nature's way

Driving to the cottage for my family's Christmas Saturday we crawled through fog. Soon after arriving I went out to catch how it softened the lake on my digital sensor, which is good because through the day the fog thickened, and the lake disappeared. Warming temps and melting snow made a fairyland - blind and mysterious. When I shot these photos it was raining hard, so my brother Jim loaned me his wide-brimmed hat. That worked so well I think I have to get me one, and another for Mr. Nikon.
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The next day I was leaning back in the hot tub at home, before the sun rose. The wind was gusting at 50 mph, and I was fearful that a branch might bust and fly onto my head. But none did, and I lay there watching the high treetops sway and bob in the wind.
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The weather has been consistently inconsistent all week - ice, snow, rain, sun, wind, fog, warm, cold. Such is Michigan.
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After two days back on the farm I took a morning walk in the sunny meadow.
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Twelve inches of snow had melted in some places, leaving flattened Timothy grass, goldenrod, leaves and the rest of autumn's scattered bits. The sun shone on, and through, morning hoarfrost.




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A caveman must have used a leaf to paint this cave drawing on a crusty snow canvas. I love it. What an artist!-To me it looks like a mouse that's just eaten a snake.



Oh how pristinely the deer stepped.



Fallen sumac looked like flowers blooming winter petals or stamens.



And a friendly surprise: a wee pocket gopher ran across the path. Then he crouched shivering while I snapped away inches from his curious eyes, poor creature.


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Trees, plants and animals - leaning, watching and flexing under the sky's torrents - show how to tolerate the conditions any new day brings. All that bending and reaching without breaking, like doing Pilates stretches so I don't freeze up with age. Ah, close my eyes, pump the air bicyle with my legs above my head, like a locust or birch tree letting its branches bend in the wind.

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family photo

Between eating homemade chicken and noodles and Don's Bûche de Noël (Christmas cake), playing Settlers of Catan, romping in the snow, listening to music, and watching movies ("Iron Man" for one - it's good), we managed a family pic with the help of Mr. Tripod. Peter processed this one with an old look on his Mac. We all wish you a Happy New Year! Left to right: me, Don, Peter, Lesley, and Brian.

I wore the earrings Peter picked up for me in St. John, New Brunswick that Gwen made. Aren't they beautiful? They made me feel tres elegante, like when I was a little girl playing dress-up with bobby pins clipped together and dangling from my ears, only better.

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resolution: writing space and time

I intend to do more writing in 2009, and it's important to figure out when and where my best times and spaces are for that. I decided I need Rudyard Kipling's study after seeing it in a slideshow of authors' writing spaces at the online Architectural Digest, December 2008 issue. Is that too much to ask?

Ok, I could settle for Dylan Thomas' water and tree room on the cliff or what it reminds me of: l'atelier: rustic and sort of like a playhouse.-

Rudyard Kipling's study:


The Nobel Prize-winning writer Rudyard Kipling’s study at Bateman’s, in England, where he moved in 1902. The surrounding Sussex countryside would become the backdrop for later works, including Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies.

This copy of Puck has illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

from Puck's Song (read Kipling's whole poem here)

Trackway and Camp and City lost,

Salt Marsh where now is corn;

Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,

And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare.

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Dylan Thomas' water and tree room on the cliff:

“A fresh beginning,” poet Dylan Thomas said of moving to the Boat House in the coastal village of Laugharne, in South Wales. Above: Thomas’s writing shed—his “water and tree room on the cliff”—displays pictures of D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman.

from Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry, . . .

. . . (finish Thomas' poem recollecting his childhood on a farm here; if you've never read "Fern Hill" please take a few minutes to read it for its lyricism alone, it is so beautiful, one of my faves, very "dingle starry"!)

Both "Puck" and "Fern Hill" are about country life in childhood, reflecting on farm life nostalgically. I think there is a little farm in all of us, and lucky me, I am spending my second childhood on one.

l'atelier, our studio that Don and Peter converted from a chicken coop - before we had chickens. To answer Shicat, this building is still a studio. Don rejuvenated another coop in the big green barn for his brood.

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gift to the world

Remember when you were young,

and if you acted too full of yourself your friend would say,

"What do you think you are, God's gift to the world?"

Well, you are a gift to the world. The reason for the season

isn't only Jesus' birth. It's your birth, and mine.

The blood in our veins is a cosmological mystery.

What keeps us alive? Whether it's God

or some other light, every morning we wake up with new baby eyes,

fresh with brightness for the world and possibilities.

This pin is a cheap piece of costume jewelry,

yet to me it is as lustrous as Harry Winston diamonds.

The best of what you create and give is free, but so valuable,

because no one else sees how you see

or gives what you give.

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You are a gift to the world.

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Merry Christmas

Krismas Mubaarak (Urdu)

Hyvaa joulua (Finnish)

Feliz Navidad (Spanish)

God Jul (Swedish)

Niibaa' anami'egiizhigad (Ojibwa)

Fröhliche Weihnachten (German)

Nathar Puthu Varuda Valthukkal (Tamil)

Joyeux Noël (French)

Noeliniz Kutlu Olsun (Turkish)

Shubh Naya Baras (Hindi - Happy New Year)

Posa varushada shubashayagalu (Tulu - Happy New Year)

Cestit Bozic (Bosnian)

Maligayang Pasko (Filipino)

Nollaig chridheil (Irish)

Souksan wan Christmas (Thai)

Mirary noely sambatra (Malagasy)

Kala Christouyenna (Greek)

Vrolijk Kerstfeest (Dutch)

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I hope I didn't miss anyone who comes here!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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winter solstice

On this shortest day of the year, we look out through the front window, between peeling porch posts, over the humble spirea's snowflake blossoms, and on to the neighbor's spruces across the road. I love the farm in all the seasons, but winter is the best, and this day must be the bestest as it's the winter-i-est of them all.

Inside, on the sofa in front of the window, oh dear, the fabric is starting to fray on the edges. I can never replace this fabric. Even if I could afford it, I doubt I could find anything like it. Horsemen trot along in a perpetually fruited orchard while farmhands pick pears. Quite fitting for the farm. (There's another image with detail, below.)

Some women meet here on the sofa too, though you can't see them. The couch belonged to Grandma Olive, a woman unknown to me except in stories and objects that traveled many miles and decades to get here. She was like Martha Stewart, with the same impeccable standards for design and beauty, and also lacking a bit in warmth. She died when I was four. My mom's dad (stepdad actually, her dad was far away, but her stepdad adopted her) remarried another woman after Olive died. We called her "Aunt Edith" - a wealthy, distant woman who is also represented on this sofa in the cushion she needlepointed with a daffodil. Edith didn't have children of her own (though she had one stillborn), and my memories of her are chilly and sharp. I don't have much to judge Olive and Edith with, except stories filtered through my family and a few memories of feeling inferior to rich relations. So why do I treasure their objects? These cushions are stuffed with down feathers, so soft you have to fluff them after sitting. Every time I do that I see Edith's chauffeur fluffing them when he came in before breakfast to ask when she needed the car. I'm still that wide-eyed preacher's child in a corner taking it all in, but no longer wishing for a life not meant for me. Years have changed the tools I use for measuring and observing. I know my own sharp edges that need softening, and I see how people's life choices are sometimes made out of pain. Olive was divorced young, she struggled with a temper, and when we packed up Mom's house I found tender letters she wrote to Mom lamenting her own failures as a mother and grandma. Also I can see how Edith's inability to have children might have turned her toward travel and material things for meaning. Even so, there is life in the stitches she made.

Now I lie back on the sofa while I meet Lesley on the phone, in the laps of Olive, Edith, and my mom - and feel all of us warm and soft.

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Today's Christmas decoration:

These Matroyshka stacking dolls observe from the piano, behind Grandma Olive's sofa.

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Lord Nelson & Sicilienne

I picked up these ornaments for Peter and Lesley in London's National Gallery gift shop in July 2005, just a week after terrorist bombs blew up a bus killing 52 people two blocks from the university dorm where I was staying. Our students studying film in Britain had heard and felt the blast. After I arrived a week later the air was still numb with shock, and with every siren's howl I watched Londoners on the sidewalk pause in suspense. The sailor here is Lord Horatio Nelson, I think, although I don't know that he lost an eye. It occurs to me now that Lord Nelson's arm lost in war is fitting for the time in which I bought these. Stupid wars.

I'm afraid I don't remember who the red dressed woman is supposed to be from the London gallery, but I've named her Sicilienne, after Gabriel Fauré's: Sicilienne Op.78 (Pelléas Et Mélisande) in the YouTube below, performed on cello by Julian Lloyd Webber (son of William Lloyd, and younger brother of Andrew Lloyd), and on piano by John Lenahan. Brilliant art.
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Fauré wrote Sicilienne for the fairy tale play Pelléas Et Mélisande written by Maurice Maeterlinck who believed that human behavior is guided by two principles: Eros (erotic love) and Anteros (punisher of those who scorn love).
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Love and revenge. Art and war. Brilliance and stupidity. That about sums up human history. I wish for more love-art-brilliance in the year ahead.




We're in the major snowstorm that has swept across the country - expecting 10-12 inches of snow. I hope everyone out there is safe, warm and fed. I've added these photos to show the snow sliding off the barn roof. Then the last one is from inside the deck window looking out at Don going to tend to his ladies in the coop to see how they're faring in the storm and also gather eggs.

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ANN (-ual) ARBOR

Monday Inge and I made our annual Christmas shopping trek to Ann Arbor, an hour away from the farm.

We browsed Crazy Wisdom bookstore with all its pretties like these soaps on the right. We sipped coffee in the tea room on the second floor. We ransacked books, some for gifts, and some for ourselves.-

Books I leafed through:

~ Immersion Travel USA has ideas for visiting a place long enough to really get to know it, and maybe to volunteer and make a difference where you stay.

~ iBrain is Dr. Gary Small's book about how technology is shaping the way 20-somethings' minds develop, function and interpret information.

~ John Lennon: The Life is Philip Norman's new in depth biography of the Beatle.

I can't tell you which ones I bought, it's a secret.

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A few c-c-c o - l - d blocks away is another have-to stop: Hollander's School of Book and Paper Arts. You can buy everything you need to make a book. I've never done that. But I am in paper heaven walking the wood floor between racks of decorative papers, some of them home-made. In fact I start going into a trance, a defense so my systems don't overload with so much beauty.

Is there anything more full of promise than a blank journal? Well, maybe a baby.

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It was freezing cold outside, windchill around 0°F (-18°C), so we didn't stay in the mini windy city as long as usual. Didn't even stay for dinner. Too bad the Michigan Theater didn't have any matinees. Ok I have to explain why the photo below is so good. Those of you not from Michigan may not realize that two of the universities in this state are major rivals: Michigan State University (aka "Michigan State" or "State" or "MSU" - GO GREEN!) and the University of Michigan (aka "Michigan" or "U of M" or "UM" - GO BLUE!). I could write an essay on the cultural phenom between these two schools. To summarize: Michigan State (where I work and earned my BA - woohoo!) is in East Lansing and began as an agricultural university referred to often and a bit condescendingly as "Moo U." The University of Michigan is in Ann Arbor and is known for its law school, med school and other high falutin hoity toity snobby entities. (Oh! Did I say that? Forgive me, Ginnie! You're one of the nice, humble alums.) They are both excellent research institutions, but there is little love lost between the schools' sports fans, and otherwise. Anyway, I could go on and on. But I enjoy walking up Liberty Street in Ann Arbor - home of "Michigan" - in the photo below, and looking at the two theater marquees that spell out "Michigan State" - bwaahhaaa.

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BTW, this Michigan Theater is a wonderful historic artsy icon. You can still hear organ music before the movie starts; the 1927 pipe organ rises up from under the stage.

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Today's ornament:

Dorothy: "There's no place like home."

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Florida ruby reds

Letitia wants beach? Letitia gets beach.













I got this old tablecloth from my mom, although I am guessing it came from her mother, Grandma Olive.






When I was a kid I watched my parents dust halves of grapefruit - the yellow variety - with sugar before eating. Then in adolescence I watched my red-headed sister Susan eat ruby red grapefruit from Florida without sugar, always exclaiming "It doesn't need sugar, it's so sweet!" To myself I said, "notta chance." I was pretty sure the real reason she liked them was that they were pink, her favorite color, which sadly she didn't wear for years because you weren't supposed to if you had red hair. Finally as an adult I tried the ruby, and all I can say is, what a shame all those wasted years. If you don't eat the pith, the fruit is scrumptiously sweet.

In April a few years ago Don and I arrived at my niece (Susan's daughter BTW) and her husband's house in Sarasota, Florida, for a few days, pulled into their driveway, opened the car door, and wham! Got smacked in the face with a soft pillow of the sweetest fragrance I'd smelled since jasmine in Pasadena. A blossoming grapefruit tree arches over their driveway. I kept trying to think of excuses to run to the store just so I could get in and out of the car and fill my head with that intoxication again.

I may live in a Winter Wonderland, but this time of year one of the sweetest treats is eating pink grapefruit from Florida.

Proper grapefruit utensils help build anticipation. With the grapefruit knife carve and separate the flesh from membranes and pith, first with the double blade end along straight sides, then with the curved blade along the round edge. Don gave me this knife for Christmas the year I remember as the best gift bonanza ever: all cool stuff for the kitchen.

When that's done a grapefruit spoon has a sharpish point that helps you scoop out any remaining attached flesh down in those triangular valleys so you can slurp the juicy fruit into your mouth. This one is from another Susie - my dad's sister, Auntie Sue.




Grapefruit has to be eaten in a bowl, then don't forget to squ- e - e -e -ze it out and drink the last drops of juice when you've dug out every morsel of fruit you can. Oops, don't choke on the seeds.





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Today's ornaments:

Most years we picked up ornaments for Lesley and Peter that matched. They were pretty little when they got these stuffed nursery toys. Lesley's dolly has a lovely ivory porcelain face (and so does Lesley).

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slow winter

Almost everything slows, like precipitation taking its time getting to the ground in the form of snowflakes. Not the finches though - quickly scooping thistle seed into their gullets, flashing glances to see if they're being watched. But the photographer is slow and stealthy, the lens is long, and they are captured. I'm grateful all we have to collect out-of-doors these days are photographs and firewood from the corncrib - the lefthand building above. (Don collects eggs, they're sort of indoors in the coop. Thank you, ladies.) Thank you, farmers in a warm climate, and truck drivers who bring food to our stores.

In 1st grade Peter punched airy holes in the tree, below, and pasted colored tissue paper behind to glow through like ornaments. Don's 3rd graders reprised this decoration last week with wreaths, trees and snowflakes. Click on it to see the colors better.

Winter slowing satisfies a craving to sit long and look out a window (not that I need a certain season for that). It's also time for reading a dense book by Henry James (so many commas and clauses in each sentence!) that I would normally read the first few pages of and shelve on top of other unfinished books for another day, which would never come in spite of good intentions. (Sometimes you get what you need from a book in the first chapter, at least in non-fiction . . . ) But after hearing Ann Patchett (whose Bel Canto I also want to read), talk about James' The Ambassadors the other day, I was inspired to push through it, in spite of poor reading comprehension, something I struggled with as an English major: I have to read slowly and sometimes re-read passages again and again. I have to read slowly and sometimes re-read passages again and again. I have to read slowly and sometimes re-read passages again and again. (Oh no, that was a James-esque multi-clause multi-comma sentence.) It wasn't until Don told me a couple years ago what he teaches his 3rd graders, that my comprehension began to improve: Visualize it as a movie in your mind. (You good readers are probably thinking: Duh.) What Don taught me was like punching holes in a book and letting the light through, like Peter's tree.

Another reading comprehension trick - besides not falling asleep - is explained in this cute 2-minute video for parents and their kids: predicting what is going to happen in the story. Following these ideas, maybe one day before I die I'll read as speedily and voraciously as finches eat thistle seed!

If like me you haven't read Henry James before and want to give him a go, you might consider starting with his fairly short tale "Brooksmith" about an upstairs manservant who has the "misfortune of being intelligent." Love this quote from it: ". . . anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than surprise." It took me 3 years to finish it, but it might only take you an hour, hehe, just kidding. "Brooksmith" comes more easily than The Ambassadors. (When you click on "Brooksmith" it will take you to the Introduction. Click on "enjoy your reading" at the bottom of that page to get to the wonderful tale.)

Painting of the woman in green reading is by Félix Augustin Milius (French, 1843-1894).

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