Mountain Light and Desert Glass

Painted Ranch

January 18-19, 2015

Mountains ... and the Light on Them

It’s hard to look away from mountains. Moment by moment the sun’s movement transforms them, imperceptibly but constantly changing their color and shading and the amount of detail visible to the human eye. When we are in the car, driving, with our own movement added to that of the sun, the changes come faster, and the mountains seem to move and shift position, coming at us first from one direction and then from another, as David always says of the Manitou Islands back home in Leelanau County, Michigan, and as young Marcel noted of the steeple of the church in Combray as the train bringing his family from Paris approached his grandparents’ village by its circuitous route, and as my friend Helen said of the little town of Jerome, Arizona, as we approached or drew more distant from it on the highway.

Los Dos Cabezas

From another direction -- una cabeza!

Yet, despite constant changes, mountains are such an ever-present reality they seem to partake of the eternal. Even at night, under a dark sky lit only by stars, one is aware that the mountains are nearby, and one trusts that they will remain at an appropriate distance and not suddenly take it in mind to fall upon the house. In the first pale light of morning, there they are, dark and massive and unmoving; however, we know that eternal though they seem, we know they were not always as they are now. Millions of years ago, some were active volcanoes, while others are old earth crust, higher than the valleys and playas owing to an age-old tearing-apart of the cooling land.

At least, I think that’s right, but we need to learn the geology of this foreign land – that is, this land where we are the aliens – as well as its plant and bird life. Outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, with Sarah on her morning promenade, I could not give a name to a single plant I saw. A couple of doves were a great relief: something familiar! Was that only two days ago?

This morning, Monday, January 19, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I was up with the first pale light, impatient for day. Two cups of coffee and a little reading at the kitchen table. Then at 7:30 a.m. the sun broke over the top of a dip in the mountains to the southeast. To the north and northwest, the sky at the horizon and in the dip where Venus appeared in the evening was banded in rose, lavender, and deep blue, but in less than ten minutes, the whole cloudless sky in every direction is bright daylight. Morning light comes on fast, as does darkness at the end of the day. The sky is nearly always cloudless. What will rain be like when it comes, water rushing down the wash?

Doves are calling, and across the road and down a way, a rooster crows.

Desert Glass

On another desert walk with Sarah on Sunday, I saw a dead scorpion. Going back with a dustpan – it would be an interesting subject for a drawing – I failed to find it again (and yes, I’m sure it was dead) but did find something utterly unexpected which I’ll call “desert glass.” You know what we call “beach glass” in Michigan? Those pieces that have been tumbled by waves on the sand for so long that they have been worn smooth and cloudy and look like translucent quartz? Here in the desert, without wave action 24 hours a day, rain only rarely rushing through the washes and draws, clearly it will take much longer to smooth and roughen these bits of colored glass I found, but the process has begun, and once I started picking up bits it was hard to stop.

Reading

At night we continue with our audio “reading” of A Cook’s Tour, and after we listen our way through a few more countries (a bit disorienting the way Bourdain hops from one to another, in no particular order, and very little in the way of segue between one and the next), I turn on my bedside lamp and go on with Gene Stratton-Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost. Strange reading that, too – fields and woods and swamps! Very far from the landscape presently outside our doors!

Writing, Drawing, Painting

None yet, except for lists, letters, and this blog post I’ll get online Tuesday, when the library re-opens after the holiday. It will take time for us to settle into a routine. We need to get to the post office, the library, the laundromat. We are hoping and praying the refrigerator and freezer come up to speed. But already I am happy with our winter base in the high desert. I like the quiet of it, the harsh simplicity, the relentless sun, and the peaceful absence of so much of the modern world’s chatter.

The Road West: Conversation Sampler

Topic 1: Which is lovelier, a herd of cattle all one color, such as all white Charolais or all black Angus, or a mixed-color herd? David plumped for an all-one-color herd, and I could see the beauty in that scheme, yet when I saw mixed-color herds, they were beautiful, too, in a different way. It’s still a limited palette, after all: black to reddish-brown through the lovely tan of

Jerseys to the cream color of Charolais. That palette (and I remember thinking the same thing in southcentral France) seems to echo the colors of the rocks and earth and trees. And to digress from cattle, sometimes those rocks along the highway look almost fake, like the big faux rochers of the Buttes de Chaumont in Paris. Or so they struck me, and David agreed.

Topic 2: When pioneers were plodding west in ox-drawn carts, did they stop and settle down in Missouri because that’s where an ox died or an axle broke? David’s hypothesized thusly, while my speculation went in a different direction. Had they continued to California, I said, they knew they would have to cross serious mountains, so why wouldn’t they have looked around the rolling, wooded hills west of the Mississippi and said to each other each other, “Why kill ourselves dragging over mountains? What could be better than this? Pretty little creeks, clean water, rich soil, plenty of stone and wood for building.” That’s how Missouri looked to me. Very appealing, a place it would be easy to call home. And again we agreed. Interesting how often we come at a topic from very different starting places and agree on a conclusion -- though admittedly one not derived logically from the original question.

Topic 3: Those neat trees in orderly rows, plantings that look so much like pecan groves -- they can’t be pecan trees, can they? We’re not that far south! But wait! All those signs advertising hand-turned walnut bowls – can these be walnut groves? Walnut trees grow as far north as Michigan, so Missouri would probably be congenial. What the trees are, of course, is a matter of fact, not opinion, and we may be wrong in what we’ve agreed is a good guess, but it doesn’t matter as we’re rolling west. We’re just keeping eyes open and minds in gear.

Topic 4: Any travel brings to mind former travels. The rocks reminded me of a park in Paris, the sycamores of southern Illinois and Ohio. Signs for particular exits brought to David’s mind trips he made one year between Arkansas and Michigan. He recalled a memorable conversation between two strangers in the seat in front of him on a Greyhound bus, both of them returning home to family after adventures gone very wrong. He described to me the worst lightning storms he’d ever been in. The next day, in Oklahoma, I told him the story of our junior high school band and orchestra raising money to charter a train to go to the National Music Festival in Enid. We lived on the train during the festival and were the talk of the town. “You’re the kids on the train!” Yep.

So there we were, rolling along at 70 mph, talking about Paris parks, 19^th-century pioneers in ox-carts, trips to and from Arkansas, lightning storms in Arkansas and in Leelanau County, Michigan, cross-country train travel, and I happened to glance across a pasture where one black Angus steer had taken it into his big beefy head, for who knows what purpose, to stroll downhill like a busy, self-important lawyer headed to a newsstand. There were David and I, existing in multiple times and spaces, and this animal was busy enough living his own life, with no thought to ours. Parallel worlds.

Later (still rolling along) we began listening to a book on tape, Anthony Bourdain reading his A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, all about traveling around the world seeking good food and adventure. Our adventures are more modest, but we enjoy them. 

We're somewhere different!

Texas uses wind

New Mexico -- landscape changes again

Cowboy country, all of it

And here, in closing tonight, is a song of the West, the link sent to by friend Marjorie back in Northport, Michigan.

Looking for Childhood Home

Along I-80

We survived the terrors of icy, snow-covered highways (cars and trucks having overturned in the median and careened off the road providing constant wordless warnings) and an unexpected detour, until at last, near day’s end, we reached the town where my mother and youngest sister live, the place my parents moved to so long ago with baby me, forsaking the Great Plains of South Dakota for the Illinois prairie. But in the vicinity of my childhood home the prairie has been pushed far away since I was a little girl, so that all in all, the experience of visiting my mother is not so much one of “coming home” as of -- well, disorientation.

To the north of my parents’ house in my childhood was our second lot, with apple trees, a pear tree, a raspberry patch, and flower gardens. To the south was a vacant lot, with a lovely old lilac bush, a dogwood, and all kinds of interesting weeds to collect and identify. Other vacant lots provided “wilderness” for neighborhood kids to explore. There were trees to climb, and we could dig holes to our hearts’ content, holes big enough to hide in, pulling old sheets of cardboard over us for roofs. There are no vacant lots any more. The farms are gone, too. Old asparagus fields have given way to blocks of houses, while acres of corn and soybeans, interrupted long ago only by nearly hidden springs and creeks, have been replaced by subdivisions, traffic signals, and shopping centers.

My mother’s house has undergone decades of change, too, and while I’ve visited in the intervening years -- of course! many times! -- it’s the old, not the more recent, that abides in my memory. The living room, for instance: only the old sofa (recovered in new fabric) survives from my childhood, with every other piece of furniture having been added since I left home. None of the bedrooms, either, is as I remember it best. I woke early one morning and was unnerved by a "new" ceiling fan I couldn’t identify with certainty in the dark.

Mother's cookbook 

Grandma's ladle

But a few small, familiar items remain and bob to the surface from hour to hour. My mother’s old Ruth Berolzheimer cookbook (1960), like mine (1966), is falling apart but still lovingly kept tucked away in a cupboard, and my grandmother’s (my mother’s mother’s) old gravy ladle (dented) still lies in one of the kitchen drawers. (We got it out and used it Friday evening.) And naturally there are boxes and boxes of old snapshots, some envelopes labeled and dated, others a mystery, all fun to look through with my mother. 

Looking through snapshots

One neighborhood landmark that remains pretty much the same, despite a new lobby entrance, is the old Merichka’s restaurant on Theodore Avenue. Doesn't that sign just shout "Nineteen-sixty"? Cocktails! Remember those?

A Joliet institution

In the Sixties, Merichka’s was the place for many dating couples to go for dinner on prom evenings or other “fancy” dates. (No, we were not served cocktails!) 'Merichka' is the Slovenian diminutive for Mary – in this case, the Mary of Joe and Mary who started the restaurant. I was glad to see the tablecloths hadn't changed, and it was good to spend a family evening in a familiar old place.

Checked tablecloth, "boomerang" menu

David and Nora

We had a lovely three-day visit with my mother, and I can report that Sarah did nothing to terrorize the resident cats. One remained out of sight the whole time we were there, and her brother, Percy, the braver sibling, intimidated Sarah for the first day we were there. Sarah would not make eye contact with the cat but turned her head and looked purposefully in the opposite direction! By our last night there, Percy had taken up a position on the floor to my left, and Sarah lay at my right, both of them relaxed and accepting of the other's presence. 

Today we crossed the Mississippi River and will wake tomorrow to Missouri. The scenery is beginning to change....

Steal From the Best

M-115 on Wednesday

We weren’t sure how long the first “leg” of our road trip would be. When we got stuck in our own driveway, trying to leave home, we weren’t sure we’d get away at all. But a phone call to the plowing service had us on our way within the half-hour. Then, errands in Leland, Suttons Bay, and Traverse City accomplished, we took time for a sybaritic breakfast at the Flap Jack Shack while assessing the situation. Stay in Traverse City? Push on and hopw to get as far as Cadillac? We pushed on – not at high speeds and not in any kind of relaxed or carefree spirit, but on we pushed.

The road between Traverse City and Cadillac is always the worst. (The mere thought of M-115 in winter gives me nightmares.) The photo at the top of today’s post shows you the view we had heading southeast. Below is the back of the truck we followed up the entrance ramp onto US-131.

See the truck?

Blue sky!

After that, as we’d hoped, both road conditions and visibility improved. What had been a pale winter sun seen only dimly through snow broke through the clouds to lift our spirits. Blue sky! Lovely, lovely day!  But by the time we reached Hastings, it was dark, and we were tired, and so after settling into a motel near downtown we agreed to spend the following day with our friends and stay a second night. The next day was good, but – another Arctic clipper blew in that afternoon! It was going to be blowing through all night and all the next day until late afternoon! What could we do? We decided to play it safe and stay a third night, and I began to envision a winter sabbatical in central Michigan, fighting blizzards day after day, poor Sarah with frozen feet. Well, I didn’t have any boots that would fit her. I had an extra jacket, though. She was dubious, but I felt better, knowing she was warmer when, occasionally, she had to wait in the car for us. She enjoyed visiting our friends (she especially seemed to enjoy the warmth of their woodstove), and if you click on this link, you can see some of the birds we all watched outside our friends' front window. 

Waking at 3 a.m. in the motel and unable to get back to sleep – 3:30, 4:00, 4:30, 5:00 – I amused myself in the dark by thinking of how I would answer the questions put to authors in “Shelf Awareness,” the daily newsletter on bookselling and publishing that appears in my e-mailbox every business day. Am I stealing or borrowing these questions? Will the Shelf Awareness people mind? I hope not! Here is, more or less, what I came up with, as far as I can remember:

On your nightstand now: This is easy. It would be different at home, but in a motel my nightstand is relatively uncluttered. There is The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene, and Coyote’s Wife, by Aimée & David Thurlo, the former almost finished, the latter not yet begun.

Favorite book when you were a child: So many! How to choose? I guess, if I must select one, it would have to be James Barrie’s Adventures of Peter and Wendy, because it was the bedtime story my father read to me over and over, one chapter at a time, beginning over at the beginning each time we reached the end.

Your top five authors: Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, Tony Judt, Betty Smith, Thoreau – today. The list would begin with Austen any day but might have four different authors, depending on what I’d been reading.

Book you’ve faked reading: I don’t think I’ve faked reading any books, but I have yet to read the middle volumes of Proust’s huge, magnificent work. I’ve read Swann’s Way several times, in French and in English, and Time Regained twice, but I got bored halfway through the Budding Grove volume and haven’t tried the others yet. When I confessed this sin to a lifetime Proust scholar, he surprised me by saying that many people read only the first and last volumes of Proust. I didn’t invent the idea of skipping the middle, after all.

Book you’re an evangelist for: So many! Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat; Conrad Richter’s The Trees; Bruce Catton’s Waiting for the Morning Train; Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet – all those, for sure. And then there are all the books by Michigan authors I evangelize for – Anne-Marie Oomen’s Uncoded Woman; Jerry Dennis’s The Windward Shore; Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior; Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust; Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Q Road and Once Upon a River; David Greenwald’s Frozen Moon; Lynne Rae Perkins’s Nuts to You; just to make a start on a list. And the poets from Michigan – Jim Harrison, Teresa Scollon, Fleda Brown – again, there are too many to list, and I’m an evangelist for many, many more writers than this paragraph contains. That is part of being a bookseller, but it’s also simply part of being a passionate reader.

Book You’ve Bought For the Cover: Frederick Franck’s Simenon’s Paris (the title didn’t hurt, either), and I was not disappointed. It’s one of my all-time favorite books, as is the same author’s The Zen of Seeing.

Book that changed your life: Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley, probably changed my life in a subterranean manner over the course of many years. I first read those books as a child and re-read them many times over the years, doubtless shaping my future life in bookselling long before destiny and I finally joined hands with Dog Ears Books. Another Country, by James Baldwin, changed my life by showing me that writers could do the impossible – that a writer could get inside the skin and mind and heart and soul of another person, regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation or age or country of origin. A writer does not have to write only of and out of herself! No other book had ever opened my mind that wide before. Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards, convinced me that even I could learn to draw, and finding a teacher who used those methods proved to me that it was true. That was a happy life-changer.

Favorite line from a book: In one of Tony Judt’s essays collected in The Memory Chalet comes the first sentence of Judt’s that I ever read, when first the essay appeared in The New York Review of Books: “I have always loved trains, and they have loved me back.” Another wonderful line about train travel occurs in one of Wilfred Thesiger’s books, and for years I had it by heart, but (sadly) the memory has faded. It was something like, “I’ve never been happier in my life than on the train traveling from Addis Ababa to Djibouti.” 

Which character you most relate to: I’ve identified with characters in almost every book I’ve ever read, but perhaps the one I most relate to is the protagonist in Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior. I understand the feeling of Madeline’s life from facing similar mundane struggles in a small northern community and finding, as she does, joy and beauty in very ordinary aspects of life.

Book you want to read again for the first time: I’d never have thought of this question myself. Re-reading is always such a rich experience that I’m never wishing I hadn’t read the book before. The book I’ve re-read more than any other is Pride and Prejudice, though, so what would it be like to come to it again for the first time? That would be interesting, contradictory as the question is!

Invaluable lesson from a book: One that comes to mind right away is from The Art of Driving in the Rain, a race driver’s lesson, to the effect that where your eyes go, your car will go. More generally, what you pay attention to is what will occupy your mind and, therefore, what will determine your direction in life.

Shelf Awareness, you guys are the best! Thanks for letting me steal from you today. You helped me get through a sleepless night during another Michigan blizzard. -- And here I'd promised a change of scenery! Not quite yet....

Busy Life, Desultory Reading

des-ul-to-ry: adj. [from L. leap down from]

1.  passing from one thing to another in an aimless way; disconnected; not methodical;

2.  lacking direct relevancy; random; incidental

That definition is taken (though modified) from The New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, 1974. I looked the word up because I don’t trust myself with a word I never use in conversation, only in writing. It looks like de-SUL-tery, but the dictionary says the strongest stress is on the first syllable, with a minor stress on the third: Dessle-tory. Yet I’ve also heard educated people pronounce it as Dessletry, i.e., as only three syllables and only the first one stressed. I play it safe and keep my mouth shut. But the word did come to mind the other morning.

Recent activities at home have not desultory: packing, organizing, cleaning. I may look aimless, especially in those moments when I pause to wait for my brain to kick back into gear, but everything I’m doing is connected, if not thoroughly methodical, all actions (except for episodes of escape reading) aimed at a single end: departure! Sarah knows something is up but little does she ken what it is. No matter. Sarah is always willing.

What has been desultory of late in my busy life is that reading I mentioned parenthetically above, episodic escapes to rest a fevered brain. It doesn’t matter much what the book is, so the first one on my Books Read 2015 list is a book on grammar. Why? It came to hand, that’s all. Focused on an imminent road trip, I don’t need thrilling bodice-rippers: anything with printed words and pages to turn is an escape from bags and boxes and scribbled lists.

And so, in the search for self-soothing comfort, I skipped ahead to the last episode in the last section of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, those final pages of Time Regained in which the mature Marcel, arriving at a reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes, enters her house in the middle of a musical piece and must wait in the library until the next intermission, which gives him time to reflect on a small but crucial incident that occurred between his carriage and the house.

...I had barely time to get out of the way and, in stepping back, struck my foot against some unevenly cut flagstones leading to a carriage house. In recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was a little lower than the one next to it; immediately all my discouragement vanished before a feeling of happiness which I had experienced at different moments all my life, at the sight of trees I thought I recognized when driving around Balbec, or the church spires of Martinville, or the savour or a madeleine, dipped in herb tea, or from many other sensations I have mentioned....

Examining that sudden feeling of happiness, he realizes that the sensation delivered by the uneven paving stones has carried him back to Venice but brought to him much more than a mere “moment from the past,” and there in the library, reflecting on various similar moments of happiness, the character Marcel conceives the book he will write, the book that Proust has in fact written, the fictionalized memoir in which this last section shows the author before he has begun his great work. It will be a “solid” psychology, not “plane,” and he sees the challenge in all the demands it will make on his powers and remaining life.

To convey an idea of it, one would have to go to the noblest and most varied arts for comparisons; for this writer, who, moreover, would have to shew the most contradictory sides of each of his characters in order to give his volume the effect of a solid, would need to prepare it with minute care, constantly regrouping his forces as if for an attack, endure it like an exhausting task, accept it like a rule of conduct, build it like a church, follow it like a regimen, overcome it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, feed it intensively like a child, create it like a world, without overlooking those mysteries whose explanation is probably to be found only in other worlds and the presentiment of which is the quality in life and art which moves us most deeply [my emphasis added].

Read again the task as he set himself to it: “build it like a church ... overcome it like an obstacle ... create it like a world....” That string of similes, all those strong verbs with their substantive objects! Doesn’t it make your heart beat faster and shivers run down your spine? Don’t you sit up straighter and want to cheer the author?

-- And yet, stirring and compelling and moving as I always find this section -- I must confess I would read a few pages and then pick up another book, and I have no way to explain my going back and forth, other than the general unsettled atmosphere that fills a house and pervades life itself in days preparatory to a long road trip. Desultory reading.

My other main reading during the same unsettled days (I must hunt up information on this book and author sometime) came to me at random, as had the grammar book, although no doubt the title was a strong attraction. The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene, written in journal form, without any prologue, background, or introduction given, is an account, not surprisingly, of one writer’s winter, specifically in this case a winter on a farm in New England following World War I. A reader gathers snippets of the writer’s background as the journal goes along. (Not until over halfway through the book do I realize at last that the farm is in Vermont, a fact she had not mentioned earlier.) She is a single woman, with a grown daughter. The daughter now lives in the city, but before this season lived with her mother. The writer is also an artist, although she seems to be doing little or no drawing or painting this winter. (But what is this ‘frontispiece’ she keeps mentioning, without telling us any more about it?) There are no more chickens – all gone -- but numerous horses and ponies, one cow, and, in the house, one dog (a collie) and one cat. Essentially, hers is a pony farm.

[Oh, how my grandfather would have loved this book! When he retired from the Pennsylvaia Railroad and moved from Ohio to Florida, his dream was to establish a pony farm, a dream I encouraged with all the enthusiasm of the horse-crazy ten-year-old girl I then was. Alas, his second wife was working against me, and she had daily access 365 days a year. Don’t get me wrong: I loved her, too. But oh, how thrilled Grandpa and I would have been with a pony farm! I might even have moved to Florida to help him with it, and then the entire course of my life would have been different --. But there. I cannot regret the life that has brought me to where I am now, so be off with you, pony dreams!]

The author of The Lone Winter rides (horses, of course), skis, and snowshoes, besides regularly milking her cow and pitching hay to her “children,” i.e., the cow, horses, and ponies. When she drives, she is driving a horse, and the horse is pulling a sleigh. There is no plot, only life events  -- e.g., her daughter visits, ponies break through their fences, a pipe freezes. Mostly what happens is that the weather changes and changes and changes again.

Again the uncertain thirties have yielded to a solid zero, and the world is a-crack with cold. Even my bed seemed a shivery spot this morning; so by a pale, surreptitious sunrise I was already down, shuddering, and poking at the fire.

Supplies run low, and the resourceful countrywoman attempts a sort of cowboy pan bread, flung into a hot, greased pan, coming out at last “toothsome” and “white as sea-foam under a somewhat charred exterior.” I imagine my far-flung blogger friend, Cherie, out on the Atlantic coast, enjoying this book. But would she chafe at its slow beginning and the many, many pages of chasing and feeding ponies? I think I would urge her to open right away to page 167 and read from there until she lost interest, if she were going to lose interest. If she didn’t, of course, she could go back to the beginning and start there. Cherie, shall I send you the book when I finish it? It’s in the car with me now!

Here at home in the Upper Midwest, while Arctic “clippers” made necessary errands and organizing and packing and everything more difficult– frigid dashes from house to car! – the weather also made sense of our winter change of venue. Not so long ago, back in the mild days of December leading up to the end of the past year, we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going away?” We’re not asking that in what must be nearly the hundredth hour straight of fierce winds with subzero chill coming off nearby Lake Michigan.

It’s really happening. The pony farm was only a dream, but the life of the artist and the bookstore were dreams we turned into reality and have kept afloat year after year. Well, now our winter sabbatical dream is becoming reality, too, so stay tuned for pictures of “elsewhere,” postcards from the road. The scenery will be changing, that I can promise.

Gliding From One to the Next

Bulletin board at holiday time

Immediate Future

If David and I had university positions, teaching art and philosophy, we would surely have earned sabbatical by now, the academic world’s recognition of the fact that those engaged in teaching need occasional time away for their own research and creative projects. Working in retail as we do, i.e., selling books and paintings, can be as intense as teaching (we’ve both taught, so we do know both worlds); this winter, therefore, David and I are giving ourselves sabbatical. Our businesses will be closed from the first of January to the end of April. We’ll be recharging our spirits and focusing on our own work, coming back in the spring energized and with renewed enthusiasm for our Northport world. 

The Year Past

The other day, after David gave me a little pep talk (something I needed during a slow holiday shopping season), reminding me of all the loyal Dog Ears Books customers who turn out for my author events and buy books when they come, I looked back at the roster for the past year. Our bookstore events really were remarkably successful – and a lot of fun!

Ken Scott

The event year began early in the season, in May 2014, with photographer Ken Scott and the best-selling book of the year – I’m sure this was true throughout the county, as well as in Northport – The Ice Caves of Leelanau. Wow! The 100 copies in my first order were all promised before Ken’s appearance date! Then the printer was late with the books, and half my customers (I love ‘em!) sweetly offered to wait a week for theirs! The ice caves themselves had been the phenomenon of the preceding winter; the book was a phenomenon that came on in spring and kept going strong through December.

Thirteen poets!

The next month, June, was almost more excitement than this bookseller could absorb. Thirteen (yes, 13) poets came to Northport from all over the state of Michigan to read their work from the beautiful new book, Poetry in Michigan, Michigan in Poetry. Poets in attendance were Angela Williams, Mary Ann Samyn, Joy Gaines-Friedler, David James, Dennis Hinrichsen, Patricia Clark, Linda Nemec-Foster, Keith Taylor, Anne-Marie Oomen, Alison Swan, D.R. James, Teresa Scollon, and Bill Olsen. (Audience in attendance was so numerous that the crowd spilled out into the artist David Grath’s studio and out onto the sidewalk.) Samyn, Oomen, and Scollon had previously read work at Dog Ears Books, but the rest were here for the first time; Olsen is one of the two editors of the collection. Along with celebrating poetry in Michigan, we were also celebrating (unbelievably, to me) the 21^st anniversary of my bookstore, first opened down the street in 1993. What an evening! I saw stars for weeks afterward....

In July I took a breather from bookstore events but let myself get strong-armed into doing a 5-minute reading on live radio, when the “Roundup Radio Show” came to the Northport Community Arts Center auditorium. Bill Dunjen’s invitation was completely spur-of-the-moment, and my first impulse was to decline, but I rallied, found a passage from Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, did a few quick run-throughs, and the little gig went very well. People I never see in my bookstore were stopping me at the post office and in the grocery store days later to congratulate me on that one brief performance. Visibility. Presence. Taking the bull by the horns. An indie bookseller can’t let a chance like that get away. I was also happy to promote Ellen’s book, which I love, love, love! (I’ve read it four times.)

Another literary item on my July calendar was a gathering of fiction-writing friends, all women, who came to my old farmhouse for an al fresco luncheon that stretched to dinnertime. Each writer read from current work-in-progress and reported on publishing status – which sounds (and is) quite serious, but we also drank several bottles of wine and laughed a whole lot.

Mary Beth Pope is no stranger to Northport, having worked one summer selling donuts at Barb’s Bakery, but she’s moved on since then, teaching English at Emmanuel College in Boston, where she received tenure this past year. Mary Beth took time out from work on her novel-in-progress to read for our bookstore audience from her short story collection, Divining Venus. It was, I’m pleased to report, yet another standing-room-only crowd. Mary Beth had a good time, too. That’s the way we like it – happy writers and happy customers.

Excitement continued in September. Besides the second Leelanau UnCaged street fair in Northport, Dog Ears Books hosted a book launch party for Newbery-winning author Lynne Rae Perkins and her latest book, Nuts to You. Lynne Rae is a deservedly popular guest author, so I ordered a healthy number of books in advance of her appearance, a number she and I both thought would be sufficient. Advance sales, however, made serious inroads into my stock, so I placed a second order – then a third – and then we still sold out of books on September 19! Later holiday sales of Nuts to You were not hurt at all when the press found out that the Obama family bought a copy on their annual indie bookstore shopping expedition.

Me with Lynne Rae Perkins

I had really thought September would close out the 2014 bookstore event year. One event each for the months of May, June, August and September felt like a manageable schedule, much better than some years past when I’d tried to have three events in a two-week time period. A good year, I thought. Then I heard from Traverse City writer Jerry Dennis about a new venture he and artist Glenn Wolff had underway. With Jerry’s wife, Gail Dennis, as creative director, the three were launching their own independent publishing company, Big Maple Press, and the first two books being issued were new paperback “Indie Bookstore Editions” of  It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes and A Bird in the Waterfall (with a third “wonders-of-nature” title coming in 2015). Jerry Dennis and Glenn Wolff at Dog Ears Books? Of course! Any time they want to come! And so we had another book party in early December.

Jerry Dennis on left

Glenn Wolff on right

John Mitchell

John Mitchell’s best-selling Grand Traverse: The Civil War Era has been around since 2011, but when John offered to come in for a couple of hours two days before Christmas and sign books for customers, I was not about to turn him down. There are still people in our own township who have not yet read the book, and a couple of them came for signed copies. I think the woman who made a 325-mile round trip, though, may have been the most excited about the opportunity. She had called the previous week to ask my hours for Christmas week and mentioned John’s book. When I told her that he would be at the bookstore in person, her resolve to make the journey strengthened. It was her first visit to Northport, but something tells me it won’t be her last.

My own special treat was conversation with John about his most recent research trip to Cuba and Trinidad for his next book. We even had time before customers arrived for a quick tour through his fascinating travel photographs, as I never turn down a chance for vicarious travel, either.

The Year to Come

Dog Ears Books will be 22 years old this coming year and while my main focus as 2014 winds down is on winter sabbatical, I’ve also been working with authors to put together the 2015 bookstore event schedule. Already the summer calendar looks full! Here’s how it’s shaping up --

In June we’ll have Holly Wren Spaulding, a Hopwood award-winning poet, reading from and signing her new collection of poems and offering a hands-on workshop in short poetic forms. In July we’ll host Loreen Niewenhuis, with her third Great Lakes adventure book, A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Island Adventure. World War II is the theme for August, with Barbara Stark-Nemon and her novel, Even in Darkness, and Luisa Lang Owen, whose memoir is entitled Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered.

We hope to schedule a visit from our dear friend and author Ellen Airgood from the Upper Peninsula early in the summer. Her new YA novel, The Education of Ivy Blake, a sequel to Prairie Evers, is due for release in June, so she’ll be putting tour dates together before then. We also hope to meet author David Greenwald (finally!) and introduce him to Northport. The third title in Greenwald’s “Jenny-Dog and the Son of Light” trilogy (first two titles were Frozen Moon and Cody) will appear in 2015. And of course there’s that third, as-yet-untitled “wonders-of-nature” book of essays by Jerry Dennis, with beautiful illustrations by Glenn Wolff. Jerry and Glenn will be in Northport again, for sure.

It looks great, doesn’t it? I’m so excited about all these writers and their books! I look forward to welcoming the authors (and artist!) to Northport, again or for the first time, and to welcoming my customer friends to meet these special guests. Into another year, together we will celebrate printed words and images linking minds across distance and time.

May your new year be happy and healthy, peaceful and prosperous, and may it always be filled with the magic of books.

A Pleasant, Quiet Holiday

Christmas Day Landscape, Leelanau

We did not have a white Christmas this year. On the other hand (the more positive view), the roads were handily ice-free, and the threatened storm and power outages did not arrive, so it was an easy day for most of us in northern lower Michigan. We were not traveling and had no holiday guests ourselves (our holiday visiting was all by phone), but it was good not to have to worry about others, either. 

Lack of snow also made the painter in our household very happy. He loves the tawny colors and "bare bones" look of November, which is just what we had (a month later) and which tempted us outdoors for a country drive and dog walk between late breakfast and early holiday dinner. 

Sarah had no presents to open and did not think much of my holiday plan to trim her toenails with a new clipper (which she would never have regarded in the light of a present), but she was on board 100% for a ride and a run. I couldn't help finding it lovely to walk so easily and comfortably, without ice or sleet or bone-chilling wind. David drank in the browns of the landscape greedily. We all enjoyed our holiday outing. 

One tree in the woods stood out so sharply that I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before. I wonder what its life story could be.

Our dinner for two was simple, leaving me lots of reading time during the day. I enjoyed A School for My Village: A Promise to the Orphans of Nyaka, by Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, with Susan Urbanek Linville, and the opportunity it gave me to spend time vicariously in Uganda, where days are twelve hours long twelve months of the year. David also read out loud to me bits from a book I'd given him about the painter Russell Chatham.

Shortly after dark (Michigan), our neighbors came to the door bearing Christmas treats. Cheesecake! My dinner plan hadn't included dessert, so this surprise topped off the day perfectly. 

12/25/2014