It's So Northport! It's the DOG PARADE!

Gracie, the dog belonging to my sister and brother-in-law from Illinois, was registered as dog #1 and our Sarah as #2, but they did not lead the parade. First came the Fish Queens on the fire truck.


Then the flag-bearers (see top), followed by the banner-carriers. Recognize anyone famous in this shot?


Next came the mayor of Omena. No, not the walker—it’s the dog who was elected mayor (honorary) last year in a fund-raiser where votes could be bought for a dollar apiece.


Then there was the mayor’s whole town council.


Among the councillors was Bruce Balas, wearing a shirt from Dog Ears Books! Bless his heart, that angel!


Then, at last, “our girls,” Sarah walked by my brother-in-law, Ben, and Gracie, walked by my sister, Bettie. Gracie wore a scarf. Sarah wore a smile.


Here are some folks who really got into the spirit of the theme, “When the Dogs Come Barking In.”




Others had a message of their own to get out.


The band was GREAT, as always!!!


Some dogs were walked, while others were carried. All were good-looking.






Andy and Gloria Thomas reminded people that there’s still time to buy a raffle ticket to support the Northport Promise scholarship program. You might win a new BMW.


More dogs, more costumes...



...And old cars, too. This one carried musicians.



Even the hot dogs had their own float.


Friends of the Library rode in a Stanley Steamer.


When you see these ladies in their trompe-d’oeuil costumes, you know it’s the end of the parade until next year.



Sarah came back to the bookstore wet! She and Grace got to take a little dip in the bay to cool off after the parade. I think the dog cousins had a good time.

At Summer's Height, Literary Life Continues

The audience at Dog Ears Books on Friday learned that author Donald Lystra’s success with Season of Water and Ice did not come overnight. Before his novel was published by Switchgrass Books, a new Midwestern fiction imprint of Northern Illinois University Press, Lystra had over a dozen short stories published in various literary journals across the country. Learning (by doing) how to craft the characters and story lines in shorter pieces of fiction, he said, gave him the skills necessary to write the novel.

We also learned that Season of Water and Ice began life as a short story. It was a good short story. The characters, however, had more to say and do, and that “more” eventually became the award-winning novel.


The audience had a lot of questions for Don, and he was very gracious in answering them all before one young woman’s plea for a signed copy of the novel produced a rush to the book table. There are a few more signed copies available at the bookstore—and because we’re fortunate enough to have the author as a seasonal resident in Leelanau Township, I’m sure we’ll be able to arrange to acquire his signature again in the future. In fact, all of us who have read this book are eager for him to get back to work on his second!



I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of my mother meeting the author! I was sure I had, but this morning it’s not there in the camera memory! And I took no pictures of our picnic supper or of my sister and her special birthday cake!

Today? What will today bring? Everyone yesterday was asking anxiously what will happen to the dog parade if we get rain at one o’clock on Saturday. It has never happened (though we had clouds and a few sprinkles last year), so no one knows. That’s the perennial truth about the future that it’s so easy to forget: tomorrow is not ours to see.

As always, the story of Northport remains to be continued!

You Supply the Captions Today!

After a good walk/run (remember, I walk, she runs) with Sarah and a stroll through the farm market, I gave myself a 20-minute break down by the harbor, reading the New Yorker and enjoying my almond croissant. Refreshed, I found errands easier. Okay, you do the rest.

Makin' Hay

A woman called the bookstore this morning, just as I was opening for the day, to ask if I carry Don Lystra’s book. I’d just spent half an hour e-mail blitzing my local community to remind them that Don’s signing at Dog Ears is this Friday (see right-hand column), which only goes to show that there’s no such thing as too much publicity. (It’s harder to get the word out to everyone than in-the-know people might imagine.). Don stopped in early today, and we had a chance to chat about his publishing experience and the new book he's working on.

So, yes, it’s “high season” here, and the work is nonstop. Plants and insects and farmers are all at work, too, all of us laying up stores for the lean times of winter.


It’s hazy, it’s crazy, but lazy? Not!

Artists Still Crazy, Dogs Lying Low, as Dog Days Settle In

This image of melting ice cream swirled with chocolate syrup is intended to answer the question, “How hot is it?”

Do parents do this kind of thing in the 21st century? My mother and father taught little toddler me to responded to their question, “What’s the brightest star in the sky?” with the shamelessly coached response, “Sirius, the dog star!” I remember knowing the answer but had no idea what the dog star was. If you’re in the same boat, you can follow this link to read about Sirius and why the hottest summer days are called “dog days.”

Heat does not seem to dampen the zany ways of artists. Painters Jack Warden and David Grath proved irrepressible on Sunday evening.



Sarah enjoyed the tepid Lake Michigan water this morning and afterward was happy to lie in front of the fan at the bookstore.


Who's crazier during the dog days, dogs or artists?

Another Season of Memories in the Making

Here are a few more pictures from Ian and Kim’s visit. The Avion travel trailer was their private suite. Sarah loved having them here! When either Ian or Kim appeared, she would immediately begin smiling and wiggling. Look how her tail is a complete blur as she dances around Kim!


Following Amy-Lynn’s example of the other day, I removed the color of this still shot of Ian. The simplicity of black and white seems timeless, doesn’t it?


When I was little, all home snapshots were in black and white. Prints came back from the developer with crinkled edges, bound in bright yellow folders. Color prints from my high school years lacked the clarity of those early pictures, and the color destabilized over the years. All memory does destabilize over time, I suppose. Nothing truly “remains” but must be recreated over and over, attaching to old photo albums, family stories told and re-told, books read and re-read.

“What is life?” “The making of memories.” At least, it occurs to me that that might be one definition. For Americans, whole lifetimes seem to be customarily distilled into seasons of summer and of school, the year divided as if by nature into those two parts. Think about it. How many American memoirs and autobiographies have you read that catalog the writers’ lives that way?

When we were young, summers stretched out to time’s very horizon, endless, vast sunny prairies of days to be filled. Bicycles, camping, lightning bugs, tree climbing and corn on the cob were elements in mine, while others have memories of horses, sailboats and family cottages. It doesn’t matter. From Alaska to Florida, we all remember the feel of the air and the sense of time standing still, sensations that belonged to summer alone. (Is Hawaii different?)

Later, as parents, and then again as grandparents, we seek to recreate our own memories with new generations forming their first. When my sisters and I were small, vacation simply was the trip east on old Route 30 to visit two sets of grandparents and that time spent in Columbus and on the outskirts of Springfield. It was playing jacks on Grandpa Gilbert’s cool, shaded cement front porch or reading in the hammock in the back yard or swinging so high in the tire swing that we could see over the high board fence into other yards. It was feeding Grandma Pringle’s chickens, weeding the vegetable garden, playing barefoot with other barefoot children on that road whose dust was soft as talcum powder between our toes. It was Ohio farm markets and fresh fruit off the trees, running semi-wild, and reading, reading, reading.

A morning e-mail from a friend asked if I’d really read (as my “Books Read in 2010” list claims) Gene Stratton-Porter’s The White Flag. Yes, indeed! With its clear delineations of heroes and villains and the many deep, dark secrets held until the story’s cliff-hanging finish, it was sheer melodrama. Not my usual reading fare, but I enjoyed it immensely. Vacation can be change of literary scenery, too.

Company, Clouds, Views and Vegetables

They're here, they're here! Family gets top billing today, with sunset coming in second. You can see the glow of the setting sun on our faces, however. It's Kim's first visit in 10 years, Ian's first in four, and I can hardly believe they're here, all the way from Kalamazoo! (I'm not being ironic but poking a little fun.) Here was our sunset:


We could hear the festivities from the Conservancy picnic and auction, just over the fields to our east.



The tents were still up the next morning, seen here behind a field of corn. Looking west, I had the always-majestic sight of Lake Michigan:

What would a Friday post be without the farm market in Northport?



Look at these beautiful little vegetables from the Bare Knuckle Farm folks:




Life is good Up North, and a cold front moving through is giving us a little break from the heat. Not to worry--the temperature will be back up to 80 tomorrow.

Another Don't-Miss Book of Michigan Memoir Essays

The other day I mentioned the summer issue of the Dunes Review and how much good writing it contains. One poet featured is Fleda Brown. Brown’s poems in Dunes and the fact that at least one local book club chose to include her new book on its next round of reading and discussion led me to that book, Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity.

Sorrow remains within me like a closed box, the contents of which I know so well there’s no need to keep checking. Still, sometimes one wants—one deliberately opens the past and lifts out, one by one, its small, radiant objects. One suddenly thinks of sorrow with fondness, the way it keeps on being itself, no matter how it’s been anatomized, analyzed. Sorrow is easy to love, actually, the way it asserts its own clear presence that one can’t dispute, can’t wish away, for the way it insists on being included, along with everything else.

Delaware’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2007, memoir essayist Brown is a poet first and foremost, and that art shows in this book, its pieces personal, even intimate, but never sentimental. Always there is the sharp, true edge, discovered, rediscovered and valued for itself, given to us in words chosen carefully to capture and present it.

My longing joined up with a more universal longing that year: we girls turned equine, galloping across the ruts of the playground whinnying and neighing in our sleek bodies that were filling with a new, animal energy we could only call horse.

Then there is the way she writes of Dvorak’s music, weaving it into memories of summer vacations with her parents and siblings. Sound simple? Think again. Try it yourself, and then read the title essay in Brown’s book. I found myself holding my breath and then letting it out in a sudden gust, upon which I would have to close the book and put it down for a few minutes before taking it up to go on reading again.

Later, in “Hiking with Amy,” on their second night in camp, with aching knees and feet, the writer dreams:

I catch an updraft; it is good to have back the old dream of flying. I am molecular, carried on drifts like a Chagall figure, nobody’s pain hurting me, not even my own. The sequence happens over and over, as if I am trying out how to do it, or if I really want to leave so much behind.

My summer's reading has convinced me all over again that no one writes essays as well as poets. These essays are poetic elaborations of the writer’s life, as her poems are distilled moments of perception. There is no preferring one literary form over the other. –-Well, I am saying that, knowing that inevitably some readers will prefer the poems, others love more the essays. Being given both, however, we are privileged to choose from abundance or, greedily, as I prefer to do, take it all.

You present your life to yourself. You give it a happier ending, make a shapeliness of it. Then art sends you back to memory, where it came from. You can’t have the original, which maybe never was the right thing, but you can have this. And soft, the little wisps, rising from the lake: the angels, the annunciation. You have to bow your head, to receive it, all of it, down on you, its sheer trumpets, clarinets, the joy of its French horns.

All excerpts in this post are from Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity, by Fleda Brown (University of Nebraska Press, 2010, $24.95, available at Dog Ears Books and other fine bookstores and more than worth the cover price--you will want to send it to someone you love and keep it yourself at the same time, I guarantee). All coneflowers are from my meadow. Apologies to both the author and to the composer for my inability to figure out how to put the accents in the composer's name.

My Recipe for Happy Lobelia

A lot of people ask what the little blue flowers are. Others, who know, ask what the secret is, because they've bought and planted lobelia, only to have them look very straggly or even die. I only know that these are happy (1) in the windowboxes, (2) facing the morning sun, with (3) afternoon shade and (4) daily watering. I have a few at home that get afternoon sun and are not happy, whether in a container or in the ground. So that's my experience and all I can say about lobelia.

Tour of the Tees and of Peterson Park

See? I didn’t mean ‘trees’ and leave out a letter. At least one of these shirts could probably be used as a car washrag, but I don’t have the heart. There are gaps in the words and picture both, but that’s my sweet old Nikki (below) in the old shop on Nagonaba.


Sweet young Sarah and I went to Peterson Park this morning, and the first thing I noticed was that it’s been very windy lately out there on the bluffs.


The view is always beautiful, even on a rainy morning.


Why didn’t I bring a picnic breakfast? Some of the tables are down below under a sheltering roof, others out in the rain, high on the hill. I love the way these trees are leaning.


“Someone else was here!” Sarah is saying to herself.


Reminders: Tomorrow is Election Day, and there are two more weekends with an opportunity to see “My Fair Lady” at the NCAC. I went on opening night and recommend the show highly. Acting, singing, choreography and orchestra—all are excellent. And it’s great fun!