I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons (University of Michigan Press, hardcover, 186 pages, $24.95). This one’s been in progress for a number of years and finally came together during the pandemic. I’ll always remember it as my Covid book—the one […]

“Doing okay,” is what most of my family and friends say whenever I ask. And none of us forgets that if you’re okay you’re one of the fortunate ones.But even those of us who have stayed healthy and not lost our jobs, homes, or loved ones have faced extraordinary challenges. If there’s been a time […]

IT’S BEEN A MILD WINTER so far here in northern Michigan. We’re in “deep winter,” about midway between the fall and spring equinoxes, when we usually have temperatures in the teens and lower 20s and there should be a couple feet of snow on the ground. In fits of whimsy I’ve sometimes imagined (in The […]

(January, Cathead Point, near the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula) IT CHANGES EVERY MOMENT. It’s a thousand lakes, changing faces with every shift in wind and light – flurried by offshore wind, white-capped in squalls, colored flannel gray or pearl white or stormy black beneath the winter clouds, a dozen blues when the sky is […]

THEY SAY SPRING ADVANCES fifteen miles a day, about the pace of a steady walk, which explains why I could experience three springs that year. The first was in March, in Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where I stayed in a small cabin near the bay to watch new grass sprouting […]

WHAT IS THIS ENERGY that floods our veins in autumn? When the nights start turning cold and the trees are showing their first reds and yellows, I find myself rising at dawn and hurrying outside to cut firewood and install storm windows, then rushing off to spend the rest of the day fishing on rivers […]

WE SPENT THE NIGHT with our friends Betsy and Eric in a cottage they had rented on the shore of Lake Michigan near Point Betsie. The cottage was a 1950’s-era Cape Cod perched on a dune a pebble toss from the waves breaking on the beach. The lap siding was old enough to have been […]

If you’re like me, not even the recent spell of cold and snow can push away the stirrings of spring fever. My symptoms always include greater than usual obsessions with birds and fish and morel mushrooms. Today it’s mostly birds. With that in mind, maybe it’s a good time to revisit a couple of my […]

Ah, the season of promise. Is it any wonder we grow impatient for it in March, when the last winter storms close roads and snap trees beneath their weight? We step outside hoping to hear the bassoon rumble of frogs mating in the neighbor’s pond—and instead are struck by a cold wind from the north […]

IT’S AN ILLUSION, of course, but winter hours seem longer. In summer, when daylight lasts from five in the morning until ten at night, there’s not enough time in the day for everything you want to do. But in winter, time languishes. You can work eight hours, plow the driveway, prepare dinner, eat, clean the […]