Sunday with the family

 

Bonsai at the Matthaei Botanical Garden

Water lilies in the greenhouse.

Bonsai in bloom.

Inside the Bonsai Garden

Left to right: Tom, Len, Miriam, Evelyn, and Hayden

Alice in her living room.

Miriam and Hayden Cook Dinner

Chopped kale and kimchi.

Purple rice, mushrooms, cabbage, and sweet potatoes

Perfect easy-over eggs

Evelyn and Tom will drive home tomorrow morning, and Miriam and Hayden will fly home in the evening. We’ll be left here — though of course Alice also lives here in Ann Arbor.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Birds at Kensington Metropark

 

Because people feed birds along the boardwalk, they are quite unafraid, like this dove.

The red-winged blackbird loved the seeds that several people were offering them.
Park policy permits feeding seeds to small birds like these.

A muskrat was very close to the boardwalk. (Not a bird)

This sandhill crane was missing one foot and part of a wing. He was right on the path.
We assume he survives because people feed him and protect him.

A crane family with this chick were patrolling the parking lot at the picnic area.

They closely approached our table, but we didn’t feed them as it’s not allowed.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Visitors today

 Birds

Beside a small lake outside Ann Arbor: a kingfisher.

A heron near the water. We drove our visitors out to see them. Miriam has recently developed an interest in bird watching..

The swans again — the cygnets are growing up.

Miriam Cooks

After we saw the swans, Miriam cooked dinner.

Dinner: baked salmon, purple rice, braised cabbage, and sautéed cabbage.

Dessert that Alice brought from
Cannelle Ann Arbor 

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Complicated People

Today’s novel is The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. It’s about one man and his inner life. Here’s a passage that captures the man and the way that Strout portrays him

“[He] thought that now, after all these years, he was finally becoming a grownup. What did he mean by that? That he was finally beginning to understand the multitudinous aspect of people. He was amazed by it, really, now that he thought about it. In his study of history, he had learned about the leaders, and the various groups involved, but he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.

“And he understood that it could make a person lonely; people had to take and give to one another whatever they could. If it was not enough…Well, then it meant one just had to be a grownup.” (p. 185)

This book is about complicated people. I have never really liked complicated people by which I mean people who take their emotional states and their feelings about other people too seriously, and constantly ruminate about them. And who worry about being a grownup (or not). When I was an adolescent, I was surrounded by such people, as it’s a common trait of adolescents. Most of the reasonable people I knew outgrew it during college or shortly afterwards. In this novel all the supposed grownups are complicated people who love wallowing in whatever they feel or what they fear or what they think other people fear about them. I don’t like them. But I did read the entire book, since it’s not very long.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

A Few Good Things to Eat

 

A Michigan Strawberry (shown previously but too good to skip)

About to cook chicken with snap peas and onions

Pancakes

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Waiting for the shoe to drop

Meaning of “Drop” in Slang & Casual Contexts

• Release / Publish: Commonly used online for publicly releasing a new product, album, or media

This usage of “drop” is less than a decade old (according to googling). I am still trying to get used to it.

My Life This Week

 Wildlife

These turkeys are wild, but they seem to like to graze on well-tended lawns.

A visitor to my kitchen landed on the kitchen sink faucet.

Outdoors

Along the Huron River

Graffiti under the bridge in Gallup Park.

At the canoe livery

Keeping the river clean.

Swallows nesting on the bridge.

A paddle boat.

Damaged viewing platform further up the river.

Good Food

Waffles

Alice brought treats from White Lotus Bakery.

Michigan Strawberries

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Martin Walker: “A Murder in Springtime”

 

A Murder in Springtime is Martin Walker’s latest police mystery, as always starring Bruno, the police chief of a small town in (idyllic) rural France. With each successive Bruno book, Walker seems to become increasingly interested in the food that’s served at village festivals and that Bruno cooks for himself and his friends (and even for his dog). Walker spends less and less effort on the murder mystery side of the book. In this one, I felt as if solving a crime is less the main point of the book than ever. The real focus is a méchoui — that is, communally roasting a lamb on a spit over an open fire. This ritual is popular with French people who live in the countryside or visit it for a long summer stay, mainly at one’s second home outside of Paris.

In the spirit of the novel, I’ll skip describing the plot and proceed directly to a quote about the méchoui — the all-day cooking task was performed by Bruno (always dedicated to culinary activity) and several of his close friends in the village:

“The morning passed in a blur of activity. Momu taught Fabien how to build the spit for an aboveground méchoui, with Jack Crimson watching, offering unsolicited and inexpert advice. The four men made fast work of carting the lamb down from Pamela’s dining room table in its insulated box, the task made easier when Bruno pointed out they could drain the melted ice onto the lawn and lighten their load. Once the animal had been prepped, speared and hung over the hot embers, Momu asked Pamela for some large mixing bowls. Into them went several liters of cooking oil and his magic box of herbs from his car. He banished the others indoors while he set about preparing his secret baste, keeping a watchful eye on their makeshift furnace.” (p. 194)

In a way, it’s surprising that so little development of the plot can result in such a long book. If you’ve never read this series, I strongly suggest that you start with some of the earlier mysteries about Bruno and the idyllic village. 

A Méchoui in 1989

A photo from our experience with a méchoui in 1989 

at a country house in France. The revolutionary hat was part of

a celebration of 200 years since the French Revolution.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander; photo © 1989

”The Typing Lady”

 

I have read around half of The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki (published last week) and I’m enjoying it. The story titled “An Anthropologist’s Kid” was a really good capture of being somebody’s kid. It managed to see life from both a parent’s and a child’s viewpoint — in particular, the perspective of a faculty brat —

“In the winter we played in one of the empty seminar rooms or in my dad’s office. The secretaries let us type on their typewriters. They gave us scrap paper to draw on, and sometimes, if we begged them, they let us help run the mimeograph machine. That was our favorite. We loved the smell of the purple ink. You could almost get high on it.”

I’m planning to finish this book after I read the brand-new Martin Walker book! Bruno, chief of police is back today. 

More by Ruth Ozeki 

 I’ve read all of them, but not reviewed every one of them.

Review © 2026 mae sander

“I Who Have Never Known Men”

Existentialist literature pares down human experience to its barest existence. In my opinion, that’s exactly the effect of this novel — I Who Have Never Known Men —by author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012). The stark reality of a world in which only one human being remains alive and conscious is the focus of this rather short novel. The character (never named) grapples with fundamental questions that in fact don’t bother most of us who lead an ordinary social existence. She says: “I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.” (p. 5)

I admired this novel for the economy with which the author uses words and formulates ideas, getting to questions of existence without being too pretentious. I admired the way a very bleak and unfriendly landscape became a key part of the narrator’s seeking in an absurd world. It makes me think of the classic example of existential fiction, the novel Woman in the Dunes by Japanese author Kobo Abe and the French film based on it.

The existentialists had an acute sense of the absurd, and the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men puts it thus: “Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.” (p. 55)

And near the end of the book she wonders: “What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive? (p. 159) This is a powerful book, though I think it implicitly claims to be deep and profound to a greater extent than maybe it actually accomplishes. The AI summary from google says: “The book is a modern classic of feminist speculative fiction, known for its haunting atmosphere and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. ”

Speaking of Frida Kalho…

Frida Kalho: Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943

In the Guardian today: an article about a three-course feast inspired by Frida Kahlo. The author, Andrew Gilcrist, writes:

“I’m in Mexico City with a Tate delegation just as the huge jacaranda trees are blooming purple and violet across its parks and boulevards – to follow in Kahlo’s footsteps ahead of Frida: The Making of an Icon, a show of more than 30 of her works at Tate Modern in London that seems destined to be a summer blockbuster, adding yet more fuel to Fridamania.”