Leeks and Books -- Why Not?

Monday morning sunshine

We got through March! Did it go out like a lion, or would that be an exaggeration? I’ve already forgotten if the “wintry mix” that veered into big snowflakes happened Saturday or Sunday. Saturday, I think. Easter Sunday was just overcast and gloomy. But Monday morning was bright, as you see in the photo above, and those wild leeks, a.k.a. ramps, were popping up all over in the woods.

We might not have had a real winter, but chances look good for a real spring. And now that April is underway, here is my list of books read in March: 

44. Bartlett, Charles H. Tales of Kankakee Land (nonfiction). I bought this book for descriptions of the Kankakee River and Swamp before dredging, draining, and canalizing, and it was dreamy to picture it in those days. Later tales in the book, however, had more to do with human conflict. Sigh!

45. Cep, Casey. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (nonfiction). Furious Hours is divided into three parts. It tells of an Alabama man who took out life insurance on wives and other relatives who kept turning up dead, the lawyer who defended the multiple beneficiary and later defended another man who shot him in front of a large funeral crowd, and finally of Harper Lee’s career, from college until her death, culminating in her abandonment of this complex story. The Reverend, by Harper Lee, based on piles of documents and hours of interviews, never took final shape, victim of one of the world’s most well-known cases of writer’s block. But then, how many prolific writers have equaled To Kill a Mockingbird?

46. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale (fiction). Finally! I finally read this novel, after saying for several years that “this year” I would surely read it. I began in the afternoon and stayed up until midnight. Terrifying!

47. Cady, Jack. The Night We Buried Road Dog (fiction). A novella and a collection of short stories, all highly original and compellingly written, this book was given to me by friends who brought it home from their travels, only to realize they already had a copy. Thank you, Walter and Marjorie, for introducing me to a writer I might not have encountered otherwise! 

48. Wagamese, Richard. Indian Horse (fiction). Like #46, this is another novel I could not stop reading once started. From the pristine Northern wilderness to the horrors of a Catholic school for Indian children to clashes and catcalls of professional hockey, Saul Indian Horse is someone whose happiness the reader passionately wants him to find. “One of Canada’s foremost writers.” I’m glad to have discovered him at last.

49. Block, Lawrence. Hit Parade (fiction). Block is lauded as a mystery writer, and yet these tales of a professional hit man hardly fit the genre. The charm (if one can call it that) of this novel, as no doubt is true of others in the series, lies mainly in the clever dialogue between the hit man and the woman who acts as his agent, sending him out on jobs that come their way. The hit man is also a serious collector of postage stamps.

50. Chater, Melville. Two Canoe Gypsies (nonfiction). A New York couple whose apartment building is due for demolition decide to canoe and camp their way through Belgium and France in a custom-built canoe, a journey between the two World Wars, when the “back door country” had not yet been modernized. Oh, if only we could travel back in time for real!

51. Parker, Robert B. Ceremony: A Spenser Novel (fiction). Read my first Lawrence Block on Sunday and my first Robert B. Parker on Tuesday. Kind of like popcorn.

52. Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain (nonfiction). A quirky and bizarre, one-of-a-kind road trip, with reflections on personal relationships, history, science, and America in general. For a while, I set this book aside, not sure if I would get back to it, but I did pick it up again and read to the end. Uncategorizable. 

53.             Erdrich, Louise. The Painted Drum (fiction). Definitely one of my second category of page-turners (explained in this post), as mother-and-daughter antique dealers follow an artifact back in time and into their own history. I should probably have read this after rather than before other LE novels, but jumping in anywhere is worthwhile. Do it!

54.             Lystra, Don. Searching for Van Gogh (fiction). Coming of age in the early 1960s was so different from today that it’s hard to remember how naïve many of us were. Still, every generation must discover the world for itself, as Lystra’s 17-year-old protagonist does in this moving novel that doesn’t show all its cards at once. Surprises aplenty! Guest review here. Lystra will be part of the Leelanau Township Library’s summer author series in July.

55.             Erdrich, Louise. Tracks (fiction). I read this book much too quickly and so, the day after I finished my first reading, I started again at the beginning while all the characters were clear in my mind. I should probably be reading her books in order, but my reading is never that organized. Which is your favorite?

56.             Hoffman, Alice. Faithful (fiction). I had some of the same feeling about this story that I had about a very different novel, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, i.e., how is it possible for these people to keep running into each other time after time, in such a big, busy city? Contrived, maybe? But I was carried along by the flow of the story and was cheering for the protagonist all the way to overcome trauma and dare to live again.

57.             Mason, Daniel. The Piano Tuner (fiction). Mesmerizing, dreamlike story of a Englishman whose 1880s wartime assignment is to travel to a remote village in Burma to tune a valuable French piano for a for an eccentric, peace-loving British general. Many shorter stories are included inside the main narrative. The writing is vivid and compelling.

58.             Mosley, Walter. Touched (fiction). A strange, short novel, quickly read, and I have no idea what to say about it, fan though I have always been of Mosley’s writing. Did the author dream the whole thing? I can imagine that being the case.

59.             Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs (nonfiction). Personal essays in this volume are grouped by theme, rather than chronologically, so some are funnier than others, a few not funny at all. I laughed out loud more than once and also appreciated the serious moments. If you’ve ever been a parent – or a kid – this book is for you.

60.             Strong, David. Crazy Mountains: Learning From Wilderness to Weigh Technology (nonfiction). Strong teaches philosophy, and this is a very philosophical book. The back cover says it is written in the tradition of Walden and A River Runs Through It. There are very personal stretches, as well as deep stretches of Aristotle, Kant, and Gabriel Marcel, to name only a few. Strong wants something he finds lacking in previous environmental ethics: a strong case for an ethics that would protect wilderness from exploitation, generally, and specifically save the Cottonwood Canyon in the Crazies from timbering. Though sympathetic to his philosophical project, I’m not entirely sure it succeeds – but what could ever convince a timber company owner to give up his business for hiking?

61.             Van Dyke, Michael. Radical Integrity: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (nonfiction). The name is well known, Bonhoeffer a Lutheran theologian and pastor whose opposition to Nazism cost him his life only weeks before the end of World War II. This book almost reads as if written for a YA audience. Its strength is in making clear the questions and concerns and values that drove the man who made a sharp distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘faith.’

62.             Vida, Nina. The Texicans (fiction). He had no intention of helping anyone, no desire to become involved. Joseph only wanted to be left alone, on the trail to Texas as in life generally, but life had other ideas for him. A colorful cast of characters and an unusual story of the West, probably truer than most literary and cinematic romances. 

***

So there you have it. Now either pick up a book or get out in the woods, one or the other, because April will be over before you know it! Or, you know, whatever makes you happy....

First spring beauties, petals still furled

Out With the Old, In With the New

"Table!" is an agility command that translated well to this forest stump.

Since winter arrived (or this season's version of winter, anyway, which hasn't been all that wintry in terms of snow), Sunny and I go out a couple times a day for half an hour to an hour on what I call a walk -- she does a lot of running, which I’m happy to leave to her -- and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were no exceptions. Before I get into those days, though, I want to back up in time. If you read my 12/28/23 post, you already know that Sunny was invited with me to the home of friends for Christmas Day dinner and that she behaved very well (i.e., amazingly well, which is to say, she amazed me!). My reason for turning back so far in the 2023 calendar is not to repeat myself, but to focus on one of the ornaments on our friends’ holiday tree. You might not see it if you didn’t look closely. 

So much to notice on one tree!

But here is the dragon.

There, you see? I don’t recall the artist’s name who made this ornament (Marjorie would have to remind me), but isn’t it perfect for my first post of the new year, the Year of the Wood Dragon? (I would have put it at the very beginning, except that Sunny thought she deserved top billing.)

 

A day or two later, I had another invitation that included Sunny, and while I wouldn’t have time to get her out for a lot of hard exercise before we went to the home of these friends, our hostess promised a walk on the beach – and, as I say, a “walk” off-leash for Sunny means she gets to run -- and run she did! She had a glorious romp, and sunset was glorious, too! Dinner conversation was so lively that Sunny didn’t start barking until she noticed her reflection in the windows. 

Barbara leads the way.

Happy girl!

Glorious sunset --

So not only did I have an unusually social week, but so did my dog, and that made me happy! 

Without any big plans for ushering in the new year, I asked friends if I could bring them cheesecake on New Year’s Day afternoon, and they graciously agreed. Then, out of the blue, I had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party that was scheduled to run from 7:30 to after midnight, hosted by old friends I hadn’t spent time with for quite a while, so while I have never been much of a “party animal,” I resolved to attend and enjoy myself. 

 

Driving the back roads of the township after dark, I was visited by ghosts of years past, remembering Basil S. back when he still did car repair at his place; Louis R., an old Barb’s Bakery regular; Ellen B., who drove her big car much longer than she should have been driving. Driving out of my way at one point and, turning around, seeing cattails in my headlights, I thought of Ellen going off the road and into the swamp, where she stayed overnight until someone discovered her. (That must have been before cell phones.) I remembered the parents of my host of the present evening, too, and sitting next to his mother at a New Year’s Eve dinner years ago….

Old trees make way for the young.

Now we – my host and hostess, her brother and sister-in-law, and I – are the old folks. There was a moment in the evening when the younger people fell silent while we oldtimers belted out Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but otherwise we were the quiet generation, and that was fine. I looked around the living room at everyone gathered there and felt a surge of tenderness for all, tinged with a bit of melancholy, of course (because in years past, the Artist and I attended this NYE party together), but I was happy to be there, even at that.

 

I’d spent most of the day on Sunday making a big pot of hoppin’ john and a pot of rice to go with it so on Monday afternoon took a couple containers up to my neighbors, as well as, later, a container of each with the cheesecake to my Northport friends. Another good visit, comparing notes on one another’s lives past and present and our hopes (mine very modest) for the year to come.

 

(Two nights coming home in the dark! Really, I guess, it was all the same day, first at 12:30 a.m. and then around 6 p.m.)

 

I finished out my 2023 reading year with two books of fiction, both first novels by authors I hope to see more from in future: from Detroit, Shifting Through Neutral, by Bridgett M. Davis, and from Idaho, Winter Range (a novel set in rural Montana), by Claire Davis.

 

On the last day of the year, I began what will be the first title on my Books Read 2024 list, a memoir by Susan Straight entitled The Country of Women, and I cannot say enough about this author. I did say a bit back on November 2, but since then I have read another of her novels (Mecca, her most recent) and have been devouring her memoir, a long love letter addressed to her three daughters, telling them everything she knows about previous generations on both sides of their family.

Now, with Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, coming out in only days, something that strikes me, despite their different worlds, is how much Campbell and Straight have in common. Both of them are content to live in what “sophisticated” people on the East and West Coasts (or even in the higher echelons of academia in any part of the country) would probably see as poor, backwater communities. Straight was asked in one of her writing classes why she kept turning in stories about working-class people, and Campbell’s fiction has been labeled “rural noir” or “grit lit.” I just shake my head. These women are both brilliant writers, and they make, of their overlooked neighborhoods and neighbors, fiction that rings true and important for the same reasons that any fiction rings true and important: the characters are people whose lives are fraught with challenge, who are sometimes (not always) noble even in failure, families that are, as much as any other, Americans, all of them together making up not a melting pot but a rich, many-flavored stew -- vivid characters who come alive on the pages and live in our minds and hearts after we close the books. I should probably add that Straight and Campbell’s works are also noteworthy for portrayals of strong women. So whatever your gender or orientation, if you are weary of the women in Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, or if you simply want literature that includes more layers of complex and diverse humanity, make 2024 the year that you discover Bonnie Jo Campbell and Susan Straight. 

 

Make it also, please, a year of enchantment, if you can. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush or a flute or guitar, go for a walk in the woods or on the beach or just around the block, and leave the to-do lists in a desk drawer. Get lost, if only in a dream. Explore, if only with a paper map. 

We won’t always be here. Don’t overlook the wonderful in ordinary life. Today we are alive, and that is beautiful.

Home, Sweet Home

Postscript: 

 

I’ve gone back mentally over my holidays and decided they definitely deserve a higher rating than I’d been giving them. When people asked, I was saying, “Not bad.” Well, the time was much better than “not bad.” 

 

From the people I fed to the people who fed me, from the bookstore customer who brought his tools to put one of my bookcases back into working order to friends who invited my dog to their homes, from quiet hours cooking in my “Paris kitchen” to outdoor rambles in the countryside that has seen so little snow that I haven’t had to have my driveway plowed a single time yet. Messages of holiday greetings to and from distant loved ones. People who found their way from faraway to Dog Ears Books. My own reading at home. Those peaceful, dark country roads with occasional outdoor holiday lights on homes passed. The dog park and the beach. My little Charlie Brown tree on Waukazoo Street and my much tinier tree at home. And so much more!

 

My holidays were good. As for this new year just begun, it’s a wonderful life, and I don’t want to waste it, so my friends, let us be light to one another.

"When it's cold outside / I got the month of May...."

Post-postscript:

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell here.
Interview with Susan Straight here. 

Many more to be found online -- just search for the authors by name.

Almost to the Turning Point

Only two days until we reach the winter solstice, and then the light will begin to lengthen day by day. Almost imperceptibly at first, and we will certainly have many more weeks of cold (winter, after all), but the return of the light is something to celebrate.

 

Weather Notes

 

This morning’s “feels like” reading of 21 degrees did not encourage me to rush outdoors! On the other hand, the wind had died down, and I took that as a blessing, after Monday’s gales from the north, which were fierce, destructive, and gave no quarter. Sunny and I had the wind at our back on Monday when we walked out but directly in our faces on the way home, and it was brutal! Well, I should speak for myself. The dog girl didn’t mind it at all and would happily have stayed outside all day, playing in the wind and snow on her second birthday. 

 

I thought about venturing into the woods on Monday to get away from the wind, reasoning that standing trees would provide some shelter, but all the fallen trees and branches, criss-crossed on the ground like  jackstraws, gave me pause. After all, I think, they were not always on the ground, and it’s usually wind that brings them down, so standing in the wrong spot at the wrong moment could be fatal.

“What are the odds?” a friend asked skeptically when we talked that evening, adding, “I think you would have been all right.” She had a point. The odds would definitely have been in my favor, and if I were escaping a more awful fate, I would have taken the chance without a second thought. Now that so many friends my age no longer venture into the woods or even out on long walks at all, however, out alone with my dog I look to minimize unnecessary risk. Today, though, ah, yes! Only a mild west wind, and the woods called me in among the trees, where I took a reading of present and future walks. 

 

When the snow is deeper in the woods (it’s only a sprinkling on fallen leaves at present), it is the fallen, not possibly falling, trees and branches that must be minded, along with so much more. Branches disguised by the blanket of snow, deep, hidden pockets in the ground (pitfalls?) where an old stump has rotted away, and the always treacherous wild grapevines – there is much in the woods waiting to trip up the unwary. And yet, stepping carefully and watching where you step, the woods are peaceful in winter and well worth visiting.

 

Book Notes

My local readers and mystery aficionados will want to pick up a copy of Karen Casebeer’s new novel, Calling. Her Northwoods Mystery murder story is definitely plot-driven, with plenty of complications, and I enjoyed equally a running sidebar – cleverly related to the plot -- on one of northern Michigan’s most beautiful seasonal birds, the sandhill crane.

 

Another book I want to highlight this week is How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation, by Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski. If the title puzzles you, that’s intentional. Rather than pose a familiar problem and get bogged down in familiar hopelessness, the authors propose a vision and then ask, if we imagine ourselves already there, what would it have taken to get there? I am not only thinking racism in America, but also political divisiveness in America, and I’m also thinking Gaza. Having a vision is not mere wishful thinking. It provides a goal – seeing it – which provides a direction, which illuminates steps to be taken. And the first steps are to be taken by each of us. We can do it. The greatest barrier to a solution is hopelessness.

 

Bookstore Notes

 

Today is Tuesday, a “by chance or appointment” day for me, but it’s also the last week before Christmas, so here I am in the bookstore. I even have a little wrapping paper and tape for the totally unprepared. Probably won’t be here past 3 p.m., but I’ll be back again tomorrow and Thursday and Friday, 11-3, and then 11-5 on Saturday, as usual.

On the Road: Bookman’s (not Busman’s) Holiday, Then One for Dogs

In case you had doubts....

The Bookman’s Holiday

 

The first leg of my winter odyssey south and west takes me only as far as Kalamazoo, where many family members and friends make their homes. One friend brought supper for me my first night in the ‘zoo, and in the morning when I picked my son up for breakfast, we went instead to – surprise! – a bookstore. “Do you mind?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would I mind going to a bookstore with my mother?” Okay, it was a stupid question.

 

This is a bookstore is the name of the bookstore where we found ourselves. That really is its name. It’s partnered up with the next door Book Bug, specializing in children’s books, and they share café space. 

When I visit any bookshop for the first time, I pretty much know right away if it’s going to be a memorable experience or just another ho-hum Hallmark moment. And the minute I got inside this is a bookstore I was excited. Who wouldn’t be? I should say, what booklover and bookstore lover wouldn’t be excited by such a place?

 

1) I love their counter!

 

Is this cool, or what?

“What if someone wants to buy one of those books?” I wicked-innocently asked a clerk behind the counter, pointing to the real books holding it up. He said those books were not for sale but that a “reasonable facsimile” could be provided. 

 

Here are some of other aspects of the shop I found to love:

 

2) The books are attractively displayed, categories easily identifiable, and there is an unspoken, silent invitation to venture quickly into the far reaches of the store.

 

3) A few used books, clearly marked as such, are mixed in among the new, and once I realized that I started seeking out the yellow tape on their spines, treasure-hunting.

 

        4) The café invites lingering, in much the way that the bookshelves invite browsing. If I still lived in the ‘zoo, I would be a regular. I can’t give the bagels high marks (my advice is to skip the bagel and go straight for a brownie), but the coffee was excellent.  

 

Nectar of the gods!

5) I overheard a couple of conversations, and the talk was interesting. That to me is another mark of a high-quality bookstore. And of course, at our table, my son and I were having interesting conversation.(Can you doubt it?) Our talk was of writing, as it often is when we get together.

6) Even the restroom was cool!

Doesn't everybody read in the bathroom?

 

Whenever I find myself in a really good bookstore for the first time, it takes a while for my initial giddiness to subside. Quickly I found a used book and bought it -- right away! -- but only after latte and conversation with my son could I could remember the name of a new book I wanted. Yes, they had it. Good! I bought that, too.

 

And okay, I’ll confess, with nary an apology to Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, that I also bought a couple pair of socks, because far be it from me to criticize a bookstore looking to enhance its slim profit margin by selling puzzles, socks, and other sidelines, as long as they are also stocking excellent books! If socks keep bookstores in business, I’m all for socks (particularly cute ones). And I am definitely not one of those people who loudly proclaims "love" of bookstores and leaves empty-handed!

My haul --

 

Holiday for Dogs

 

Sunny, having no choice in the matter, waited patiently in the car while her bookseller dog mom indulged a human love of literature. I told her that her turn would come in the afternoon. Did she believe me? Did she have any idea at all what I was saying?

I think she had doubts.

Our grandson and his wife have a 20-acre piece of property north of Kalamazoo, and grandson’s wife, her mother, and I, each bringing a dog, met there to walk trails in the woods. Motivated by a deep and abiding tick phobia, I wore a stupid-looking hat with a big, floppy brim and tucked the legs of my jeans into my socks. (You wouldn't want to see that image.) The dogs had no such worries. A malamute, an Aussie, and a Boston terrier walked into a bar – I mean, ran into the woods. Sunny’s leaps across the creek, a charming little creek with a sandy bottom, delightful turns, here and there a miniature waterfall, were stunning! If dogs ran steeplechase, she could!

 

The lovely little creek!

There is always so much to see in the woods, and every woods is different. This one had beautiful beech trees, one of the trees I love back in Leelanau County, but also different species, such as shagbark hickory, and I was told the mushrooms, both spring and fall, are plentiful and various. The fungi I saw may not have been edible (I don't know), but they were eye-catching.

Shagbark hickory

 

The dogs’ holiday in the woods, honestly, was as much a holiday for me as was the bookstore visit. The sun was shining! And tomorrow, at last, Election Day will be behind us, as is (finally) Halloween! I will be happy to see the landscape naked again, its human dressing of skeletons and political signs gone for another season.

How are you spending these fabulous, sunny, still unseasonably warm fall days? They are like windfall apples, aren’t they? Or merchants’ lagniappe. Unexpected, extra, delightful, unearned and perhaps undeserved gifts…. 

Dogs having fun!

Me and Henry Miller and the Michigan Woods

One must come to Eleusis stripped of the barnacles which have accumulated from centuries of lying in stagnant waters. At Eleusis one realizes, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis one becomes adapted to the cosmos. Outwardly Eleusis may seem broken, disintegrated with the crumbled past; actually Eleusis is still intact and it is we who are broken, dispersed, crumbling to dust. Eleusis lives, lives eternally in the midst of a dying world. 

- Henry Miller, Colossus of Maroussi

After finally finishing Life in a Mexican Village, by Oscar Lewis, a book I’d begun reading two years ago and set aside for something else and then picked up again -- many times in that long interval -- and then hungrily devouring (though not wanting either to end), one after another, two books I highly recommend, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, written and published over a hundred years ago, and Katey Schultz's just-published and stunning first novel, Still Come Home, I found myself in a somewhat dizzy, head-spinning state of mind (powerful literature can do that to a reader), and I turned for a couple of days to juvenile literature of another era rather in the way one partakes mid-feast of a palate-cleansing sorbet.

I do so love the Moffats! Sometimes I don’t visit them for a few years and then have the joy or discovering them all over again. Dear Janey, the middle Moffat! I am the oldest in my family, not the middle, but I can certainly to Janey’s small but troubling social worries and certainly to her sports cluelessness. I laughed myself silly over the chapter where she “took up” basketball! 

Not long ago a customer in my bookshop was looking for books for a granddaughter, "ten years old but a very good reader, and she likes more old-fashioned stories. Nothing with vampires or the end of the world.” The women shared with me some of the books her granddaughter liked, and I was able to suggest a couple of current children’s books that should fill the bill. After spending some time with Prairie Evers, by Ellen Airgood, and Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, by Lynne Rae Perkins, the customer happily agreed that they should suit her young reader perfectly. I wonder if that girl has read the Moffat books or others by Eleanor Estes, but she may be aging out of them by now. Well, not that one can ever age out of the Moffats! Once charmed, permanently smitten! And actually, I re-read the books Airgood and Perkins write for young people, too. I find them lots of fun and very good medicine.

The other kid book, Piney Woods, was not a re-read but a first-time read. Like The Middle Moffat, however, it is a story set in a more innocent age, back when a boy could learn to shoot and repair guns and dream of a career as a gunsmith, with absolutely no criminal or terrorist or even political implications implied in the tale. Sigh!

Returning next to grownup books, I didn't focus on a single one and so have been juggling three in the past couple of days and nights: Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side, which I’m enjoying for the second or third time; the Henry Miller quoted above; and Shantyboat by Kent and Margaret Lighty. Note that this last is not the Harlan Hubbard shantyboat story, beginning on the Ohio River across from Cincinnati, but an earlier trip made by a different couple, starting up above St. Paul back in the 1930s. These people, Kent and Margaret Lighty, were more tourists or leisure travelers than the Hubbards, who truly lived off the land and water and bartered along their way and made a whole life of their shantyboat years, but it is pleasant reading, nonetheless. Nothing wrong with simply pleasant reading sometimes, and given the time period of their travels it does offer a window into the history of that era. Shantyboat by Harlan Hubbard, now — that is inspirational reading. But I revisit the Hubbards more frequently so am giving the other couple a turn now at present.

Now, about Henry Miller. Henry Miller is not a member of my personal literary pantheon (though he is a great favorite of the Artist), but in the beginning this particular book had me practically me gasping with admiration for page after page. His descriptions of people he meets in Greece are nothing short of delicious, his long, detailed sentences one mouth-watering course after another! -- Alas! Just as I was ready to elevate this book to favorite status, I reached pages in which the author veered away from description and fell into oracular pronouncement. Page after page, one ringing, tedious declarative statement after another. He was pontificating! Ugh! Luckily, little trick-or-treaters in Northport provided welcome distraction, and I knew that at home there would be apples to peel and slice for the dryer, and that Jim Harrison’s memories and the Lighty couple’s river adventures awaited me again, too. 

The eternity of any particular time or place, I want to say (thinking about the Miller quote again) — perhaps more a subjective phenomenon than a fact of the physical world — never exactly reveals itself but teases each of us from time to time in different places and at different times in our lives. Miller found it in Greece. For me it is in Michigan woods and Arizona mountains.

These old northern Michigan roads have not been here even 200 years, but they have the feeling of history and even eternity about them. Now can you see in the two images below where French immigrant farmers once lived? The lilac bush near the road's edge and that old apple tree are your first clues, and farther back are the two cedars that marked the corners of their old log cabin, long ago rotted back into the earth.

Somewhere in my digital files -- and if only they were logically and consistently organized, I could show you -- are photographs of rocks in the woods used by earlier inhabitants to grind acorns and perhaps corn from their gardens. In the Dragoon Mountains of southeast Arizona are similar grinding stones.

11/20/2019: Never say die! Here they are!

The past is all around us, in every land, still breathing, living on in the stillness or in the noise, whether or not we are paying attention. It's just more obvious in some places than others. As for the broken world part, it's up to us to make what small mending attempts are within our power.