Flowers For My Mother

Luckily, Sarah and I made time for an outdoor adventure late yesterday, while the sun was shining, sky blue, air warm and still and humming with the buzzing of bees in the orchard. Finding these rows of old trees in full bloom, I was reminded of the year my father decided that he and my mother should come up for a visit during cherry blossom time. Bruce took care of the bookstore that day while my parents and I drove all over the county, from top to bottom, touring blossoms. So, with that in mind, I dedicate these images to my mother for Mother’s Day. Wish you were here, Mothe! Although our weather for the weekend has now turned cold and grey again….




Yesterday’s detour from the orchards down into the secret wooded valley was cut short when a coyote appeared on the path. Sarah was lagging behind just then, sniffing something back on the ridge. The coyote and I looked at each other, then, by mutual agreement, decided to depart in opposite directions, and Sarah had no idea of the encounter she had so narrowly missed. I didn’t think she needed the meeting.

Out in the open, the trees are at the pointillist stage, leaf buds beginning to open, a blush of green visible from a distance.

The willows are particularly beautiful this year. Here is one not far from the Happy Hour, a fountain of raining gold, reminding me of a tree I only remember from a story my parents told. In Aberdeen, South Dakota, where I was born, my parents planted a willow tree in the yard of my first home, a little grey bungalow. All the neighbors told them a willow would not survive there. Was it still there when we visited Aberdeen the year I was 16? I don’t remember. Is it still there now? I like to think that it is, that there is something of us remaining in South Dakota.

Gearing Up

Spring seemed late in getting underway, even for those of us who spent the longest, coldest weeks of winter elsewhere, far from snow and ice, but it’s making up for lost time now. Like a fresh, green horse not content to trot, the season has broken into full gallop. The speed of the succession of wildflowers in the woods takes my breath away. How can our memory-laden minds keep pace with so much newness? Can you see, in this picture of blooming pussywillow catkins, the snow shovel in the background?

Waukazoo Revival, as I like to call it (one aspect of what I like to call the Northport Renaissance—feel free to spread these slogans around), has also shifted into a higher gear. Next door, at the new BBQ spot, the day arrived, the long-awaited Day of the Pour!





Tulips and jonquils of every variety are honking their horns in the May sunshine, but they are not telling you to drive faster. They’re suggesting you park that car and stroll at a leisurely pace, all around town, along the creek, down to the harbor. Take a good book with you. I’m a third of the way through The Gift of Rain and hoping Bruce will cover for me on the day the library book club (Wednesday, May 27) meets so I can join their discussion.

P.S. My apologies to the bookseller in Micanopy, Florida, whose business name I had misspelled in a January post (now corrected). That bookstore, well worth a visit, is O. Briskey Books.

Village Wilds

Sensation Series: A Little Game

‘Sensation,’ not ‘sensational,’ please note. I’m not thinking of Gothic novels or vampires. Take the basic idea of a series, such as 2,4,6,8,10, but instead of numerical intervals, use a general group of sensations, such as rich, smooth & mellow. Build a series within this group, using the general categories fruit, vegetable, wind instrument, string instrument, I formulate a more specific series: avocado, eggplant, French horn, cello. (Do you accept eggplant as a vegetable? If not, substitute.) The germ for this idea came from an acting book I read for a class long ago, in which the writer of the book suggested thinking of a character to be played as a vegetable, and he suggested Juliet’s nurse might be thought of as an eggplant.

Suppose instead of rich, smooth & mellow, one began with piquant, light. Then the general categories might yield as specifics sugar peas, lemon, piccolo, lute. If each series were continued with an oil, the RSM series might include olive oil, the PL series grapeseed oil. How might each series continue with a flower? A dog breed (or just an animal?) A poet or novelist? The possibilities of this game are endless. With more than one player, the possibilities for argument are endless, too, so play at your own risk.

It is a rainy day. I cannot complain. After all the dry weeks in Florida, where drought-stricken pastures seemed they would ignite if looked at too long or too hard, the damp green of Michigan spring is a relief. And what better book to begin today than The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng?

Ramblings, Nothing More

Sun filters through a layer of thin and insubstantial clouds, with possible rain in the forecast for later in the day. Tonight is Northport School’s annual spring concert. (Admission is free.) I’ve been reading a secondhand account of William James and John Dewey in a book called Four Philosophies, by J. Donald Butler, pragmatism being the fourth one considered, following naturalism, idealism and realism. “Pragmatism works for me.” How’s that for a bumper sticker? One only a philosopher could love, I’m sure.

Not only in the orchards and wilds, but on town ground, too, spring’s blooms are bursting forth, while out at Krikat Farm yesterday it appeared a riding lesson was in progress.




Let me fill in now with more from Robert Grudin’s Time and the Art of Living:

How will we, five or ten or twenty years hence, look back on present time? Most probably, with envy and regret. We will envy the younger self who could, relatively speaking, do so much, and we will regret that it did not do more. We will wonder why, given youth and health and broad reaches of time, we learned so little, loved so little, risked so little; how so much time could have drained so immemorially down the sink of routine and distraction. Yet these regrets, however specifically realistic they are, ignore the broader continuity, which dictates that the confines of a single moment can hold all the dimensions and potentialities of time, and that the crucial decisions and opportunities are always before us, no less now than in the past, no less in the future than now.

And

The past is like the body of time, the future like its soul. Our sense of the past is voluminous, corporeal, complex; but our sense of the future should hold innocently and simply, like a stellar spectrum, the full quality of our spirit and will.

Very Bergsonian, to my ear.

Temporal Parallax

Long, long ago, when some big high school assignment was given that would require months of research (something like Northport’s senior project requirement), one of the first impossibly large topics I grabbed at was that of time. (In the end, the topic I chose was language, another impossibly large topic but one that prefigured, by many years, my doctoral dissertation.) Time, the sea in which we live, has always had a grip on my imagination. Not, of course, vice versa: it is ever-present but elusive. We are in it and of it and yet cannot grasp it.

A friend has been reading arguments in physics over whether or not time “exists.” Some say yes, some say no. My feeling here is that the question is wrong—or, should I say, ill-formed?

One of my favorite movies is “Back to the Future.” Another is “Groundhog Day,” another “Slaughterhouse Five.” Three very different imaginative treatments of time as traversable simultaneity. I am Bergsonian, and for me time travel can only be science fiction. And yet, since our minds are not bound to the moment but much more often, in Heidegger’s terms, lingering or leaping ahead, in another sense we are always traveling back and forth in our element.

This morning I was reading Robert Grudin again. His book, Time and the Art of Living, is written in a staid, flat-footed, academic style (that is only an observation, not a criticism), through which his mined insights glow like uncovered jewels. Opening the book at random this windy, overcast morning, I found a paragraph asking the reader to imagine possessing what Grudin called ‘temporal parallax,’ the ability to experience time from two separate moments, in the way our binocular vision allows us to merge what our two eyes see into one three-dimensional image. It strikes me that this is one way of expressing the point of a short story I wrote Sunday morning, a story rich to bursting with meaning for me (if no one else) but one in which, I must admit, nothing “happens.” The omniscient narrator is possessed of temporal parallax, and it is in that vision of joined moments, one from youth, the other from middle age, that the meaning resides. Grudin remarks that

Visions of this sort are impossible for us in the body, which demands that we view time as if through monocles. Less so in the mind’s eye which can, through memory, reason and imagination, reconstruct the missing dimensions of phenomena.

My story began with a memory. Reason, working through imagination to construct the temporal merging, gave me a new understanding. It is very mysterious, this business of writing and how one can say things not previously understood and, in saying, come to understand them. To foresee the cherries in the blossoms not yet open, to recall the blossoms in the bowl of fruit, all of it merged into one vision—that is what’s on my mind this morning. The image at the top of the post is from yesterday.

Progress of the Season

Yesterday’s sunshine coaxed the forsythia to open, and their unguarded optimism brightens our front porch. Leaving for Northport this morning (and with no cars behind me on the road), I slowed down just shy of the Happy Hour, where, sure enough, the first marsh marigolds had also opened at last. I say “at last,” because it seems I’ve been waiting weeks for them, but are they really late? A little frog jumped before I could capture it on camera, too.


Big doings on Waukazoo Street: preparation for the pouring of cement at the new BBQ spot. The name of this business will be revealed to all when the sign goes up!



Next door, in the vast recesses of the old Ford dealership building that now houses Dog Ears Books, Funky Mama’s consignment shop and the Painted Horse Gallery, Bruce and I put in three solid hours purging the book storage area. It was tiring but satisfying labor. I rewarded myself for my work and Sarah for her patience with a late afternoon walk in the woods. Shy, lovely bellwort, my favorite! These two trillium blooms, David said when I showed him the image, look like two nuns in white.


Many more blooms have yet to open, including those on the cherry trees. It won’t be long now, though. They look fit to burst already.

Bookstore Party: Season Now Officially Open!

The sun has been shining all day, and despite a nip in the air, it was good to spend many hours outdoors, raking and hauling leaves and hanging laundry on the line. Before the sun goes down, however, it’s time for me to post a few pictures from last Friday.

Early in the day, mystery and fishing writer Joseph Heywood paid a surprise call. He and his fiancée were looking for the Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide but took time to visit a while, and Joe kindly signed copies of his books that I had in stock. Nice to meet him after hearing about him through friends for years and enjoying his Woods Cop series set in the U.P.

Late in the afternoon came our long-anticipated, two-hour reception for Ed and Connie Arnfield, whose book, Roadside Guide to Michigan Plants, Trees and Flowers: An Ecological Approach, was published this spring by Arbutus Press. For most of the evening, I could hardly catch a glimpse of Ed and Connie: the crowd between us (having them sign books and paying me for books) was that thick! (We estimated later that at least 200 people must have turned out.) Gerry Sell came all the way over from Torch Lake (you get the distance prize, Gerry, but why don’t I have a picture of you?), and ecology essayist Stephanie Mills was on hand, too, to meet the Arnfields and compliment them on their book.






For more party pictures and an unbiased report from an out-of-towner, head over to Torch Lake Views and see Gerry's post. All in all, it was the perfect opening for the 2009 season. We were all exhausted afterwards—but in a very, very good way.

As you see, there was yet some snow lingering north of town Friday evening, but the sunset, after a perfect day, was lovely.

Getting Back to Reading

[Our reception and book signing party yesterday afternoon was so wildly successful that I still have not recovered sufficiently to write about it this morning, so that story—with pictures!--will appear in a day or two. For today, here’s a report (written before the party) on the last three books I’ve read.]

Becoming a bit discouraged over a “Books Read” list that hadn’t seen a single addition since we left Florida, I resolved during the past week to remedy the situation. Laundry could wait. It did, and I was able to add three books to my list, all of them fiction this time around.

My first choice was a very short book, Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, which is really like a long short story divided into chapters, and I think this book would have many more readers had its author given it a more appealing title. It’s fine to have the main character bear the name, but the story itself, riveting from the very beginning, needs something stronger, something to indicate the momentous upheaval that takes place in the character’s life, something to say to a bookstore or library browser, “Pick me up! Read me!” Any suggestions from anyone who’s read the book? If you haven’t read it, grab a copy somewhere. You can begin before dinner and finish before you fall asleep. Warning: the characters may haunt your dreams!

The next book on my list, of our time and much longer, was like Wharton’s tale in that it was another riveting story. The author of Still Alice, Lisa Genova, is a neuroscientist, and her novel chronicles the life changes experienced by a 50-year-old Harvard professor of cognitive psychology diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Here is a passage from an early chapter that struck me with its poignancy:

She thought about the books she’d always wanted to read, the ones adorning the top shelf in her bedroom, the ones she figured she’d have time for later. Moby-Dick. She had experiments to perform, papers to write, and lectures to give and attend. Everything she did and loved, everything she was, required language.

Alice’s story is told this way, from her perspective but in the third person, and as it proceeds we witness from inside her mind its deterioration. This is, undeniably, a story of irretrievable loss, but it also has encouraging aspects as Alice reaches into an inner core of strength to do as much as she can before she loses herself. One major accomplishment—and I don’t want to spoil anyone else’s reading by revealing what that is—provides an especially strong, high point late in the book. Changes in her relationship to her youngest child are another strong, positive thread. Still Alice would be a remarkable story even without its timeliness. But--

According to the report, there are 5.3 million Americans living with the disease and every 70 seconds someone in America develops Alzheimer’s disease.

Bruce brought Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile back from his winter travels for me. (He’s as bad as I am, filling boxes wherever he goes!) This short novel captures the Paris of a certain time for a young woman at the Sorbonne of a certain temperament. The time and temperament of the author? One wonders. This is, intentionally, not “riveting” fiction. It is cerebral, distanced from life, and that, I think, is the place to focus in assessing the novel.

Dominique’s greatest fear is boredom; her response to being in love is nausea. I can’t help thinking that Paris was wasted on many of the young existentialists. Poor things! But am I harsh? Cold? Unsympathetic? No, I remember…that feeling that one is different from everyone else…the horror that one might not, after all, be different from everyone else…. The passage from adolescence into adulthood is fraught with emotional peril. Wonderful, glorious, agonizing, nightmarish! One might guess that the boredom Dominique professes to dread is self-defense, a barrier to passions that might otherwise overwhelm her. Such a psychological explanation would not, however, apply to Luc, her older lover. What does his boredom protect him from? The realization that he has not lived up to his potential, has not given himself whole-heartedly to anything, is drifting through life without being fully engaged? Negative side of existentialism: Meaninglessness; Positive side: Engagement. At the end of the book, we leave Dominique with the existential dilemma still unresolved.

Getting Ready for the Party

The trillium were not yet open on Tuesday, when I found the wildflowers posted for that day, but Ed and Connie Arnfield will be on hand at Dog Ears Books tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m., signing copies of their book (see right) featuring northern Michigan flora, and you can question the experts about what you’ve been finding. Yesterday my wildflower hunt in the woods was cut short when Sarah became very interested in a little face in a tree hollow. I was just glad the skunk was wedged in there with its face, rather than the business end, pointing out. No picture of the appealing little face in the hole—my focus was all on getting Sarah out of the woods as quickly as possible.