and those who—incredibly! inexplicably!—continue to support it live our lives as best we can one day after another, we the opposition with breaking hearts and determined, resolute hope. 

Do their hearts not break, the hearts of the supporters? Do they not miss the neighborliness we used to share? Can they look unmoved upon the deaths of children, of children’s parents, of their own neighbors? If they are so certain that God’s will is ordering everything that happens, what explains their frantic politicking and their desperate denials of fact? 

I do still hope, fervently, stubbornly, however, that our country will survive and turn once again toward freedom and the common good for all our grandchildren and great-grandchildren—. Don't you?

***

Coming back to add another wandering thought I had this past week about Republicans in Congress: I was wondering whether they are simply spineless (afraid to lose favor with the naked emperor) or if they are terrified deer in the headlights of oncoming history, realizing full well that theirs is a doomed legacy of shame. The thing is that remaining paralyzed is no protection against history, which just keeps rollin’ along. The moving finger writes, and all that. In time, history itself throws cowards under the bus. Their only hope is to wake up, jump out of the road, and yell “Sorry!” as loud as they possibly can. A good first step would be to vote against confirmation of the most inappropriate candidate for U.S. Attorney General ever proposed to fill the position. 

On the Home Front

Merging households, especially in a busy season like summer, involves a period of transition, so there’s a little chaos and a lot of clutter at Casa Bookseller-Tree Guy these days. Small items go missing on a daily basis. We had that big three-carload book move during the heat wave immediately preceding the holiday weekend, too! Despite it all, we are finding our new life together almost unbelievably easy and natural, and Naughty Barker goes right along with it, too. She now has company during the day when her momma goes to work, and she gets extra walks and extra attention and another someone willing to throw tennis balls for her. And have I mentioned that Tree Guy is a reader? Icing on the cake!

Really, Really Here

Cinco de Mayo in the cherry orchard

The Most Beautiful, Most Uncertain Month of the Year?

May has arrived, right on time, and never have I watched the buds of fruit trees as closely as I’m watching them this year. My interest is personal, social, and community-minded. 

My two little apple trees, after several years of bountiful harvest, succumbed to codling moths in 2024 and a late freeze in 2025. I’ve taken proactive measures against the codling moths but can do nothing about the weather. That’s personal. Fingers crossed!

Will there be apples this year?

The social aspect of my interest has to do with friends and neighbors who want to get together when the orchard is in bloom. When will that be? they ask. Twenty days from Stage 2, an online guru says, and yet what looks like Stage 2 to me seems as if it’s been going on for a week already. Please tell me the buds have not been killed by cold overnight temperatures, as so many were last year!

As for community, in a farming neighborhood such as mine it matters to most of us that our farmer neighbors have good harvests. Few of us are invested financially, but we want their success. 

Of course, you know I’ve been keeping track of wildflowers in the woods, too. For such a long time, it seemed that Dutchman’s breeches were the only ephemerals daring to bloom. Spring beauties, usually the season’s first, had popped above the forest litter but were hesitant to open their faces to grey skies and cold winds. (I had similar feelings.) Trillium, like the spring beauties, kept their flowers shut up tight, waiting. Then finally I spotted a bellwort, one of my favorite spring flowers with its shy, gracefully drooping habit, and two days later, after warmer temperatures and sunshine, there were crowds of trillium and bellwort, along with bracken fern fiddleheads, and spring seemed truly to have arrived at last. One day, a single trout lily, a.k.a. dogtooth violet! 

Defense of John Steinbeck

Everyone, it seems, wants to “reassess” the last published book of John Steinbeck’s career, his bestseller Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I'll begin with the AI overview served up by Google, because it's the first thing most people will see when they do an online search: 

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) is not a strictly true story and is considered a heavily fabricated or "fictionalized" non-fiction book. While John Steinbeck did take a road trip with his dog in 1960, he created fake characters, invented conversations, and falsified where he slept.

Other critics are more specific, sniffing haughtily that he may have driven a truck with a camper but that he stayed in motor courts. Well, sometimes he did, and he says so right in the book, at least three times that I recall without looking for citations. Or that it wasn’t a completely solo trip, as his wife met him on more than one occasion, times together in Chicago and with her relatives in Texas that he also recounted in the book itself. Did these critics read Steinbeck's book at all? 

A more general criticism (see above) is that he invented characters and conversations. I wonder how they would know. Right at the outset he said that he was not a note-taker. And Travels with Charley was not a diary, after all, not a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account. That the author came to no very definite conclusions is something else he admitted himself, more than once. He could not distill the United States down to a single personality with universal coast-to-coast characteristics. I should hope not! 

I wonder what Steinbeck would think if he could take his cross-country trip again in 2026. He wrote this of the Monterey Peninsula, a place he had known well in earlier years:

…The beaches are clean where once they festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries which once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out. And Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there….

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.

- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

That was in 1960, when the population explosion he saw, staggering as it seemed at the time, in retrospect has nothing on today’s California crowded and expensive real estate.

I was disappointed that Steinbeck hurried through Arizona in a single paragraph, but it was his trip, not mine, and he admitted he was tired of traveling by then and headed for the barn, planning immersions only in Texas and the South farther east, focusing on New Orleans. That South in his time was the South of early forced desegregation, angry, bullying local crowds, and what he calls “the breath of fear” everywhere. No wonder he felt his trip was over by the time he reached Abingdon, Virginia. 

As for fabrications, however, according to Steinbeck,

Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory.

Well, then, are some of the people in this book fictional characters? I am willing to accept that the author may have presented composites and that his “almost total recall” would not have been word-for-word of every conversation, but I’m also willing to believe that his trip was basically the trip he recounts in his book. He could have invented more dramatic scenes and more outrageous characters, had he wanted to do so. He was, after all, John Steinbeck.

The Girl Who Doesn't Read

Every morning's companion

Not fair to say that of Sunny Juliet, is it? She reads me pretty well, and I don't do too badly reading her, either. We were happy to see her dog friends two days in a row on Sunday and Monday, and we're happy every day to spend time out in our yard at home and in the meadow and in the woods. 

Reading her dog momma's face

Bookstore Schedule for May

In general, hours for May will be Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; however, the shop will be closed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, May 19, 20, 21 while I’m out of town, then open again Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. 

Memorial Day! At last or already? How do you feel about it? Are you ready?

We are happy to be into porch season at last.