Change in the Weather

The top image today is one from last week, our first week home. Sarah and I were out in the orchards, and everything looked great. To her, I’m sure, it all smelled great. The wild leeks were up in the woods, and at home in the garden, my rhubarb was pushing its way into the sunshine, looking like some misbegotten monster from the Black Lagoon.

How fortunate that we returned home on Sunday, April 12, rather than a week later! Sunday, April 19, the day I had hoped to finish yard and garden raking, turned cold and rainy and would have made a dismal homecoming, in contrast to the beautiful sunshine that led us home a week earlier. Now the forecast for the next couple of days is for more rain, “possibly mixed with snow”! (No accumulation is expected.) There is a positive side to this superficially unpleasant turn of events: the season for morels is upon us, and the morels needed rain. Also, though I had no choice in the matter and would have much preferred to be outdoors, raking, this last Sunday’s rain kept me inside, and a full day at home, indoors, inspired me to clean out kitchen drawers, dust floors, and catch up with laundry. Sooner or later, these tasks demand to be performed.

Monday, another day I do not require myself to be at the bookstore (until Memorial Day arrives, and the 7-day-a-week schedule begins), was a second day of cold rain, and David suggested a trip to Traverse City. It was a perfect museum day, and the exhibit of sculpture by John Cavanaugh at the Dennos Museum more than repaid the trek to town. The poses of his single figures are extraordinary, his groupings compelling. I had at least half a dozen “favorite pieces” and hope to have another opportunity to spend time at this exhibit.

Then, home on a cold, rainy afternoon, what better way to warm up the house than by baking cookies? What would the cupboard provide in the way of cookie ingredients? The resulting mix was a chocolate chip dough with rolled oats instead of chocolate chips…confectioner sugar substituted for granulated (this turned out so well I’ll do it this way again)…my mother’s usual half-butter, half-Crisco recipe for the half-cup of shortening. Delicious! And how clever of me to bake only one sheet of cookies and put the rest of the dough in the refrigerator against tomorrow’s certain chill?

Today was a back-at-home landmark for me, too. After a winter of voracious reading in Florida, I had not started a new book since leaving the Sunshine State. Now I have shaken off that dismal inertia (and clawed my way out from under a mountain of homecoming housework) to begin Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait, by Barry Miles. Strange reading choice for the bookseller who has yet to read On the Road, but maybe that’s in my future for 2009, too.

Ah, the future! What does it hold? My fortune cookie at lunch predicted, “You are next in line for a promotion in your firm.” I’ll have to talk to the boss about that. Or maybe I’ll put my money on the morels.

Back--With Books

The world around Northport is full of happening these days, and there is so much to do (after three months away) that it’s overwhelming. Last Sunday we came up to Northport and emptied the van of all these boxes of books. By Thursday I had all the boxes empty and two tables filled:


Now to get started on all that cleaning (groan!). And of course everything will have to be rearranged for the May 1 reception (4-6 p.m.) for Ed and Connie Arnfield's new book (see top right corner). Come one, come all!

South (Bend) to North(port)--Home!

We had our first sight of a three-bottomed semitrailer on the blessedly short stretch of toll road we traveled (my opinion: a toll road should not be bumpy) between South Bend, Indiana, and the Middlebury turnoff. Eek!



North of Middlebury on two-lane we had to slow for farm machinery. I never mind that. In fact, I love it! “No farms, no food.” True. This feels more like home.

Lowry’s books (Tom Lowry, prop.), still serving community and visitors in the heart of downtown Three Rivers, Michigan, along with a newcomer, the Stray Dog Bookshop and Coffee Bar (Larry Nelson, prop.), back on a side street in Three Rivers. Stray Dog has used and antiquarian, Lowry’s has everything in the way of books and more besides. Both merit long stops.




Blue scilla were blooming in the yard of Kalamazoo friends. We sat out in the sun next to them (humans sat by flowers, that is), enjoying the moment. Dinner later with family was full of laughter and good humor, finishing off with lemon Easter cupcakes. Yea, Carson and Chelsea!

Yes, we are—back in Great Lakes country!

At a quick gas station stop outside Mesick for coffee to go, I couldn’t resist this brightly decorated donut. It looked like a holiday, appropriate to the day. The girl behind the counter apologized, saying she wasn’t all that good at making them yet and pointing out that the result was somewhat lopsided (I really couldn’t see that), adding with a smile, “But it was made with heart.” “And,” I replied happily, “it was made in Michigan!” to which she responded, “That’s important these days, isn’t it?” We exchanged comments on the beauty of the sunshine and parted, probably forever, and that’s the whole story. But imagine it differently: put an unhappy clerk who hates her job on one end or a rushed, impatient, surly customer on the other, and the brightness would have gone out of the day. As it was, I returned to the car smiling, buoyed up for the home stretch. Friendliness and goodwill from stranger to stranger, in small encounters such as these, are that powerful.

Look at this pile of snow! It’s filthy! So why does it bring a wide smile to my face, as if it were a blooming dogwood tree? David and I had both wondered how it would feel to come back Up North to the ragged end of winter, with everything still brown and squashed down (cattails in the wetlands, last year’s bracken at forest edges), patches of snow lingering, no green yet in the woods. Is it only thanks to the sunshine that it feels so good, that everything actually looks great to us, just as it is?



Our first sight of Grand Traverse Bay!



The colors of the Bay were practically tropical, ranging from deep blue through brilliant aquamarine through sparkling clear water through which we could see the sand bottom. “It’s never looked prettier!”



There’s the sign for Northport!



Snow in the woods….



…but crocuses blooming in the yard!

Third Day Heading Back North

Faces of rock cuts speed past us, prehistoric time slipping by like a galaxy as we are borne, inexorably, out of Tennessee, through Kentucky, on into Indiana. Sometimes the cuts are terraced, and then, along each thin ledge, small redbud trees have found footholds sufficient for life. In bloom against the rock, on a grey day, they are breathtaking.

I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move…

These lines are quoted near the end of John Tillaby’s A Walk Through Europe (1972), which David started reading in Aripeka and which I finished with him in the car today, reading aloud while he piloted us across the Indiana prairie. I searched online this evening and found the full text of Tennyson’s poem, “Ulysses,” from which these lines are taken. Here is some more of it:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known….

David was so close to the end of the book that I only came in for the end of the story, beginning with the account of a memorable meal made for the author by an old granny in the French town of Bonneval. That had me yearning, on a day of expressway driving, for France, for surprise, for adventure, but even Hillaby’s foot-trekking involved what he called “restless, zestless stages.” That, for me, summarizes most days I’ve ever spent on expressway (though I-65 is not the outright torture that characterizes time spent captive on I-75), but sometimes, I must acknowledge, covering territory is the main objective. Never mind that glimpses of winding roads tug at the heartstrings! Banish that lump in the throat as the Ohio River is crossed and the South left behind! We have explored rural Kentucky on other occasions: this time we need to get ourselves back to Michigan. But I love a lot of Indiana, too! Does that make sense? If only we had time to follow every inviting vista beckoning to us! I would be Ulysses and never rest from travel—or…?

I think the answer lies in the fact that my tendency is to enter into whatever country surrounds me, to the extent possible. What is frustrating about expressway is the feeling that one is not in the country but being conveyed through it while being isolated from it.





Enough complaining! After the two near-perfect days we had coming north through Florida and Georgia! Today, too, spent crossing the ocean of prairie dotted with farmstead islands, offered up its own time-island of magic when we stopped in Columbus, Indiana, home of the Four Freshmen but even more famous as a city of outstanding architecture, acknowledged for architectural design by the American Institute of Architects. I’ve made several visits to Columbus, after discovering it, by chance, when traveling between Cincinnati and Champaign-Urbana, but it’s been several years, and there have been a lot of changes.



The mall is being rebuilt, for one thing, and Terry and Susan Whittaker’s Viewpoint Books has moved from the mall to a corner location on Washington Street. The rain held off long enough for us to stroll beneath the flowering pear trees (petals drifting down on us like snow or confetti) to the bookstore, where I bought a book on the architecture of Columbus and we visited with Terry and bookstore employee Melinda. We bookstore people trade combat stories, tales of moving shop and stock. As friends and customers did for Dog Ears Books in Northport, Columbus volunteers turned to schlepp for Viewpoint Books. "Book people are great!" we all agreed.

Next stop was the deli down the street, where I ordered the sandwich called “Double Dilemma,” because—how could I not order a sandwich called “Double Dilemma”??? We were unable to see the Jean Tinguely metamechanical sculpture “Chaos No. 1,” which is currently under wraps, awaiting needed renovation, but did see the new video at the Visitors Center, as well as the Chihuly chandelier in the new addition to that building. Thanks, Judie and Joyce, for your warm welcome and all the information you provided! (Joyce and her husband operate the Ruddick-Nugent House B&B, which occupies an entire historic block. Who wouldn't want to stay there?)

Tonight we learn, to our dismay, that Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where we stayed last night, was struck by a tornado only hours after we left. Of course we are happy to have missed it, but our sympathy goes out to the folks in Murfreesboro, memories of Kalamazoo’s 1980 tornado still very much alive for us.

In closing this evening—our last evening before we re-enter Michigan—and in salute to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, here are the last words of Tennyson’s poem:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

We are tonight in South Bend, Indiana. Tomorrow, Kalamazoo....

Heading Back North, Day 1

The van was all packed the day before. Sarah and I were up and out early, visiting with Ida and Weiser on the bridge at sunrise. I made coffee but not breakfast, waiting for David to be ready for that, and sat down with Kevin Jackson’s wiggy book, Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities, a series of essays on ‘paratexts.’ Huh? Oh, you know, written parts of a book that are not the book, per se—titles, dedications, prefaces, and the like. Pretty funny and just right for a morning before a long road trip when I didn’t think I would be able to concentrate sufficiently on the history of ideas.

As we left Aripeka, honeysuckle was blooming, Weiser and Ida lying by the side of Fiddler Lane, Carl and Mrs. Carl going into the Community Club. Bye-bye!



The sky was blue, drawing us north along Hwy. 19. In the median, some wonderfully bright, deep pink flower was blooming in blankets, but I’m not good at identifying small flowers at 55 mph. Dianthus?



Except for a brief lunch atop at Perry, Florida, we stayed on the move all day—no stopping to look at wildflowers or photograph buildings (though there was some great ones) or saunter along Main Streets or scour flea markets (none open on Wednesday)—and rolled through northern Florida and the beautiful Georgia countryside. What a great road! The only departure from it was due to a wrong turn (and honestly, I did not miss the right road on purpose!), which took us through the towns of Sasser, Dawson and Parrott before cutting cross-country on a couple of two-lane roads to get back to our divided highway. It all worked out great. The towns we saw were worth the detour (I’d like to go back to Parrott someday to explore on foot with my camera), and the roads were all smooth as silk.

It’s unusual for us to cover 400 miles in a day, but that’s what we did, stopping for the night in Thomaston, Georgia, where David headed for the showers, and I went out to forage for dinner. Jackpot! Greek take-out!

How close to a perfect road day can a person ask for? Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, here we come!

Cats for Kathie

A friend of mine loves my dog but has to remind me sometimes (though I had have had and loved several cats in my life)that other people love their cats, too. Here are a few pictures I collected for Kathie. The first two are Aripeka cats; the third is from a mural in New Port Richey.

A Brainful (Running Over?)

Thought for the day:

MSU won #2 place in college basketball for the entire nation! Yea, green! You’re our team!

Last days in Aripeka:

Varnish is drying on paintings. Ten boxes of books are packed. Strong winds have been tearing at the coast for 24 hours and are still at it, and the furnace came on a couple times during the night. We will leave before the cold front, so it’s time to pack up the warm-weather garments of a fairly contented winter and prepare to re-enter the zone of real winter, because while the calendar says spring, the TV screen last night showed flurries in Detroit, and we’re going farther north than that.

For all these weeks, turning off Hwy 19 onto Aripeka Road has reminded me, every time, of turning off M-22 onto Setterbo Road in Leelanau County. It’s a slowing down, leaving behind the hustle-bustle world and re-entering the quiet, green world of home. Won’t Sarah be surprised to see the farm again? I can hardly believe it myself!

What I Will Miss

Sunrise over Hammock Creek…sunset over the Gulf of Mexico… flight of herons…the mystery of tide coming in and going out…Carl Norfleet’s friendly face and greeting…visits from Weiser and Ida…having all the time in the world to read and write…espresso at Paesano’s…gyros in Tarpon Springs…meeting people and pets at the dog park…the warmth of the sun…bright colors...long, restful views over the sawgrass….



A Serious Reading Recommendation:

The History of European Liberalism, by Guido de Ruggiero, translated by R. G. Collingwood. Oxford University Press,1927; Beacon press paperback, 1959.

My thoughts on this book began as an e-mail to my son. Ian, I know you read the blog (even though you don’t like the word ‘blog’), so I hope you won’t object to sharing, with people you don’t even know, what is still, first and foremost, a letter to you, since it has always been a joy to me that you and I share these interests, even though we often disagree.

I bought my paperback copy of The History of European Liberalism back in February, I think, at Poe House Books in Crystal River, but somehow other acquisitions from Poe House and elsewhere claimed my attention first, and as acquisitions have continued through the season, It was only Sunday morning, sorting and meditating on packing all the many books I've bought, that this one came to have its turn with me. After a walk with Sarah, cup of fresh coffee in hand, I sat down on the front porch and began to read the translator's preface. Well! You know the feeling on the first or second page of a book when you become so excited you can hardly bear to sit still and read the sentences in order?

Liberalism, as Professor de Ruggiero understands it, begins with the recognition that men, do what we will, are free; that a man's acts are his own, spring from his own personality, and cannot be coerced. But this freedom is not possessed at birth; it is acquired by degrees as a man enters into the self-conscious possession of his personality through a life of discipline and moral progress. The aim of Liberalism is to assist the individual to discipline himself and achieve his own moral progress; renouncing the two opposite errors of forcing upon him a development for which he is inwardly unprepared, and leaving him alone, depriving him of that aid to progress which a political system, wisely designed and wisely administered, can give.

You see what I mean? Collingwood's preface is only two pages, the second page not even full, and yet he commands attention with this distillation of the essence of de Ruggiero's thesis. Then the translator, following the author, poses the crucial question, whether political freedom is

…destined to disappear, crushed between the opposing tyrannies of the majority and the minority, or has it the strength to outlive its opponents?

Such a question, posed in such a way, is not one I can resist. The recent political history of our own country--here I detour from exposition of the book in question to my own personal opinion--not excluding the nominally Democratic administration of Bill Clinton (and that’s how I think about that), enlarged the protected interests of a tyrannical minority, those with the greatest financial power. Voices today most fearful of Obama are afraid that his administration will bring about a shift to a tyranny of the majority under socialism. I do not share the fear. President Obama is neither foolish nor ignorant. Socialism has had its trial and has failed, as he well knows. But so has laissez-faire capitalism, government by financial might, been tried and found wanting, as he also sees. To fear one danger is no reason to run into the arms of another, equally great. The disguise of the false dilemma is shallow, but the trap is cunningly laid by our own minds, yielding so easily to the temptation to divide the world into binary oppositions.

I do have hope that we Americans, as a people, under a wise leader, are beginning to see our way through and past simplistic fallacies. But what a breath of fresh air to come upon this book, now, at this time! It was over 90 years ago that de Ruggiero saw true Liberalism not as a weak compromise between the two positions he identifies as tyrannies (which we might call laissez-faire and socialism) but as the only possible ground for true political freedom, the path avoiding the pitfalls of both extremes.

Seduced next by the table of contents, my eye running down the list of chapter headings, I saw, almost at the end of the book, “The Crisis of Liberalism,” broken down into economic and political aspects. Handily (for a reader who begins at the wrong end of the book), the author begins this section with a recap of the development European Liberalism, one form was based on land, the other on industry. Land-based liberalism, he argues, is threatened when industry takes precedence over agriculture, diminishing the importance of land. Landowners then

…lose their character as a disinterested and governing general class; their sense of autonomy and their power of criticism diminish; and the idea of power takes in their minds the place of the idea of freedom.

Added to this diminution of importance, agriculture itself, in becoming “industrialized,” demotes land to the status of personal property, something to be bought and sold, an investment less profitable than other forms because the returns are so much slower. With the coming of general industrialization and the industrialization of agriculture, the reciprocal bond between man and the land is broken. Land belongs to this man or that man, until such time as it may be relinquished for cash, but the man no longer belongs to the land. In becoming mere personal property. Reduced to mere personal property,

…land has become entirely detached from the personality of the landlord, with which it was once indissolubly united; it has consequently lost that peculiar force which it owed to a life spent in constant and unremitting contact with the soil.

Land—nature, natural resources, the earth--can make no legal or political claims on its own behalf. When the welfare of land is divorced from the interests of the landowner and the laborers in the field, land is no longer wealth to be protected but merely a means to wealth. And as other avenues are faster and surer, it is no wonder that little prestige attaches to farming.

The democratization of landed property, which de Ruggiero says began with the French Revolution, has also meant smaller pieces of property coming to be held by many more individuals, diffusing the any kind of unified political base among landowners. Without denying that there are good results, also, when the number of small landholders increases, de Ruggiero presents the downside of the shift:

If properties are too small, their owners’ minds turn to other preoccupations, professions, or employments, and the cultivation of the land becomes a subsidiary occupation. In this way they lose interest in all essentially agricultural problems, and bring with them into public life an outlook formed by the experiences and demands of their chief occupation. An excessive economic subdivision of the land pulverizes it politically; it becomes less and less able to resist the aggressive forces of industry and finance, acting through great concentrated masses, and usurping, even in mainly agricultural countries, a disproportionate share of public power.

Note that here again a false dilemma has been sidestepped. It is not a matter of small versus large landholders. The small farmer has not enough land to meet his needs, and legions of small farmers who make their living “off the farm” (to use the modern phrase) develop off-farm values or, at least, find themselves too weak individually to shape public policy, while “agribusiness,” with its enormous holdings, treats land like a factory, a capital investment to be maximized, large size purchased at such a price leaving no room for values other than those of the marketplace. The issue cannot, therefore, be large vs. small. Neither is abolishing private ownership a solution, as de Ruggiero makes clear. Such a move, it seems, would constitute a regression to slavery if human beings were tied to the land, and if they were not tied, no bond would be re-established in the absence of individual ownership.

Since writing that much, I have gone back to the beginning and am now engrossed by the section devoted to the history of the development of natural rights, so I won’t get into the problems de Ruggiero sees for Liberalism in industrialization and will resist the temptation to start quoting long passages from the beginning of the book.

In writing The History of European Liberalism, an admirably clear overview and synthesis, Guido de Ruggiero did not pretend to offer prescriptions for resolving the crisis of Liberalism, but 90 years after the publication of his book, we know what has happened in the interim, and his historical analysis can help to see the crisis of our own time in historical and context.

Moving Toward Departure

Yes, it's that time, the time of obsessing over boxes and dreaming of the road. The other night I dreamed we had to get three vehicles back to Michigan with only two drivers, so you see I am using 'dream' in the general, not romantic, sense of the word. Then, re boxes: Boxes are one thing, and shipping boxes quite another. To pack books (we have acquired books, no surprise, and many of them are heavy), banana boxes will not do (too heavy), and to ship books liquor boxes (marked as holding glass containers) won't get past the postmaster's eye. --Not that we have liquor boxes lying around the house, understand, but liquor and beer and wine boxes are so sturdy and such good sizes, not to mention easily obtainable, that the temptation is great. But no! Resolutely--and yet somewhat hopelessly, too, because we’ve been on this quest before--we start haunting the backs of stores in search for appropriate cardboard treasure. Yesterday we were outraged to come around the corner of a shopping mall and see bundles of compacted, flattened boxes on pallets! How could they?

Last week was a year since Donnie died, he whose house we have occupied this winter, with his two old dogs as frequent visitors. A small group gathered on the bridge to toss long-stemmed roses into the outgoing tide at sunset, and dear little doggie Ida plunged in to swim after the roses. We’ll miss Ida and Weiser. We like to think they may miss us a bit—and little Saripeka, too.

Sarah's World and Ours

While David has been ducking in and out of the world of John Updike short stories and I inhabiting Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (a cheerier place than it sounds, especially as compared to Chancery), while we follow economic news and forecasts, what fills little Sarah’s doggie mind? When she goes to the window and whines in a certain way, we know that Weiser or Ida or both are outside, waiting for her. And when we drive to the dog park, she knows when we’re getting close, and her excitement fills the car. We think of the dog park as exercise and socializing for Sarah. To her it’s just life. As far as we can tell, she takes every day and every hour just as it comes.




It’s doubtful that Sarah is yearning for Michigan, but when I took her outside last night and looked up at the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, clear after recent thunderstorm of the night before, to see Orion in the southwest, I was seeing it over our old Leelanau barn. Soon!

Meanwhile, I’m cramming in all the reading I can before we go back home where obligations of home, bookstore and community will fill the days. Jane Austen in Boca, by Paula Marantz Cohen, is a lark I heartily recommend. You don’t have to be Jewish or retired or living in Florida to enjoy it. Having read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice enriches the reading of Cohen’s book, but I’m sure it would be entertaining even without the literary background.

As for Dickens, we met one of his Bleak House characters here in Florida just the other day--they exist in real life, his people!--but I do think that novel should have had a different title. I’ve avoided it for years, due to nothing more than its name (and have my friend Marilyn to thank for bringing it to my reluctant attention this winter), so how delightful to find myself charmed rather than depressed by the reading! The plot twists and coincidences, along with multiple tangled narrative threads connecting the cast of characters, have something in them of soap opera—but oh, the language, the descriptions of persons and places! Very satisfying, very satisfying!

P.S. I have just read in today’s newspaper that Hernando County is considering handing over its presently public libraries to a private, for-profit company. The company says it can save the county $500,000, maintaining current hours, and would hire back most current employees. So where would the savings come from? How would the private company make its profit? Obviously, employees would be hired back at lower salaries. Perhaps they would no longer have benefits. Would library patrons be required to pay a membership fee? Borrowing fees to take books home? Service fees to use computers? Columnist Dan Dewitt ends his piece by observing that “this is the kind of compromise we’re forced to make when we decide we hate taxes more than we love democracy.” Ocean ports, prisons, schools, libraries—what next? I suppose this is more of what libertarians consider ‘freedom.’ I would love to hear the reflections of Charles Dickens on all of this. Perhaps he would wax eloquent on the myth of progress.

Wordless and Modified