You won’t get bedbugs from reading this. Since we all grew up with the nursery rhyme, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” and were told they didn’t exist anymore, we thought bedbugs were mythical. What did a bedbug even look like? A mosquito? A beetle? And ant? No one knew because, pretty much, there weren’t any.
The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) is a public service. It is funded by our tax dollars. It is an essential service, and recognized as such, and that is the reason we have it. It provides transportation to those of us who otherwise would not have it. It allows us to survive. It gets us to the grocery store, the library, and the doctor’s office. Let’s take a minute, stop and think, and ask ourselves this question: would we want our elderly mother, our pregnant friend, our frail and possibly demented grandfather, or our twelve-year-old child, waiting at a bus stop in a storm, and with no shelter? Shelters are basic, like seatbelts.
“Are you sexually active?” The young woman asking does not look up from her note pad, writes Leelanau author Kathleen Stocking. I’m not sure in what capacity the questioner is asking. Is this my doctor, a physician’s assistant, a nurse, an aide. I am there for my eyes. The question catches me off-guard. I’m in a neck brace, walk with a walker, and part of my right leg is a prosthetic. I’m almost 80 years old, but look older.
In the summer of 1994, I met a northern Michigan writer—though not in person—who made a lasting impression on me: Leelanau County’s own, essayist Kathleen Stocking. I soon came across Stocking’s first book: Letters from the Leelanau: Essays of People and Place. After examining the front and back covers and conducting my open-any-page-and-decide test, I had to have it. Here was a writer who grew up in Leelanau County, whose family had a remarkable history in the area (notably, the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is named after her father), and who, as I would read, captured the essence of this special place. Little did I know that this would lead to an improbable encounter nearly three decades later.
The Glen Arbor Sun won seven awards in five different categories from the Michigan Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest among local news media for stories published between August 1, 2021, and July 31, 2022.
“Outside my window a crescent moon is slowly descending toward the snow-covered trees outlining the bend in the river. If my eyes aren’t deceiving me, the moon appears to become more orange the closer it gets to the earth,” writes Leelanau author Kathleen Stocking in this Christmas letter. “So much to know, so little time. We are all on the same path, just in different places, not only in the stages of one’s present existence—young, middle-aged, old—but in all the generations who have come before and might come later. This wild, unwieldy world. So much grief. The pandemic. The homeless under bridges. The Ukrainians, without bridges. The horrible wars.”
“What if we have lived, not just this lifetime, but millions since the earth began? Was I a leaf in a past life? What if we are truly part of everything that lives? Is it possible that there is no boundary between us and the world?” writes Kathleen Stocking in her latest essay. “When times are hard, like during a plague, sometimes people regress. What would late science teacher Mr. Bolton think of people taking horse de-wormer to protect them against the COVID?” Phil Deering, who has a small hobby farm, can’t get horse de-wormer for his animals. “Now they’re hiding it behind the counter,” he says, “So people who need it for their animals can still get it.”
Lynne Rae Perkins, an award-winning Suttons Bay author and illustrator, has released a new book, “The Museum of Everything.” The book, a kind of map—or as publisher Harper Collins calls it, an invitation to go on “an imagination-fueled journey through the living museum that surrounds us all—is the museum. And the museum has in it, among other things, a cloud, a shadow, an island that could be a stone in a puddle.
By Kathleen Stocking Sun contributor March is a dead month in Northern Michigan. In March 2020, when the pandemic hit, the snow fell like little gray feathers for days. I live in housing for senior citizens in Traverse City, a tiny apartment two blocks from Grand Traverse Bay. Older people with underlying health conditions, we were […]
We’re home. We’re self-quarantining ourselves. We’re practicing social distancing. The restaurants and bars are closed. Crowds no longer gather. What better way to spend these pandemic days than to read books newly published by Leelanau authors? Here’s a roundup of local books, or books by local authors, in 2020: