Hey Good Looking!
Dear Good Looking Friends,
I've noted it -- everyone who enters Birchbark Books is really good looking. I don't know why it is, but just a fact. And particularly when clad in a Birchbark Books organic cotton T-shirt of any vintage everybody is good looking. That is why we are asking you to send your picture wearing a Birchbark T-shirt to our Facebook page. We have several editions of our T-shirt now, each one produced for us by that fabled local company, Monkey In a Dryer. We have the birchbark brown, the robin's egg blue, the erotically charged graphite gray, the current deep Currant, the current Lucky Blue, and I can't remember what else. If you've got the inclination, please include your favorite book, dog, or tree. Please tell us where the picture was taken, as long as you were there legally. Truly, we'd love to meet you wherever you are!
This is Tree Month -- have you noticed? The trees in Minnesota have now fully leafed out and this week just past the solstice they are in such glory it gives a person green brain. Time to read Eaarth by Bill McKibben to find out what you can do to help your best tree friend. We cannot exist without trees, and they would certainly do better without us, but they continue to be the most generous living beings on earth. I'm reading Keepers of the Trees by Ann Linnea, meeting people who devote themselves to the love of trees. One of my favorite characters in the book is Merve Wilkinson, who devoted himself to a tree-lot and logged it over the span of fifty years in such a profoundly thoughtful way that there is now more wood in the forest than when he started. He figured out how to sustain himself, his family, and the forest and has educated people ever since.
We have books on Remarkable Trees, More Remarkable Trees, Tree Houses -- as I'm sitting here writing the late afternoon sun is flowing down through the still, tiny leaves of my favorite locust tree just outside the window. I know people don't like these trees much because they have big thorns. Yet their blossoms are swooningly fragrant, they're unkillable, and unfathomably lovely. But really, isn't every tree helplessly gorgeous, just like the people who come into Birchbark Books?
Book People! Thanks for your support this summer! Oh, before I forget, I'd also like to celebrate the Green Team who have made such a beautiful impact on the other side of the street from the bookstore. Come and see! People gardening what was once a small wasteland of asphalt -- children learning to grow food -- this is truly inspiring. Subject of next blog . . .
