Getting Lost

My best vacation memories are of places found accidentally, far off the beaten path. Of three that stand out, two were in adolescence, traveling with my parents and sisters, and one with David in France eight years ago. Actually, David and I have had many such off-road adventures, from Canada to FLorida, but the one I will recount was outstanding.

One: My parents were looking for the home of a famous woman writer somewhere in northern Florida. I don’t remember who it was, but Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is the likeliest one who comes to mind now, so many years later. What I do remember is driving very slowly down a narrow dirt road, the trees on either side hung with Spanish moss that swayed slightly with the least movement of air, and little barefoot children who stopped their play to stare silently at our car, as if they had never seen one before. We never did find the famous writer. I guess we must finally have turned around and stumbled back to paved roads. But it’s that dirt road that stands out in my mind. The dirt road, the Spanish moss, the barefoot children.

Two: Another family vacation took us to South Dakota, where my parents had lived when I was born. We covered the state from east to west, and one day we found ourselves on another unpaved road, a secondary road that slipped to tertiary status as it wound up into the mountains. We came to a wide, roaring mountain stream. There was no bridge, but the road continued on the other side of the water. My father drove his Buick slowly into and through the rushing water while my sisters and I hung our heads out the window in excited disbelief. On the other side we pulled over for a picnic on a large flat rock. We girls wanted to wade in the stream, but the water was too cold. It was August.

Three: When David and I were last in France, we took the TGV to Avignon, where we rented a car and began a slow, meandering drive north. We stopped to visit a Traverse City artist friend living in an old silkworm farm on the outskirts of a small village. Most of the time we were on two-lane roads (narrower in France than in the U.S.), and David was doing all the driving (he drove, I talked: that was our division of labor in France), and after a while, in the mountains, I noticed that roads to and from higher villages off the road came in pairs, as if one road led up, the other down. These were very narrow roads. Could we take one up and see what the higher, named place looked like? We could come right back down to the road. --Sure. Well, the ascent quickly became precipitous and terrifying, but there was no way to turn around or back down. At the top, turning left, to make our way between buildings we had to fold the side mirrors back against the car. (French car makers anticipate these situations.) Then the road ended! Not only did it end, but the pavement was crumbling at the edge, and chunks had fallen down the mountainside! What now? I got out to keep an eye on the edge so David wouldn’t tumble down it in the car as he made a series of very small back-and-forth wheel crankings to turn us around. We stopped to catch our breath and for a picnic of bread and fruit and cheese on a low stone wall. After eating, we walked down the narrow, deserted street. Two women on a balcony above called down to us, astonished by our presence, to ask where we were from. “Près de Chicago,” I answered, giving my standard response. They would never have heard of Traverse City. Their astonishment increased, but it reached epic proportions when I described to them the road’s end that had almost been the eud of us. “There was a sign saying not to go there--!” “No,” I said, “there was no sign.” “There was a sign,” one of the women continued, “but some kids took it down!” Thanks, kids! Our bodies might never have been found! We did find the other road going down the mountain, again narrow and frightening, and only then did I realize that these were not, in any official way, one-way roads! It was one of those adventures one would never choose to repeat but was glad to have had and survived. Les Crozes-Hauts was the name of the small collection of houses—not really a village at all: no shops, no post office—but we always call it “the scary place.” The two women were friendly, though. I asked them questions and learned that they had bread delivery three times a week, vegetables and fruits twice, meat and fish once a week, all by little trucks, camionettes. I wonder if the drivers of those little trucks were well paid. I see that village in my mind as clearly as if we had been there yesterday.

Many miles over many years, but these are a few of the long-ago memories that stand out. That might be my wish for today--to get lost. Not just turned around and confused on some miserable, impossible expressway interchange, but lost, far from the pavement, where adventure awaits.

Bookstore Thoughts From the Tennessee Road

All right, I’ve added IndieBound to my “Good Connections” list (check out the link called Independent Bookstores), and I’m gearing up to be optimistic about the business I’m in. It isn’t real estate, after all, or investment advising. So here I go, out on a limb to proclaim the start of a great year for books and bookstores, in general, and especially for Dog Ears Books. For starters, we the people are inaugurating a president who reads books! Then too, the air is full of new ideas and the rethinking of old ideas, and many of us will be turning to books to help sort through thoughts we’ll bring to one another in discussion. At the same time, we will be feeling a pinch in the pocketbook for a while yet, so although a new hardcover book may cost $26 compared to a movie’s $8, there is much more than 90 minutes’ worth of entertainment and food for thought in the book, and it can be passed along to a friend when finished.

David predicts happy times ahead for used books, the initial foundation of Dog Ears Books (hence the name) and still the majority of our store stock. I remember one or two fellow students in graduate school who raised eyebrows when they saw me reading “outdated” books--not classic texts from ancient Greece, of course, but philosophy books written perhaps 20 years before the time I was reading them. Sorry, friends! Technologies may become outdated (and I’m not entirely sure even of that), but ideas rise again and again from their own ashes, rediscovered by each new generation of readers. And then there are those classics, too. They have always been a staple of the book business, new and used. All grist for our mills.

The publishing business is in turmoil, so independent booksellers can hope for changes that will level the retail playing field for us. Besides drastically lowered numbers of new acquisitions in the near future, publishers (and distributors) have begun to rethink the whole notion of returns. Why should bookselling stand out in the retail marketplace when it comes to wasteful industry standards? Shouldn't book people set a better example? I’m talking about over-large print runs and unnecessary transportation costs. And why should the public have to wait a full year to be able to purchase a title in paperback? Here are changes whose time has come: smaller print runs; paperback editions either preceding or coming out simultaneously with hardcover editions; and a no-returns policy, with wider discount to retailers. Let’s stop shipping books back and forth, back and forth, extending credit so that publishers don’t get paid for months on end, and finally shredding and pulping books that can’t be sold. It’s time to bring down cost and make life easier for all concerned, from publisher to retail customer. Shall I predict these changes or just cross my fingers and hope for them?

Day Five Out of Northport

[This is being posted in the morning after the day it was written, as the motel wireless signal wouldn’t reach our room last night. Single-digit temperatures are in the weather forecast for Tennessee.]
Wednesday: Effingham, IL, to Whites Creek, TN
Sunshine all the way



Sarah has a quality wonderful in dogs, that of being “good in the car.” Here she is on her travel pillow between our seats, looking to us for approval. When the pillow gets boring, she retreats to her cave, i.e., crate, i.e., cage, where she has room to lie on her side with feet outstretched. She is a patient traveler.

Expressways are not my preferred travel routes, but we’ve taken them from Grand Rapids to northern Tennessee, choosing time over variety and making getting and keeping ahead of snow a priority, and I too have been “good in the car.” I had to admit, reluctantly, that the expressway choice was sensible, given the weather. I miss going through all the little towns, and even the land looks different from the route roulante that the expressway seems to me: we pass by farms and woods and fields rather than going through them on the same level. By Day Five out, I had reached my expressway boredom limit, and so, while David was driving, and to pass the time in a more interesting fashion for both of us, I read aloud from Alex Karmel’s A Corner in the Memoir: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood. The Marais having been David’s neighborhood during his first stay in Paris, he was fascinated before he heard the first word, but we were both captivated almost instantly by the story. Karmel and his second wife, a Frenchwoman, find a sixth-floor walkup apartment to buy in the Marais, and this launches the author into historic research of the quarter, beginning with his own building, which he quickly discovers is 300 years older than what they had been told. Part One ends thus:

…And so we are permitted to imagine, without feeling it is only imagination, how this ordinary house came to be built, how it was built, and who might have lived in and around it at various times. That is the kind of information that is called ‘History’—the sum of all we know, and infer, in the present about the past.

I prefer reading aloud to David rather than listening to books on tape. Our choices are not so constrained, and being the reader, free to stop and comment at any time or to take questions or comments from David or to join him in conversation about something else without losing a word of the story, I have more of a sense of control over the situation. Also, David can ask me to repeat something, and neither of us has to stop a tape and back it up. We both like reading this way.

Here is some history encountered along our way to the Ohio River. I-24 gave us an opportunity to stop at a rest area named for a fort built by the French in southern Illinois (before it was Illinois) in 1757. (It was the name, Fort Massac, reminding me of a town called Massiac in central France that led me to look at brochures inside and find the story.) Burned by Chickasaws (and who can blame them?) in 1763 at the close of the French and Indian War, the strategic site was subsequently neglected by the British, allowing Revolutionary Colonel George Rogers Clark to march into Illinois, capture Kaskaskia, and claim the entire Illinois Territory for the United States of America—without firing a shot! It was the first American president, George Washington, who ordered the fort rebuilt. (There is a rumor that Vice President Aaron Burr had a meeting there to plot for the conquest of Mexico, but Burr had other troubles, and Mexico was never annexed to the U.S.) Damaged by the New Madrid earthquakes, the fort was again rebuilt in time for the War of 1812, but at the war’s conclusion settlers of the region helped themselves to the fort’s timbers, presumably to build their own houses and barns, until little remained. Illinois was granted statehood in 1818. The Fort Massac site, purchased by the D.A.R. in 1903, the site became the first state park in Illinois in 1908 and is now home to a reconstruction of the original fort.

Seeing the historical marker for the Blue Star Highway made me feel at home, as both the Blue Star and Red Arrow highways in west Michigan hold many memories for me. Of course, the purpose of the Blue Star Highway was to honor America’s Armed Forces. This particular marker also honors George Rogers Clark.




David couldn’t stop in the middle of the bridge for me to take a photograph of the Ohio River, so this is the best shot I could get. We noticed that the river had flooded far up through the trees and into the fields of Kentucky but speculated that this natural flooding is probably a good thing. And then, south of the Ohio, we found ourselves in the limestone country of western Kentucky and Tennessee, dramatically different from the prairie farmland of Illinois we’d been traversing since Joliet. Even by expressway, the difference in topography from state to state is striking. “One union shall unite us, forever proud and free.” How easily I can imagine certain state lines as borders between countries, and yet they are not. Amazing!

We exited, before being caught up in the Nashville rush hour, with plenty of dog-walking daylight left. Later David channel-surfed while I read a little book by Paul Gallico, a rough, ex-library copy with the binding peeling off its spine. A strange story, Love of Seven Dolls. I kept imagining it with illustrations, but that would have made it seem too much a children’s book, and the antagonist, so to speak—the protagonist being a waif of a girl known as Mouche (fly)—is much too realistically cruel for a children’s picture-story book, not only striking but also raping the girl in his attempts to destroy her innocence. No, this is a book for adults, but its readers, to stay with the story to its end, must have children’s hearts and hopes. They must believe in the possibility of redemption. That is to say, I suddenly realize, that this book’s readers must be romantic pragmatists! Can the puppeteer be wholly depraved when his puppets (hand puppets, not marionettes) are so loving and kind to the desperately lonely girl they (i.e., he) rescued from suicide by drowning? Philosophical skepticism was awake from the beginning, for while my childhood fear of marionettes did not extend to hand puppets (the jointed mouths and limbs of the former that terrified me, hard and machine-like where hand puppets were reassuring soft like stuffed toys), still I could never completely believe in them the way Mouche did. I was even more put off by the character of Gogo, the Senegalese. The reality of the character I could accept, that is, but not the author’s treatment of him. He is the troupe’s “slave,” he must sleep in the car rather than hotels—well, that is the puppeteer’s treatment of him. But his name, given by the author, calls forth a stereotype, and his position has not improved by the end of the book. No, Gogo deserved better. But so did Mouche, and so, when it comes down to that, did the puppeteer himself, an orphan brought up in a hard world: “By the time he was fifteen he was a little savage practiced in all of the cruel arts and swindles of the street fairs and cheap carnivals.” Unloved all his life, become “wholly cynical,” there must have been some instinct within him to save himself, or why would he have saved Mouche, though giving all the credit for saving her to his puppets, from throwing herself into the Seine? A little story, simple on the surface, underneath it is an endlessly complicated and convoluted as human nature. I read my mother’s Paul Gallico books when I was young, Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris and The Snow Goose. This one was new to me. I wonder if my mother would like it.

An Old Note to Self, Found

Day Four:

My sister showed me her fancy cell phone last night. She can download her e-mail to it, play games, and write herself memos. I pulled out my little spiral-bound paper memo book to show her and flipped to the page where I wrote a poem last May, somewhere on the road to Kalamazoo:

“Road Kill”

No summer fun is coming
For the raccoon on the shoulder
Of the road.
If life were a cartoon,
Its eyes would be X’s.
If life were a cartoon,
A loud enough noise
Could re-animate the corpse,
And the raccoon,
Shaking its head dizzily,
A little stiff-legged,
Would amble down to the shore
And dip again for crayfish.

- P.J. Grath

First Three Days Away

Day One:

Leaving sunshine behind in Leelanau County, traveling under grey skies to Grand Rapids, where snow in the air and on the ground grew heavier and heavier, we made our way south as far as Benton Harbor. The highways were not cleared of snow, so travel was slow. Roads and parking lots were deep in snow, also, a foot having fallen in 24 hours. We found a dog-friendly motel, close to restaurants and shopping, and stopped to make camp. Our Steak and Shake waitress, Kimberly, made the evening memorable. With so little traffic moving on the roads, the dinner hour was very slow, so we had time to visit at length and hear all about her daughters, the birth of the younger, how she and the baby almost died, and much more. With all the challenges life has already handed her (at the age of 34), she is very much aware of the difference she can make in other people’s lives, in her waitress job, by letting them know that someone cares enough to try to brighten their day, and this awareness guides her in her work. She is happy that her older daughter attends the school she herself attended, the girl’s teacher this year one of Kimberly’s childhood teachers. She is giving her children the best foundation for life: love, education and the involvement of two parents. She spoke of her children being her gifts. “You’ve been our gift today,” I told her. Before we left, she and I were hugging each other, tears streaming down our faces. What a good, strong, lovely young woman!

Day Two:

The next day was sunny, the highways cleared of snow, and we had an easy drive to my mother’s house in Joliet. How good to arrive at last, safely! A young man who grew up next door long after I had gone away to Michigan was outdoors with his wife, launching his small children downhill on sleds in the vacant lot between the two houses, half of which my father sold to his father years ago. My sisters and I sledded down not only this hill but, with a good, strong start, further down another slope or two below it. Many things change and become almost unrecognizable, but some things don’t change.

My mother is moving gingerly on her bad knee, but if she has surgery (looking more likely all the time) it will not be, she is assured, a full joint replacement but only the reattachment of a detached piece of cartilage, so that’s not as bad as it might be. The three of us had all afternoon to relax and visit, with no real work to do, and later on my sister and brother-in-law brought dinner: homemade lasagna, red wine, green salad and a pan of brownies. Sarah drank more water than usual during the day (helping herself from the cats’ water dish), and that meant more times I had to take her outdoors in the snow, but overall she behaved well. Brother-in-law Ben, who grew up without ever having a pet, admitted he is now a convert to dog ownership and recalled his first meeting with Nikki, our old dog: “When I said ‘Sit!’ she sat! No dog had ever obeyed me before. She showed me that all dogs didn’t have to be obnoxious.” Nice to think that our old girl, providing a positive and pivotal experience like that for Ben, paved the way for Ben and Bettie’s adoption of Gracie, their black lab. My mother’s cats, on the other hand, as when I visited with Sarah in May, did not mingle with the family—with a dog around!--but stayed in the front bedroom, not venturing through to their basement litterbox until Sarah was behind a closed door.

My mother has been reading An Irish Country Christmas, by Patrick Taylor, M.D., whose books are set in northern Ireland, and A Good Yarn, by Debbie Macomber. There are so many books, I reflect, both fiction and nonfiction, written on the subject of knitting these days! What is it all about? Knitting is hardly a new phenomenon, but these books are, as far as I know.

Day Three:

It’s an hour earlier here in Illinois, and I wake up early, anyway, so it was about 5 a.m. when I brought my book out into the living room. Last night I’d read a bit from The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith, to David, but he was sleepy and couldn’t keep the characters straight, especially as I like to read the dialogue in what he persists in calling “dialect,” adding, “like an actress.” Well, I love African accents in general and these characters in particular, and all the names of towns and streets sound quite beautiful to me. This is the eighth book in the series. The story begins with Mma Ramotswe, the main character and founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, starting her day at home. “It is useful, people generally agree, for a wife to wake up before her husband.” Two pages later Mma Ramotswe is remembering her childhood, thinking of

…the view from the National School up on the hill; of the paths that wound through the bush this way and that but which had a destination known only to the small, scurrying animals that used them. These were things that would stay with her forever, she thought, and which would always be there, no matter how bustling and thriving Gabarone might become. This was the soul of her country; somewhere there, in that land of red earth, of green acacia, of cattle bells, was the soul of her country.

I am up before my good husband, as usual, and the first pot of coffee is brewed. Across the road from my mother’s house, the old fields that used to grow corn and soybeans (in alternate years), the fields across which I watched thunderstorms and sunsets and beyond which I imagined the Wild West, are now all given over to streets and houses and yards. As Mma Ramotswe sips her bush tea and remembers grazing cattle, my morning coffee heart returns to the woods and orchards of northern Michigan. Isn’t it strange? My childhood memories are of my childhood dreams of living in wide-open country spaces. I am nostalgic for my present life rather than my past.

Later—Sarah had her first visit to a dog park. Seven acres, about a dozen dogs running around when we arrived. She was somewhat overwhelmed at first but quickly regained her composure and had a wonderful time.

The "Middle of the Night!"

The MOTN is any dark hour when one’s partner finds it outrageous that one is not either asleep or actively courting sleep. (Can one “actively court sleep,” or does the very endeavor rule out success? Never mind.) When David is listening to the news through his earphones at 2 a.m., I might protest that it’s “the middle of the night!” On the other hand, when I awake at 4 a.m. and announce quietly—he’s awake, too, you see; why does he pretend otherwise?—that I’ve given up on the idea of getting back to sleep, his sensibilities rise up in astonishment: “It’s the middle of the night!” All I can say is that I might as well be up and doing instead of lying in bed worrying about all that needs to be done. Also, life will feel more manageable after a cup of coffee.

Some things can be done in the MOTN without disturbing the partner still sleeping or courting sleep. Those would be, of course, quiet things, such as reading, writing, drinking coffee, going over a bank statement, doing laundry at the other end of the house, checking e-mail, writing a blog posting or reading someone else’s blog. Since this is our long-awaited day of departure for points south and farther south, I hadn’t planned to post for a while, but then a comment came in from someone with a blog I enjoy so much I want to share it. From the House of Edward features both books and dogs, along with poetry and music and musings on nature. “Right up my alley!” as our Spencer likes to say. So while David and Sarah stretch out their downtime this morning (the pooch is never in a hurry to get up as long as one of us is still in bed), I’m relaxing with Edward and his family. A railroad family, too, just like mine! Have lived “in a fantasy world?” My title for the memoir I’ll probably never write is “Reality Commuter”! One big difference between the House of Edward and our house is that Edward’s is decorated very tastefully, while ours is a messy hodge-podge on the edge of chaos. Luckily, in the virtual world, that kind of difference can be easily put aside.

Soon the long day's travel will begin. Good-bye, hills and woods and orchards! Be well until we return to you!

Anticipation

Here’s Sarah, in the driver’s seat. Yes, the whole pack is looking forward to being on the road. It will be good to see my mother in Illinois, our first stop, and several hundred miles after that it will be good to get beyond the snow. Only yesterday, gazing at snowy cherry orchards, I remembered the gracious look of pecan plantations in Georgia, and that made me think of northern Florida’s live oaks, each one a kind of oasis of shade or island of refuge in the savannah. I will be watching impatiently for the first sighting of a roadside stand selling boiled peanuts. “Bolled” is how it sounds when they say it, and unappetizing as the notion is to the uninitiated, my first experience made me a convert. A non-crunchy snack but surprisingly addictive.

I’m looking forward to reading the books I’m taking for the trip: The Manor, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (I’m about halfway through it); The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith (one chapter in, but I may backtrack to read aloud to David in the car); A Corner in the Marais, by Alex Karmel (on loan from a friend); Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson (finally I’ll get around to this, chuckling inappropriately when I remember a friend saying, “Out stealing horses. Back soon”); and Bleak House, by Dickens (not one to begin on the road but to save for cheerful, sunny, Southern days). This is only the beginning of a stack that will grow—some future events are immune to doubt--as the trip progresses.

Also, it’s been three years since we’ve been to Florida and longer than that since we’ve seen some of our friends who will be there this year.

Strange as it may sound, however (since we have not yet left home), I am also already looking forward to coming back again. I anticipate the first curly shoots of chard in the garden, hunting for morels, the re-opening of my bookstore and reunions with friends. I’m eager for Sarah’s reunion with her new friend, Kate. Our party for Ed and Connie’s new book will be the first big Dog Ears Books event of the 2009 season, and I’m excited about it three months in advance, as it will not only be the perfect way to launch the bookstore year but also the perfect beginning to the spring wildflower season. And as far as the blog is concerned, it will be fun to explore and photograph a different environment for a while, but already I look forward to coming home to Michigan scenery and sharing it online.

The rest of the pack? David says he misses our house already and will be happy to get back to it again, as well as to touch base with friends and visit familiar haunts. Sarah has never been to Florida before, but I know she will be happy to see her old neighborhood friends here again in the spring. They certainly have fun together!



Here and now, snow is falling and wind blowing. The winter coats of horses hold snow..

Feeling Unsettled

Where is the charger for my cell phone? The largest of the three lidded saucepans? My camera’s lens cap? Despite lists, despite progress, everything feels topsy-turvy and impossible. Besides that, the sun shone on Saturday, Monday and all day today. Do we really want to pack up and go away? We look around our messy little nest and feel homesick in advance. So from time to time, like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand (do they really do that?), I retreat into the pages of Between Gardens, by Carol Graham Chudley and Dorothy Field. The book’s subtitle, Observations on Gardening, Friendship and Disability, includes a reference to Carol’s struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but the only text dealing with CFS are her journal entries. The letters between the two women focus on their gardens, early childhood memories of nature, the idiosyncratic approach each takes to cultivating the soil and nurturing plants, and the passing of the seasons. Beautiful close-up photographs by Dorothy Field of plants in her garden, often set against her own hand-made papers, make the book a visual as well as a literary delight, and the writing of both women bristles with intelligence, sensitivity and creativity that neither time constraints nor illness can defeat. It is a triumph of spirit. Lost in their written garden thoughts, I rush forward mentally, into the spring and the joy of working again in my own worm-rich soil.

A Correction and Some Old Oddities, on the Last Bookstore Day of the Season

I stand corrected--specifically, on my spelling of a wine grape name from yesterday’s post, corrected by an anonymous commenter. (Susan, was that you?) I found two spellings online but should have known better than to trust the Internet, where errors proliferate and where I have now been responsible for spreading this one. How far the former spelling champion has fallen! The correction, however, sent me to Tom Maresca’s book, Mastering Wine, where I am somewhat comforted to read that pinot grigio is not known for a “big aroma.” At least I didn’t get that part wrong. Maybe I need to buy a case in the spring, sear the correct spelling into my brain, and explore the subtlety of the bouquet.

Last night I added books to my Librarything listings (see link at right). Adding only a few at a time, slowly, as the spirit moves me, I find it interesting to see which of my books are shared with other members. So far I have a little disappointment that no one else has listed Memoirs of an Unrepentant Field Geologist; Reading the Landscape; or The Rural Efficiency Guide. I had hoped to find other fans of those wonderful old books, but the titles in my library that have the largest number of other members listing them are better-known books: Wind in the Willows; The Borrowers; Walter Mosley titles; Harlan Hubbard books; The Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters. This is fine, of course, but has no one else discovered the less-known old oddities?

Here’s one such that came into my hands the other day, Three Tony’s Scrap Books, by Tony Wons, a radio personality during the Great Depression. The books are compilations of “scraps” he collected and that his listeners clipped and mailed in, and I’m especially interested, given the time period, to see if there’s any wisdom there for our current crisis. Here’s something about finances from that old expert, Anonymous:

I once had money and a friend;
On both I set great store.
I loaned my money to my friend,
And took his note therefore.
I asked my money of my friend,
And naught but words I got.
I lost my money and my friend,
For sue him I would not.
If I had money and a friend,
As I had once before,
I’d keep my money and my friend
And play the fool no more.

And here’s a thought articulated by Lord Avebury, who I’m guessing and hoping would be the Lord Avebury also known as Sir John Lubbock, friend of Charles Darwin and author of one of the books in my library, but no citation is given beyond “Lord Avebury” in the book. The thought is:

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

That punctuation is not what I would have used, but I fully endorse the sentiment.

It’s the last day in the bookstore, and the Christmas tree has to come down today, but I’ll wait until later in the afternoon to undecorated it, leaving the lights on until the last. In fact, maybe I’ll leave the lights on a few more days, since we’re not leaving town until other tasks are completed, and, as I always maintain, holiday lights in windows or outdoors are very cheery at this time of year. Although at this moment, early afternoon, the sun is shining in Northport!!!

Auspicious Beginning

It was the next-to-last day of the Dog Ears Books season, and I’ve extended my December sale through Saturday, January 3, but after Saturday the bookstore will be closed until April. [This post would have been up earlier in the day, but things got too busy. Sorry!] Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern is already on vacation for the month of January. The Eat Spot is closed for the season. Barb of Barb’s Bakery hasn’t said exactly when they’ll lock up for the winter but probably in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, Stubb’s Sweetwater Grill and the Treasure Chest soldier on, along with Tom’s Grocery and The Filling Station, abd Sally Coohon will welcome sewers and knitters and quilters and other hobbyists and crafters at Dolls and More all winter, offering warmth and lessons and camaraderie along with goods for sale. In business and the rest of human life, as in nature at large, endings and beginnings overlap, woven together by continuity.

[Spelling has now been corrected in the following section.]

New Year’s Day saw the opening of a new winery in Leelanau County, and since we know the owners and had been fortunate enough to sample one of the new wines before the opening, David and I ventured over the township line to Circa Estate Winery on Horn Road. Margaret Bell is vintner there, her husband David the grower, and anyone acquainted with these two will bring high expectations to Circa. No one will be disappointed. Everything about Circa is top of the line, from gleaming vats in the cellar to a long, sweeping, dark wood bar, grand piano and gracious appointments in the tasting room. All of this, however, is in service to the wine, which, as it should, holds center stage.

Fine wine begins in the vineyard, with grower, vintner and workers nurturing the vines and fruit at every step of their growth. Only half the grape clusters that form are left to mature on the vines, and it is advisable to cut away some of the leaves to let the sun’s warmth reach the grapes, but this must be done carefully and the results closely monitored, because too much light would scald the fruit. Later on the clusters that do not mature must be pruned away. Michigan law permits addition of imported wine or juice, but Margaret Bell will have none of that: every drop of Circa wine is produced from Leelanau County grapes, most of them grown on David Bell’s vines.

So David delivers harvested grapes to Margaret, and she and her winery staff take over from there. Most wineries de-stem and crush in one operation, but Margaret Bell uses separate operations, and between the de-stemming and crushing, grapes are hand-sorted to insure that no errant stem, twig, leaf or substandard grape is pressed. The press seen above is usually outside but was brought indoors for the opening tour. Behind it, through a tall archway, stainless steel fermentation tanks from Italy gleam. Margaret does not believe in aging white wines in oak—only red. “Do you really want to chew through white wine like a beaver?” is the way she phrases the matter. I would not know how to answer that question except that I have tasted Margaret’s pinot grigio, and the result speaks for itself.












The complicated bottling line itself takes three or four workers to keep things moving along.




So now let me tell about my first experience with Circa wine. We were at the home of friends, where the Bells were also guests and had brought a bottle of their pinot grigio for us to enjoy and evaluate. For all their knowledge and expertise and high standards, the Bells are as far from being wine snobs as anyone you would want to meet, which is good because neither David nor I could pass ourselves off as wine experts. (When anyone asks, I say that my three grades of wine are Undrinkable, Drinkable, and Really Good.) But what’s important to Margaret Bell is that people be encouraged to taste wine and describe it in their own words, not words put into their mouths by anyone else. Passionate about wine (as about music), she finds joy in sharing her passion and seeks to draw others into the fold, not to exclude anyone.

The bouquet eluded me. Was it too subtle for my untrained nose, or did I not sufficiently warm the glass with my hands to release it? I’ll take more time with that in future. But my first sip more than made up for anything I missed in aroma. It was only the smallest sip, and it was the most interesting, most complex wine experience of my life, modulating ceaselessly on my tongue, claiming my full attention as wine never had before. I was reminded of the first time I saw the modern dance group, Wellspring, perform in Kalamazoo. Here was something that captivated me utterly and took me to places I had never been before but for which I had no vocabulary. How does one talk about dance? It is not literature or philosophy or even painting. (I say “even” painting because anything I have to say about painting is from the heart and with bits I have gleaned through life from David and artist friends, not from formal study.) How does one describe the taste of wine? Margaret did not disdain my inarticulate appreciation. It is part of her nature to encourage novices.


Back to that first of glass. Never have I taken so long to drink a single glass of wine. It wasn’t only the first sip that had so much to say—in a language I am now, because of it, eager to learn to translate—but each successive sip. And I did sip that entire glass, very slowly, falling away from the general conversation to focus on the discoveries my mouth was making. This, finally, is my story: one in which words fail me. But really, what difference would it make if I could produce dozens of adjectives? Words would not give any reader my experience. So now I look forward to the visitors we will have in the spring and summer and fall, because we can take a few of my beloved back roads over to this new winery, where they will have for themselves an experience they will never forget.

This Saturday evening it is David and Margaret’s daughter, Gillian Bell, who will take center stage at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church, 7:30 p.m. Gillian now lives and works in New York City but came home for the holidays (and the winery opening) and will present the annual recital so many of us count on as part of beginning each new year. No tickets are necessary. Don’t miss this!

Well, things were lively in Lake Leelanau on New Year’s Day, with NJ’s open and busy, and in Leland, where the Bluebird and the Merc were drawing big crowds, but back where the old sheriff’s department, jail and courthouse used to stand in Leland the music had died. All these county operations are housed off M-204 now, and the old sign for the designated smoking area, next to a snow-covered picnic table, was finding no takers. When we lived next door, I loved the lights on the Christmas tree outside the courthouse building this time of year. Now there is nothing but rubble.






To everything there is a season, and in every season both beginnings and endings are found.

I am currently reading Timbuktu, by Paul Auster, and The Manor, by Isaac Bashevis Singer.