Opening a Book at Random, #1

If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has the loveliest leaf I know. I feel intemperate about it, because I came upon it after our passage through a wood which could have been underground, a tangle of bare roots joining floor and ceiling in limitless caverns. We stood looking at the banana plant till our mind was fed with grace and light. The plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the fountain returns in broad rippled pennants, falling outwardly, refined to points, when the impulse is lost. A world could not be old on which such a plant grows. It is sure evidence of earth’s vitality. To look at it you would not think that growing is a long process, a matter of months and natural difficulties. The plantain is an instant and joyous answer to the sun. The midribs of the leaves, powerful but resilient, hold aloft in generous arches the broad planes of translucent green substance. It is not a fragile and dainty thing, except in colour and form. It is lush and solid, though its ascent is aerial. There is no green like that of its leaves, except at sea. The stout midribs are sometimes rosy, but the banners they hold well above your upturned face are as the crest of a wave in the moment of collapse, the day showing through its fluid glass. And after the place of dead matter and mumbled husks in gloom, where we had been wandering, this burst of leaves in full light was a return to light.

From The Sea and the Jungle (1930), by H. L. Tomlinson

Time to Travel and Time to Work

These are the long days, the lengthening days, the days of late spring or early summer (depending on your point of view), and time for some of us to go into high work gear while others go on vacation. That’s okay: our playtime will come later, and right now Nature is working hard, too, making flowers, forming fruit, producing young. Here is a promise--raspberries soon:



My first work of the morning is outdoors, at home, watering gardens and hanging laundry out to dry in the sun. My only peony should open sometime today. Before I go home to see it this evening, there's an afternoon at the bookstore, continuing with some of the always-ongoing rearranging of books. Where to put them all? Which ones need to move? And where?



This Saturday is the Wine Festival in Leland. We're only one week away from the Friday, June 19, concert at the NCAC in Northport featuring the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Youth Ensemble, and the day after that, Saturday, June 20th, is the Maritime and Lighthouse Festival and Fish Boil in Northport, so if you’re anywhere near Leelanau, it’s time to start marking your calendar for the season’s big events. If you’re traveling far from Michigan, I have another idea to share. The item below appeared in my “Shelf Awareness” newsletter on Thursday morning.

The Gainesville Sun observed that "local book stores are alive and well--and destinations for area book lovers and collectors" in its report on regional used and rare bookshops.

"I still have customers who want to pick up a book and open it before they buy it," said O.J. Brisky, owner of Brisky's Books, Micanopy, Fla. "I also have customers who stop by when they are driving south in the winter and stop by again when they are heading north in the spring."

This article reminded me that a lot of people will be setting out on summer travels and that it’s a good time for me to give a reminder about bookstores David and I discovered or revisited on the road this past winter. Before that reminder, I should first note that you have to get off the highway and go into the town centers to find these and other small town gems. You won't find either small town America or independent bookstores out in Generic Big Box Expressway Land.

Okay, here they are, the winners, our bookstore discovers, from South to North:

Rainy Day Editions in Inverness, Florida

Poe House Books in Crystal River, Florida

O. Brisky Books in Micanopy, Florida

A Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia

Well Read and Well Fed, in Americus, Georgia

Viewpoint Books in Columbus, Indiana

Lowry’s Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

Stray Dog Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

When you stop in and browse and buy, before you leave tell the booksellers that Dog Ears Books in Northport, Michigan, sent you their way.

June Evenings

“As I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.” Omen, prophet or--bird?


David was relaxing in the bedroom after dinner Tuesday evening when he heard tapping at the window and, pulling back the curtain, thought he saw a young owl flutter and fall to the ground. He alerted me. I went outdoors to see what I could see, held aside the tall grasses and snapped. “Not an owl,” I reported to David. “I think it’s a kestrel.” We scrabbled around the house for the field guides to verify the identification before I went back out to get a couple more pictures. The kestrel, described as “gentle” and as the “most colorful of raptors,” is probably the only hawk I would be able to identify before I looked up its picture. (This one was young and unsure of itself, eying me dubiously, apparently unaware of my thoroughly innocent intentions.) Guide to Bird Behavior (Stokes Nature Guides series), by Donald & Lillian Stokes, tells me where to look for kestrel nests, but I won’t go out of my way to stalk them. Having one fall into our life for an evening was serendipity.



This evening did not have the thrill of wildlife, but it was pleasant nonetheless. The sun was out, and since I'd gotten my gardening done in the morning I was free to help David with yard work in Leland, at our old house he's now using as his studio. Hard work--but satisfying to do it together and to get it done. Sarah rode home on my lap, her head out the window, taking it all in.

I've brought home J. B. Priestley's English Journey to read later tonight. Is it cheating if I skip immediately to the Cotswolds?

Author on the Northern Map

Look at this week’s Northern Express cover, and you’ll see Bob Butz. Inside is a piece by Anne Stanton, who interviewed Bob on his upcoming book Going Out Green (due out in July) that tells you how to plan your own environmentally sensitive burial. Sounds fascinating, eh? Until we have that book in hand, we’re happy to recommend another by Butz, a widely published outdoor writer for many years, An Uncrowded Place: The delights and dilemmas of life Up North and a young man’s search for home, a book of essays that will ring a chord with many a would-be Northerner, as well as those of us already here. I can’t help choosing ”Fishing with the Boy” as one of my personal favorites from this book. First of all, I remember my son’s first fish, caught in a little roadside lake between Delton and Prairieville in Barry County, Michigan. Secondly, Bob’s son’s first fish was caught at the millpond in Northport during the annual Scott Brow Fishing Derby, the event one local man recalled from his youth as “better’n Christmas.”

A week or so ago I was reading the essay “Mining for Morels,” but today I find myself turning to “Gray Days.” In that piece Butz reminisces about days in the fall, “leading the hoary edge of winter.” We’re months away from hunting season right now, but there’s still something to what he says about overcast skies:

Gray days put me in a mood to try drifting through the woods without a sound, to perhaps for a moment feel as light as a nuthatch perched on the tip of an arrow and, maybe, for a little while pretending to be not altogether of this earth. Gray days remind me of how easy it is to disappear for a while and move with a stillness of body and mind that seems effortless when the forest is rapt with silence, when inside you feel enveloped by the clouds.

Failed Ambush

Our grandson David from Kalamazoo comes up every year about this time with his buddy, also named David. “The Daves,” we call them. They like to arrive at the farm under cover of darkness, set up their camper van and go to sleep without announcing their presence, and for several years our yard was so full of cars and trucks and vans that it was easy for us to leave for Northport the next morning without noticing the extra vehicle. Later the Daves would saunter casually into bookstore or gallery to astound us with their presence, very entertained at having put one past us once again. Now, however, we start looking for them about this time of year, and my David has been clearing our life of redundant vehicles, too, so this year we were able to spot the presence of the Daves in our yard—Tommy came along this year, too—and be ready for them in town. On their way to the Soo, they had time to cruise the bookstore (mystery, botany and economics were the subjects of choice) and to take in Greg Garman’s show of bird paintings and carvings down in Leland with David Grath as their tour guide.


Then they were back on the road, bearing north. Happy travels, guys! Come again soon! Stay longer!

Weekend Aviary

The old art school building in Leland was transformed late Friday night when Leelanau County bird artist Greg Garman set up his weekend show of bird paintings and carvings, a show that continues through 6 p.m. Sunday. Almost all of Garman’s birds are life size (one exception is a simple, subtle watercolor of a bald eagle in flight, prey clutched in its talons), and the carvings are so lifelike they almost seem like a taxidermist’s art. As a viewer I found myself in constant motion, swooping from one piece to the next, captivated by each in turn. The images here only begin to hint at the magic. With a 50% chance of precipitation tomorrow, I'd say a trip to Leland would be a good afternoon plan.

Already? At Last!

Another Friday already, and summer seems to have arrived at last. My hands were chilly, hanging damp laundry outdoors on the line this morning, but later on, walking from Dog Ears to the Eat Spot, I was too warm in a light denim jacket. Ah-h-h-h! Lilacs are already beginning to fade. That’s a little sad. On the other hand, I’m eager for the Canada anemones down by the creek to flower and will be saying “At last!” when their cheery little faces appear.

But already we have cheery faces all over town. A summer resident who winters in Kalamazoo said she hardly recognized Northport when she drove into town. There are colorful umbrellas now over the picnic tables at the Drive-Thru BBQ next door, for one thing, and a sweet board fence along the sidewalk. What Bruce Viger did many years ago for Stubb’s, what he did next with the Eat Spot, he’s doing now with the Drive-Thru. What would Northport be without him?



Overnight the flowerboxes in front of the Painted Horse Gallery were filled, so the whole front of our building is blooming now. Large pots of flowers also appeared along the sidewalk by Northport Fitness and on the corner in front of the Filling Station. The bridge over the creek just before Barb’s Bakery and the Willowbrook are bright with flowers, and next door to me, at Funky Mama's, Stephanie is giving all the credit for her flowers to Ben Wetherbee, a summer employee at Northport Nursery, now a branch of S&J Landscaping.



Already it’s almost Father’s Day! If Dad is a reader, I have several recommendations. First—no surprise!—is Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers, the tale of a special ops team in Afghanistan. For the scientifically minded dad, there’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life, by Adam Gopnik. The dad who likes to cook could use Mario Batali’s Italian Grill or Jerry Minnich’s North Woods Cottage Cookbook, while Robert Olmstead’s novel, Coal Black Horse, will be fascinating fiction reading for Civil War buffs, and Expeditions, a novel by Karl Iagnemma, tells a story of “father and son, religion and science, exploration and exploitation,” set in the nineteenth century in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I’ll stop here with the recommendations, only because the possibilities are beginning to overwhelm me. Needless to say, I have many other books that would make wonderful gifts—Barbara Siepker’s Historic Cottages of Glen Lake; Brian Leigh Dunnigan’s A Picturesque Situation: Mackinac Before Photoghraphy, 1815-1960; Michigan Starwatch for the man with his eyes on the heavens; books on fishing; books on dog training; books—books—books! Did I say I was going to stop?

Two weeks from tonight, the stage of the NCAC will be filled with cheery faces and the air filled with song. It’s the spring concert by the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Leelanau Youth Ensemble, directed by Margaret Bell. That’s Friday, July 19, 7:30 p.m. I have tickets here at the bookstore, $15 for adults, $5 for students. Tickets are also available at the NCAC box office.

What's Happening Here and There

Far from the drumbeat of world events, our fingers hardly on the national power pulse, those of us Up North take note of the world around us in a different way. We’re not ignorant of larger events. Many of us read the New York Times and listen to NPR on a daily basis. Still, it’s the smaller, more immediately enveloping lifeworld (that lovely word of the German philosophers, lebenswelt) that commands most of our attention, e.g., who’s getting married or in the hospital, who just died, who got a new puppy, how does the cherry crop look, where there was frost overnight, whose lilacs are blooming, etc.

Big excitement this week, though, is bears! Yes, black bear sightings in Leelanau County. The Leelanau Enterprise reported three, all in Leland Township, one bear appearing to be making his rounds--the bank and post office--in downtown Leland. Sounds like quite an ordinary citizen, eh? A Leelanau Township friend of ours told us early this week that his neighbor’s bird feeder had been “attacked by a bear” (how did they know? I don’t know), and just a day or two ago David was driving out northwest of Northport and thought he saw a black bear crossing the road. It could have been, he said to qualify his report, a huge black dog, but are there Newfoundlands running free on Garthe Road? I don’t know of any. Then this morning at the bakery I overheard a guy at the other end of the table (I was involved in another conversation and didn’t have a chance to follow up on what I overheard) talking about a bear up in Cherry Home. Can we call this six bear sightings? And would that mean six bears or one bear riding a wide, two-township circuit? The DNR officer quoted in the newspaper estimated the year-round county bear population at twelve to fifteen. I’ve missed them all, even the one back in the mid-nineties that visited downtown Northport. Some people still have sweatshirts commemorating that particular bear, subsequently trapped and relocated.

We did have frost again last night at our place. Will my tomato plants ever get to sleep outside in the garden? So far they have been spending their days outdoors, then coming in to sleep on the porch.

Here’s a little “shop talk” for those who are interested. Book Expo America, BEA, has been going on in New York, but those of us in the hinterlands are no longer left out, thanks to e-mailed newsletters like “Shelf Awareness” and online reports from attendees. Backwoods, backwaters paddler that I am, my vote for favorite panelist goes to poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who acknowledged that independent booksellers were responsible for his success; that traditionally printed books are more democratic than e-books (“Poor places have very little access [to technology]—still”); that he’s all for “elitist bastards,” as long as they’re elitist bastard booksellers; and that he’s the “the last author whose fiction is not available digitally, a lonely man on an island--I don't know how many of us there are.” I’d love this guy even if he hadn’t come to Traverse City a few years ago as part of a public library speaker series. David couldn’t believe I wanted to arrive so early that evening for what had been billed as a poetry reading. Well, we had to sit over halfway back in the auditorium, and it was standing room only by the time Alexie came onstage. He was no “lonely man on an island” that night! It was one of the few times my husband has ever been speechless.

Another BEA panelist, author James Patterson, whose books account for a dizzying 6.67% of all hardcover books sold, advised independent booksellers to discount bestsellers in order to get some of that market share. I can see it for large independents, but I can’t see it for my little bookshop at the end of an agricultural, retirement and tourist peninsula. People who come to Dog Ears Books for Patterson titles want them used or paperback, and it takes a big volume of bestseller sales to make discounting profitable…which relates to the next interesting item I gleaned from the BEA reports….

This was the big surprise for me: Online book sales account for only 15% of books sold in the U.S.! The largest competitor of independent bookstores isn’t even chain bookstores (30%). It’s general big box stores, with a whopping 45% of new book sales. (I could name store names but refrain out of principle. Why give publicity to those who already have such a huge advantage over me?) Can indie bookstores compete with that market? I don’t know what BEA attendees in general made of the figures, but I’m not going to bang my head against that corporate wall. I can’t get their discounts, can’t buy in their volume, and don’t want—luckily for me, because I couldn’t, anyway--to run that kind of bookstore. Know thyself. Know thy bookstore. Know thy customers. I’m deeply grateful for mine.

Here in the Quiet Backwaters

I was already behind the times as a child, memorizing dramatic Victorian poetry instead of knock-knock jokes. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Knock-knock jokes were part of my repertoire, too, and when it came to reading, I read books contemporary with my childhood as well as those my mother had loved as a girl. So too these days, in a world gone dizzily digital, I still have a foot in two worlds, but the forward foot, I have to say, is often more than a little reluctant.

This format, the blog, is already old-fashioned. Even Facebook is somewhat passé: as one friend commented, when I first ventured into those waters, “If people our age are getting into it, you know it’s old hat.” (Did he really say “old hat” or is that my behind-the-times memory substituting an appropriately behind-the-times phrase for whatever he said that meant the same thing?) Those in the know are all tweeting and twittering now. How long, I wonder, can that possibly remain the cutting edge before the edge moves farther out, leaving even tweets behind?

And here I am, over in the slow lane--but what do you expect from an unrepentant, thoroughly unreconstructed bookseller? I still read printed books, books printed on paper, books bound in cardboard and sometimes (this is becoming a thing of the past, too) cloth or even—gasp!—leather. As for writing, despite the ease of composing on a keyboard, where changes can be made with simple fingertaps, I still from time to time enjoy the feel of a rollerball pen (no, don’t use a quill) on the soft yellow paper of a nice, fat legal pad. Folding the full page over around the cardboard backing gives me a sense of accomplishment (just thinking about it makes me sigh happily) that I don’t get when a new blank Word page pops onto the screen in front of me.

“Are you twittering?” a market-savvy friend asked recently. Maybe she asked, “Are you twittering yet?” I suppose I should never say “Never” (why do people always say that? Shouldn’t we be as careful with always as never?), but so far my feeling is that twittering isn’t me. My sisters, my stepdaughters, my nephews are all on Facebook, which is what convinced me to get on board, and I understand now what one of them said in its favor, that she likes the immediacy. I do get it. It’s a little like riding your bike down a city or suburban street and calling out greetings to people you know as you ride by. That can be very satisfying, gratifying. From my way of thinking, though, it’s no substitute for a blog, at least the way I approach blogging, which is as a slow, rambling walk in the woods. I enjoy other people’s blogs because of that serendipitous chance to drop in on another life, to walk in someone else’s woods (metaphorically speaking), to see a different natural world (maybe mountains instead of woods, maybe a different country altogether) and to share thoughts that might otherwise never have sprung into my mind.

I’m disappointed to see bloggers whose pages I’ve enjoyed dropping away from regular postings. I miss my leisurely visits with them. Is there any connection, I wonder, between lowered attention span in school children and our country’s credit card debt problem? The more gratification becomes instant, the more demand there is for instant gratification, and then the rush is on, the hurry from one gratification to the next, with no time for either true desire or real present enjoyment.

Here is this moment in my life. Sun dapples the tall grass in the popple grove outside my window. Birds sing. Forget-me-nots bloom china blue, reminding me of Don and Suzanne and the day I brought the first clumps of these flowers home from their Glen Arbor studio, years ago. Earlier, before the sun had topped the trees, Sarah and I were out in the tall grass. I wore my tall barn boots, but the bottoms of my pants still got wet, and I can feel that now, so the walk of half an hour ago is part of this moment, too. After the walk, we came indoors, and I read another chapter of A Vanished World, by Anne Gertrude Sneller, who writes of how the Civil War, though it occurred during her mother’s childhood, seemed very much a part of her own life because everyone still talked about it, and fully a third of her school history book was devoted to the conflict, taking pupils through battle by battle, general by general. She writes of her grandfather’s house and the flowers in her aunt’s garden:

The old English names of flowers had not yet been given heavy and unmusical Latin ones, which show botanical knowledge, but have no effect upon the imagination. When we spoke of morning glories, larkspur, marigold, four o’clocks, bleeding hearts, honeysuckle, forget-me-not, and all the other lovely ones, we knew their opening and closing time and their shape and color from their names.

Sneller’s world has not vanished. I open the cover of her book and enter her world. My own world has rich layers of books and paintings, readers and writers, sun and rain, home, travel, friends, family, dog, poetry, morning mist, ephemeral blossoms, waves gentle or crashing, small stones, glorious sunsets and so much more. If you don’t have time to linger, wave as you speed by. I hope I’ll still be here when you have “more time.”

Cherries and Books and Mustards and Lilies

This (left) is what comes after blossoms in the cherry orchard. Next, of course, come cherries. Serious growers don't much appreciate nearby wild varieties, such as the choke cherries seen blossoming at the top of today's page, because they can harbor pests that travel to the orchard trees. I have sympathy for farmers (their lot is never easy) but also for the wild things, and I'm pleased that after years of trying I can finally remember which wild ones are the choke and which are the pin cherries. The choke cherries form long blossom strands, something like a necklace.

Exciting book news in Northport this morning! I have just learned that THE COLORS OF BEECH HILL, by Hillary Porter, has been nominated for the next year's round of Michigan Notable Books. A "chapter-book" story for young readers, THE COLORS OF BEECH HILL is set in and around Northport, and Hillary will be appearing at Dog Ears Books later this month, Saturday, June 27, 4-6 p.m. Don't miss the fun!

I don't want to get too excited yet about bringing Doug Stanton, author of HORSE SOLDIERS, from Traverse City to Northport--only because he and I have not yet fixed on a date for his visit, but we are working on that, and I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, buy and read his exciting book!

Outdoors again (looking for morels, giving Sarah outdoor exercise and lessons), I come upon wildflowers so small and pale they would pass unnoticed were I in a moving vehicle. Four-petaled cresses, members of the mustard family, have flowers much like several garden vegetables.



Wild lily-of-the-valley represents the lily family, along with the wild leeks, of course--onions all, sort of. Or, lilies all? How does the taste of onion change if I think of it as a lily?



Common names of wildflowers shed a charming sidelight on the plants. This little everlasting goes by the common name 'pussytoes.'



Temperatures are still low overnight and in the mornings, but we had some rain, and now we have sunshine, and that's a winning combination.