Christmas Present

The book I chose to give myself this year was North Woods, by Daniel Mason, one of my stepdaughter’s favorite reading experiences of the year about to end, but on Christmas Eve I had fallen asleep without finishing Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book I had searched out in my shop’s storage area after reading the same author’s novel about a young orphaned half-gypsy girl, The Diddakoi, which I’d turned to after an interval of other books that succeeded my reading of An Episode of Sparrows. (Phew! Does this count as a binge?) In many ways quite different stories, the three Godden novels in this paragraph have one thing in common: each tell stories of girls and women, and the young girls in Sparrows and Diddakoi and the young woman in Five for Sorrow all have much to overcome in order to find strength in themselves and happiness in their lives. 

So there I was, awake at 5:30 a.m. (as usual) on Christmas morning, with an engrossing novel yet unfinished and waiting for me. Also waiting for me, as she is every morning, was my dear Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist knew I needed. “I could live without a dog, but you can’t, so we need a dog.” Then, “Take that motorcycle money. Go get the puppy. Yes, I’m sure.” This puppy (I still call her that) is three years old now, and she has a clear and steady grip on her momma’s morning routine. First the momma gets up to make coffee and brings the first cup (mug) back to bed, where she sits up with a book or a writing tablet. The puppy curls patiently at my side, un chien croissant, or drapes herself over the momma’s feet, biding her time. When the momma gets up a second time, the puppy knows it’s only for a coffee refill, not really “getting up,” per se. 

"This is subtle, isn't it?" Sunny asks wordlessly.

But when the refill finally begins to cool in the mug, Sunny feels it’s time to make her presence felt with greater immediacy. First she takes a position more demanding of attention than her Sleepy Girl mode. Then, increasingly proactive, she stands up and begins to give kisses. I say “give kisses,” but this move is as much a demand as an offering. Fair enough. She has been a very patient girl for an hour and a half, sometimes even two hours, and that’s long enough! Besides, who can resist a happy, wiggly little dog girl’s kisses? Who would want to try? She's no fool!

My “plans” for the day, laid in advance, were simple. It would be a day at home, just Sunny Juliet and me. We would have our usual morning ramble outdoors before breakfast. Breakfast would be special, with little bites of pancake and bacon for Sunny, besides her usual dog food, and then, while the momma opened a few presents for the two of them, a brand-new beef bone for Sunny to gnaw. And maybe that bone would give the momma some quiet reading time.

Later: waiting for the "Okay!"

Every morning Sunny lets me know when she’s ready for me to get out of bed, even though she knows that going outside is still maybe an hour in the future. If I tarry too long beneath the covers, she lets me know I’m disappointing her (bark! bark! bark!), but once I’m on my feet, her patience returns, and I can have another coffee refill. On this particular Christmas morning I have time to fry up the bacon and assemble separately the dry and wet ingredients for the pancakes I’ll make after our outdoor time, sneaking in a few more pages of my book. 

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is one of Godden’s very Roman Catholic stories. The title refers to the rosary, and the protagonist’s continuing spiritual difficulty over the rosary stems from a painful episode—one of many—in her life journey. Lise, an American, a driver with the Army, arrives in Paris during the joyful chaos of the Liberation. When she becomes lost, on foot, in the crowds, her unintended life in France begins. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the many steps that take her from this beginning to her life in a French convent among a very special order of Dominican nuns, but I will say that the particular convent that comes to be her home sounds very congenial. There is hard work, with long hours, but also farm animals and the beautiful French countryside, and the work, while often dirty, is largely healthy farm work. The sisters eat well, too. Even during fast periods, there are feast days, so while not exactly lenient, the lives of the nuns are not uncompromisingly harsh.

 

In Chapter 8, Godden summarizes a year in the life of the convent called Belle Source, beginning in the earliest signs of spring in February: 

 

The Normandy February was usually wet and cold, but there were days of clear sunshine that reminded Lise of her childhood in England when there might be catkins; the willows turned red and the first snowdrops were out. There were no catkins at Belle Source but she found an early primrose in the bank below the aumônier’s house and a scattering of snowdrops.

 

At New Year’s Eve,

 

Another year was rounded, and nothing anyone could write or say, thought Lise, could tell the whole meaning of each succeeding year, of its unfolding; what is a day-to-day miracle is unexciting because usually it’s so sure—and yet it is a miracle; only if it’s taken away, as in a famine or drought, do we see that.

 

The day-to-day miracle of everyday life is what we so often overlook, isn’t it?

Sunny Juliet: my everyday companion

Living in the country with my dog, operating my little village bookshop, my life has its daily and hourly routines. Christmas Day is a quiet feast day at home. I am enjoying my reading of Rumer Godden and look forward to Daniel Mason’s book. Opening gifts and talking to and texting with family will be a pleasure. Will it sound strange, though, if I say I want to pay special attention today to my dog? The Artist never had a chance to meet her face-to-face, only to see puppy pictures, but this morning as I look at that furry face and into those bright eyes I say to her, “He knew I needed you.” By my side every day and precious in herself, she is a living gift from someone who knew me, who saw me, who loved me. I want to be present with my girl today. She deserves that. She is a miracle. Snow is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Light. Life.

(Now THAT is a Charlie Brown tree!)

-      12/25/2024, 8:25 a.m. And now, out into the snow we go!!!

 

Postscript: Images added before upload and after a lot of activity outdoors. In addition to all the usual neighbors—deer, rabbits, mice, squirrels—this morning we found turkey tracks in the orchard, wandering off into the woods. More miracles all around us! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Turkey track

Turkey trail

She always finds treasures!

Another Holiday -- Now Past....

Holiday spirit on Waukazoo Street

A lot of people mentioned having trouble getting in the Christmas mood without snow. With daytime temperatures up to 50 degrees, it felt more like spring than winter. I was happy that the rain held off until nighttime on the 25^th, because Sunny Juliet was invited to come with me to dinner at the home of friends, and while I was already dubious about how my wild child would behave, “wet dog” would have been a whole ‘nother ball game. 

Is this a December sunrise? Where is the snow?

On Saturday evening (Christmas Eve Eve), I made cheesecake and was up early Sunday morning making the roux for a shrimp gumbo, both of which I took to the home of the friend I’d taken Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks back. He was having a good day, and we had an excellent visit: He not only recognized me but remembered my name! I guess that’s how it goes in early stages of dementia – the person can be very different from one day to another. Anyway, this visit was easier than the last. There was even sunshine.

Morning sun on winter trees

(By the way, you shouldn’t get the wrong idea about the real me. The truth is that taking dinners to a homebound friend was as much for myself as for the friend. Planning and cooking for someone else – thinking about someone else -- takes the focus off holiday aloneness.)

That evening I had a nice, long phone conversation with my son, and in the morning, after Sunny and I got out for plenty of good exercise, my sisters and a couple of friends texted each other greetings of the day. Merry Christmas!!!

Before opening presents....

Sunny and I had another walk and then stopped for a session at the dog park on our way to our friends' house, because I figured there was no such thing as “too much exercise” before Sunny visited indoors in a new place. How would she be, amid beautiful holiday decorations and while humans were having a meal? Oh, my heartstrings! She was such a good girl, I could hardly believe it! Only when we got back home, three or four hours later, did I realize I had forgotten to give her the calming treats beforehand, and then I was even more impressed with and grateful for her good company manners.

Good dog and her dog mom got matching cozy blankets!

Christmas Day 2023 for me wrapped up with finishing a Steve Hamilton mystery novel and beginning, before falling asleep, a novel by Susan Straight, one of my new favorite fiction authors of the year. And so ended my second Christmas without the Artist. I can’t say I didn’t revisit memories of other Christmases, especially 2021, our last together and a cozy, contented, happy day – David and Peasy and me -- but this most recent one was good, thanks to friends and my little canine companion. 

Now in the last week of the year I find myself looking forward to closing out this year’s Books Read list, along with this year’s business accounts, and starting fresh with new, clean pages. As always with election years (especially recent ones), I’m apprehensive about what the next 12 months will bring, but there’s no way to put a hold on Time, is there? So here is my last quarter’s list of the year, books read in October, November, and December 2023:

 

129.        Hull, Cindy L. Human Sacrifice (fiction)

130.        Minka, Dzidra Kepitis. The Empty Sleeve (nonfiction)

131.        Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed (fiction)

132.        Dimaline, Cherie. Empire of Wild (fiction)

133.        Shipman, Viola. Famous in a Small Town (fiction)

134.        Straight, Susan. I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (fiction)

135.        Bourdain, Anthony. A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (nonfiction)

136.        Markoe, Merrill. What the Dogs Have Taught Me and Other Amazing Things I’ve Learned (nonfiction)

137.        May, Katherine. Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age (nonfiction)

138.        Conley, Susan. Paris Was the Place (fiction)

139.        McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World(nonfiction)

140.        Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. To Speak For the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest (nonfiction)

141.        Lee, Leslie. We Are the Land: Ireland, 2^nd ed. (nonfiction )

142.        Nevin, David. Meriwether (fiction)

143.        Wickens, Kim. Lexington (nonfiction)

144.        Mosley, Walter. Walkin’ the Dog (fiction)

145.        Airgood, Ellen. The Education of Ivy Blake (fiction)

146.        Enright, Elizabeth. Gone-Away Lake (fiction)

147.        Smith, Alexander McCall. The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse (fiction)

148.        Campbell, Bonnie Jo. The Waters (fiction – ARC)

149.        Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther (fiction)

150.        Lee, Leslie. The Hole Made by a Waterfall: Ireland (nonfiction)

151.        Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (nonfiction)

152.        Hamerton, P.G. The Unknown River (nonfiction)

153.        Maugham, W. Somerset. Cakes & Ale (fiction)

154.        Casebeer, Karen. Calling: A Northwoods Mystery (fiction)

155.        Garvin, Ann. I Like You Just Fine When You Aren’t Around (fiction)

156.        Williams, Justin Michael & Shelly Tygielski. How We Ended Racism: Realizing a New Possibility in One Generation (nonfiction)

157.        Ariyoshi, Sawako. The Twilight Years (fiction)

158.        Godwin, Gail. The Odd Woman (fiction)

159.        Hamilton, Steve. Let It Burn (fiction)

160.        Straight, Susan. Mecca (fiction)

Happy New Year, Friends!

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

 

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

I'll explain this further down.

Here I am (since November) in what is at present my winter home, far from Michigan, a little rented cabin in an Arizona ghost town in the Sulphur Springs Valley, mountains looming all around, where a beautiful sunrise occurs just about every morning and a breathtaking sunset at the end of each day. Southeast Arizona’s landscape is austere and can seem unforgiving, forbidding, even foreboding, but in fact, the land is characterized by indifference rather than hostility, and I find comfort in Nature’s absence of malice. I also enjoy, here in the ghost town, sufficient distance between human habitations that we don’t often rub up against each other the wrong way.

 

My own small living space, large enough to share with my canine companion, in previous years accommodated me, our dog, and my dear husband, the love of my life. Now, there’s just me and the dog, and I miss David every minute! Make no mistake about that! Although in many ways he is still here, all around me -- in his paintings, his hats and boots, his books on the shelves with mine, unlimited memories, and constant thoughts. Every day I wear his watch and one of his favorite belts, and often I’ll reach for one of his caps or pull on a pair of his socks.

Me and my girl

On the morning of Christmas Eve, my neighbor and I took our usual long morning dog walk with Sunny Juliet. We hiked high enough in the foothills to reach ocotillo territory, and then quickly turned downhill again so Sunny would not disturb cows that had climbed high on the slope for the first sunlight of the day. Due to Midwest weather, my friend’s December 22^nd flight to Detroit was cancelled, and I’d been reading books featuring travels in Mexico and Spain, re-igniting what had been until recently fairly dormant wanderlust. And so it was, as we compared notes on travels planned and desired, we decided on the spur of the moment to drive down to Whitewater Draw that very day to see the wintering sandhill cranes. 

Cranes by the thousand are very noisy, but I have always found their clattering, purling calls joyful and comforting. There were many other birds to see, as well. American shovelers, both male and female, have coloring reminiscent of mallards back in Michigan, though with much longer bills. Sweet little black coots scoot along with bobbing heads and then dive. My friend’s sudden excited cry of “Red bird!” drew my attention to a vermilion flycatcher. One waterside tree held a woodpecker (Ladderback? We didn’t have binoculars with us!), and if you look closely at the sign in the photograph below you’ll see what I think is a black phoebe.

Need telephoto for good photo of black phoebe, if that's what this is!

Long trail to largest flocks....

At the very far end of the longest path, even without the binoculars we had forgotten (along with field guides we’d also forgotten, so eager were we to get on the road), we were able to see a long line of about 100-150 snow geese, hunkered down near another even larger crowd of more sandhill cranes. I don’t ever remember seeing snow geese before, here or anywhere else, so that was exciting. 

That white line in the distance is a flock of snow geese.

 

Whitewater Draw was one of the Artist’s favorite places in Cochise County, its water scenes so reminiscent of the watery landscapes he loved to paint, that whenever we were there together he would ask me repeatedly to photograph certain scenes. He never painted directly from photographs, but he liked looking at them for inspiration, so on that sunny Christmas Eve afternoon I kept stopping to photograph scenes for him, a habit I’ll probably never break. 

 

That night I made the oyster stew (just for myself) that I’d planned for Christmas Eve supper. Lots of cubed potatoes, sliced celery, onions, mushrooms, evaporated milk, a little coarse kosher salt, and a small can of oysters. It was good. I had a second bowl. Then on my way to bed, rather than turning off my Christmas tree lights, I picked up the big platter that holds the tiny potted Norfolk pine with its battery-powered tiny lights and moved it over to the bedroom corner of the cabin where I could look up from my nighttime reading and see it from pillowland. In the morning I brought my 5 a.m. coffee and a cold blueberry pancake back to bed and shared the pancake with Sunny. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “What would I do without you?”

 

My Christmas morning reading was the second chapter of The Mays of Ventadorn, by W. S. Merwin, a journey and exploration into a particular strain of troubadour poetry but, for me, also the story of Merwin’s finding a home away from home in a part of France that I too fell in love with.

 

…My vocation as a tourist has always been dubious. Reading a guidebook and then glancing up to identify what the resume has been summarizing is likely to seem to me, quite soon, like an exercise in alienation. I am more given to imagining what it might be like to spend time in a given spot, to get to know the sounds and the light, the people and the faces of the buildings, and how some of it had come to look the way it did.  

 

-      W. S. Merwin. The Mays of Ventadorn

 

This is the way I have always loved to travel and the way the Artist and I traveled together, “imagining what it might be like to spend time” here and there, which is why having a vacation “home base” – a hotel in Paris or in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the ghost town cabin here in Cochise County, Arizona – and making daily explorations out from that base was our perfect idea of travel, enriched and expanded always by armchair travel with our beloved books, often read aloud to each other, in whole or in part.

 

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, my regular hiking partner and I walked over across the highway for dinner with other neighbors and later walked home under a new moon in a lavender sky.

Then only two days later, again without planning ahead to do so, we took one of our longer, more ambitious hikes here in the ghost town environs, gaining about 400 feet in elevation and reaching an entirely different life zone, where green-leafed oak trees flourished. It was so exciting! Sunny proved herself an able rock dog, too -- explanation for my first photograph on this post.

And the day after that I accompanied my friend on a long, rainy, stressful expressway drive – to pick up her new puppy! All in all, quite a week! 

 

Now as 2022 draws to a close I look around this little cabin at my modest belongings and feel comfortably at home, lucky to be here, safe and warm, lucky to have little Sunny Juliet, to have good neighbors and blue skies, enough to eat, more than enough to read (no such thing as “too many books” in my lexicon!), and family and friends who keep in touch across the miles. It would be easy -- and sometimes, I admit, the temptation is more than I can resist -- for me to look at 2022 as a catalog of loss, but I guess if I have a single resolution for 2023, it is to continue to count my blessings daily and to recount them whenever I start feeling blue. But here's the tricky thing. Although people say, “Count your blessings,” they generally say it when a person is feeling more blue than blessed -- because why would you need reminding otherwise? – and yet it’s when I’m already feeling blessed and contented that I am more likely to enumerate positive reasons for good feelings. Does that sound familiar to anyone else? It’s those blue hours and moods that are difficult, although heaven knows -- and I am certainly aware -- that in this life I have been a very lucky woman.

 

Last Books (Almost!) Read in the Year 2022

 

129. Steinbeck, John. A Log From the Sea of Cortez (nonfiction)

The pattern of a book, or a day, or a trip, becomes a characteristic design. The factors in a trip by boat, the many-formed personality phases all shuffled together, changing a little to fit into the box and yet bringing their own lumps and corners, make the trip. And from all these factors your expedition has a character of its own, so that one may say of it, “That was a good, kind trip.” Or, “That was a mean one.” The character of the whole becomes defined and definite. 

 

Steinbeck’s chartered boat expedition with Ed Ricketts and crew to collect marine specimens in the Sea of Cortez between Baja California and the Mexican mainland in 1941 is as full of portraits of nature and philosophical topics as it is observations of the land and people encountered. Did you know that Steinbeck studied marine biology in college? Any fan of Cannery Row will find this book fascinating!

 

 

130. Lee, Laurie. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (nonfiction) 

Ever since childhood I’d imagined myself walking down a white dusty road through groves of orange trees to a city called Seville. The fantasy may have been induced by the Cotswold damp, or by something my mother had told me, but it was one of several such clichés which had brought me to Spain….

 

Laurie Lee’s writing is magical. He walks from his home village to London, travels by boat to Spain, walks across Spain – like a mad dog Englishman, without a hat, courting sunstroke! But who else has ever written like this? 

I was awakened next morning by the high clear voice of a young boy singing in the street below. The sound lifted me gradually with a swaying motion as though I was being cradled on silken cords. It was cool crisp singing, full-throated and pure, and surely the most painless way to be awakened – and as I lay listening, with the sun filtering over me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

 

131. Merwin, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn (nonfiction)

…I was twenty-six, with no money at all and a house in the depths of the country in France. In all the years that followed, the house, the remains of the farm, the village, became a constant, insistent part of my life, invaluable, cherished, demanding, inescapable. 

 

(from late in Chapter 2)

 

…One attractive element in the farming life that had evolved by then in the Quercy was an unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture – the growing of more or less everything. It was an immemorial system encouraged by the variations of the crumpled landscape with its small irregular fields fitted into the stony contours, but deplored by theorists as inefficient…. Most families possessed a few hectares of upland woods, a few hectares of open pasture in different places, a few hectares of arable land, which they farmed on a careful four-year system of rotation, a sizable number of ritually tended walnut trees, at least one vineyard, and at least one vegetable garden…. They grew much of what they ate, and all that they fed to their animals. They sold walnuts, plums, milk, wool, calves, lambs, cheese, and they raised tobacco some years as a cash crop. They thought that was the way it had always been….

 

(from early in Chapter 3)

 

You can see how for me, this was another book with subject matter and language to work magic on my soul.

  

All three of the books I’ve quoted from above are books I could quote from endlessly, so I have restrained myself and leave you only with these scanty passages to illustrate, I hope, the wonders provided in these priceless works by John Steinbeck, Laurie Lee, and W.S. Merwin.

 

132. Smith, Betty. Maggie-Now (fiction). I have read Maggie-Now almost as many times as I have read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the author’s most famous novel, and I love them equally. Highly recommended, both!

 

133. Robertson, Thomas A. A Southwestern Utopia (nonfiction). An excessive accumulation of facts that nevertheless failed to cohere into any kind of convincing atmosphere. Disappointing but no doubt important reading for researchers into experimental utopian communities. 

December disappointment: holiday lights and decorations in Willcox taken down way too soon!

 

Unexpected thrill this last week of the year: Western bluebirds at my feeders here in Dos Cabezas!

Life -- it is a mixed bag, my friends!

 

Happy new year

and 

happy reading in 2023!!!

“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like…”

Early morning, and I sit happily here under my Christmas tree! It’s only a foot and a half tall, but it perches atop one of my bookcases, so when I sit in the closest chair to that bookcase, as I am doing this morning, I look up at the lighted tree above. Yes, lighted! Our grandson’s family sent a string of tiny battery-operated lights just the right size for an 18” tree, so after sunset last night and early this morning I turned on the tree lights and am absurdly pleased. Adding to the effect and my happiness is the shape of the lights: each one is a miniature Eiffel Tower!

Next to the tree, what started out as a neat stack of holiday cards (actually, in the beginning I was standing them up until there were too many for the space) is now a sweet, slippy, messy pile, telling me every time I look that way that faraway friends have remembered me. There are also little presents that arrived early, and rather than put them away I arranged them on top of the bookcase where they make me smile, reminding me of family who love me.

 

On the table are pots of poinsettias that a neighbor bought for a dinner party and then passed along to me. So bright and beautiful! 

As is true for so many of you, I was happy to have the winter solstice arrive and to know that our hours of daylight will now grow longer and longer, but at the same time, with lights on my little tree I look forward to the dark of evening and don’t mind the dark of early morning, either. 

 

Funny how much difference a few tiny lights can make, isn’t it? 

Happy Holidays –

Let your little lights shine!