Day of Protests

 Dexter, Michigan, Protest at 1:00 PM

The protest rally was held in Monument Park in downtown Dexter, around 10 miles west of Ann Arbor. Dexter has a population of 4,500. We estimated that around 200 people were in the park.

The Dexter Bakery: Best-Known Business in Town

Although the park across the street was crowded, the streets were almost empty.

Dexter celebrated its 200th anniversary last year. This is the downtown in 1908 in a mural on the wall of the bakery.
Quite a few buildings are unchanged.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, Protest at 4 PM

Each of the four corners of the at the protest site  were crowded with people carrying signs.
Our guess is that there were around 500-600 people present

 

The rally was scheduled at an intersection of two major streets at the edge of town.
This seemed mysterious until we realized that downtown and the campus area were overwhelmed by the annual Hash Bash today.

April Is Here!

Flowers Around Me

Spring thoughts shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.
All spring photos were taken this week, © 2025 mae sander.

Baby Owls

Can you see two owlets peeking out from their hollow tree? We visited them on Monday.
Shared with Eileen’s critters.

 An Excellent Novel

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think many people are recalling the start of the pandemic five years ago, and probably share my feeling that it seems very long ago and at the same time seems like just yesterday. The pandemic is at the center of the lives of the characters in this newly published novel, which makes it perfect reading for right now! Ultimately, the narrator says: “The ending of lockdown trailed off like a forgotten song. If only life could immediately return to what it used to be. Some bars and restaurants had opened, all hesitantly, the rules changing day by day.” Things return to normal — but not really.

Dream Count is about four characters, all women from Africa who immigrate or simply visit the United States. Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor all know one another in various ways. Each belongs to different ethnic and status groups. They have different economic opportunities: one comes from a quite rich family, one makes money on her own, and one is quite poor. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayals of the women, their relationships with men, their views of both American and African social norms, their attitudes towards having children, their jobs or careers, and many other features of their lives. The author has a fabulous way of creating stories and showing the inner and the outer realities of the characters.

The poorest woman in the story, Kadiatou, works as a hotel maid in New York, and her high-profile experience is based on the much-publicized rape of a hotel maid by the famous French banker Daniel Strauss-Kahn, in 2011. However, the author created an entirely different background for the character and her reaction to the events and the cancellation of the prosecution of the perpetrator, imagining an original persona into existence

What is the “Dream Count” of the title? It’s the way that Chiamaka, the pivotal character, during lockdown, reviews her many failed relationships with a series of lovers, both serious and casual. At the end, her friend remarks that “normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.” Chiamaka (who is narrating the novel, corrects her:

“My dream count,” I said. 

“So how many dreams have you been with?” 

“The world has changed and you look back to take stock of how you’ve lived. And you have so much regret,” I said. I wished I had not used that word, “regret.”

In my opinion, Dream Count is one of the best novels I’ve read recently because of the penetrating portraits of the characters and the fascinating insights into both African and American lives.

A Poem For Changing Seasons

With all the big wind storms that have swept across the country lately, I thought a symbolic wind poem would be good for this week —

[what if a much of a which of a wind]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives truth to the summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two, 

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

(Source: Poetry Foundation)

Caused by the wind in April, 2025.

 

Too Short or Too Long?

 

Things Like These by Claire Keegan.
Reminds me a lot of James Joyce (not just because it’s Irish).
Very good book, but too short. Shortlisted, too.

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves. Lots of good characters!
Good book but too long, gets kind of lost in the misdirections.

The Shortest Way to Hades  by Sarah Caudwell.
Unfortunately a very discursive and frustrating book to read. 
It would be a good plot — almost a locked room situation —
except for excessive detail about legal matters and TOO LONG!

Kitchens, March 2025

New in My Kitchen in March

New spoon rest or teabag holder that Evelyn made me.

What’s new on the refrigerator this month? Just one new and timely magnet.
For a thought-provoking essay on Orwell see: “We are all living in George Orwell’s World Now”
in the New York Times Magazine.

Things We Ate in March

Vietnamese shrimp and snap peas. Recipes from Andrea Nguyen.

Favorite dish: au gratin potato casserole prepared in my French baking dish that I’ve had for many years.

Roast lamb, roast potatoes, broccoli, and a glass of red wine.

An omelet and a pita bread.

In our kitchen one morning. Toast, jam, butter, orange juice, coffee. Other mornings, other selections.

Alice at our favorite bakery, Tous Les Jours — lunch. Yes, we three ate all these pastries!

A visual recipe from the website Recipe Tin Eats. It was very good!

A great meal from Carol’s kitchen.

Recently opened in Ann Arbor: one of a small chain of Vietnamese/French coffee shops. 

Beyond my own Kitchen: US Food Aid Disrupted

Destructive actions by our government have been constantly increasing. 

“Last week, the USDA cut an initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped schools receive fresh ingredients from small farms.” (source)

Food-insecurity is a major concern that has been addressed by some very effective programs during the past five years, but those programs are being abruptly discontinued. Farmers have suddenly been abandoned by government programs that purchased their goods on behalf of food banks. Agencies like Feeding America are struggling to cope with these losses. 

“USDA had previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Now, the food bank leaders say many of those orders have been canceled.” (source)

Food banks throughout the country, which have struggled to help those in need as their numbers increased, are now profoundly challenged as many millions of dollars in food aid has been cut off: 

“USDA’s cancellation of the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance programs has garnered headlines, but they are just two of more than a dozen programs supporting small farms and regional food infrastructure that have been impacted. (source)

Source: “Feds cancel #4.3M worth of poultry, cheese, eggs to Michigan Food Banks” (March 29, 2025)

Here in Ann Arbor, throughout our state of Michigan, and in most other states, needy families that relied on USDA food supplies for nutritional help are facing a grim future. 

“Nearly $5 million worth of food for Michigan food banks has been cut by the Trump Administration, according to the CEO of one of Battle Creek's food banks. Although that number accounts for about 4% of food distributed to Michiganders across eight counties, South Michigan Food Bank CEO Peter Vogel is hopeful the cuts won't cause southwest Michiganders to go hungry. Canceled meals, including products such as chicken, eggs, pork, turkey and cheese, were expected to be delivered this spring and summer.” (source)

Farmers, already jeopardized by international trade cancellations in the tariff wars, are additionally faced with these newly cancelled orders. (The impact on farmers of new tariffs scheduled to begin this week is a major issue, separate from the various program cancellations.)

“Funding pauses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are affecting sustainable agricultural programs in Michigan. The program Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funds 41 projects, including 28 in Michigan. Grants support programs that increase economic opportunities for farmers who use sustainable practices. The disbursement of those funds has been stopped, according to two of those projects in Michigan.” (source)

Thinking of my own kitchen, where I am so extremely fortunate, makes me also think of the less fortunate people in my community, my state, and my country — one of the tragedies that is unfolding in the tsunami of federal injustice.

Blog post and original photos © 2025 mae sander.

Other photos as credited.

Shared with In My Kitchen at Sherry’s blog.

“The Egg and I” and Other Reading

 Rural Living in the mid-20th Century

The agony of raising chickens.

What’s an aigon-eye? As a small child I remember my mother and her sisters talking about an aigon-eye that was in a movie — another mysterious thing that I had never seen. Eventually, I learned the name of the book and later movie The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald (1907–1958). According to the preface in the above edition, the 1945 publication — unexpectedly — was wildly popular. When I saw it on the shelf of recommended reads at the library, I decided to that I would finally read it after all these years.

On the whole, it’s not a terrible book, but it’s very dated, especially the author’s appalling racist views of the Native Americans who lived around her in the Pacific Northwest where she and her husband had a farm. I have no idea if this was the first humorous family memoir about the difficulties of being a farm wife or about some other family challenges. I know that other similar memoirs were popular at around that time; for example, Cheaper by the Dozen, published shortly afterwards, and I Remember Mama, a play and movie in the late 1940s. It’s still a popular genre, for example Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water. You can probably think of many more, both humorous and serious.

Betty MacDonald’s narrative offers lots of supercilious discussions about uncouth but generous and well-meaning neighbors, lots of self-congratulatory descriptions of extremely hard work raising farm animals including despised chickens, and lots and lots of purportedly good-natured complaining. All this passes for humor. I guess I’ll skip the movie.

The Author’s Other Books

Here’s the biggest surprise: Betty MacDonald was also the author of a series of wonderful books that I remember fondly from my childhood. Our teachers read them to us and we eventually read them to ourselves. I never connected, until this week, that this author also wrote Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and the sequel Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic. (Now I see that the cover of the first edition of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle actually did mention The Egg and I, but it never made an impression on me then.) Life can be very strange, can’t it. 

In case you haven’t read the books, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle taught kids to behave themselves by hilariously unorthodox rewards or punishments. One that sticks in my memory was the time she caused seeds to sprout in the very dirty ears of a girl who never washed (but learned her lesson). I was amused, but also annoyed at the preachiness that teachers expressed when reading to us, but I recall that on the whole, everyone loved these books. I’ll keep my happy memories by not rereading the books.

Backyard Birds in the Twenty-First Century

Amy Tan, a great author, has documented how she became a birder.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a very pleasant read.

Her sketches and notes delighted me.

Her description reminded me of several places where we have fed hummingbirds by hand.
(From our December, 2024, trip to Trinidad and Tobago).

I was surprised that she wrote about never seeing a hummingbird nest. I especially thought about this very daring bird that lived on electricity in Costa Rica. (Date: January 1, 2024).
As I read, being reminded of birds and birding from my experience contributed to my enjoyment of Tan’s book.

Amy Tan constantly tries to please her avian customers with delicious treats!

I love owls, as does Amy Tan, and I admired her beautiful sketches of them.

Of course Amy Tan’s descriptions made me think of owls I have seen.
(Owl in Costa Rica, December 2023)

Reviews © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters and Deb’s Readerbuzz.