green-eyed lady

When my edges feel too rough.

When complications of the human exchange seem beyond my ability to maneuver.

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When I need to cool down.

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When I need to remember that circumstances are not what give, or take away, peace.

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When I need to close my eyes and feel Nature's riches.

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My elegant green-eyed goddess barncat comes to the rescue.

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She looks into my eyes.

She eliminates Time, and Distance, and Separateness.

She says, "I love you."

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And I say, "I love you too."

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young year, old dog

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I like the way 2009 is starting.

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Against my wishes, I learned a new game, Settlers of Catan. Theoretically, I think board games are good for developing young minds to think, and plan strategies. But not the ones I grew up with: Chutes and Ladders, Chinese Checkers and Sorry, which are just for fun - all that slipping and sliding and stealing. I missed developing thinking skills partly because I didn't play strategy games like Monopoly and Chess. So now, at age 52, learning a new game feels like going ice fishing with nothing but a sewing needle to chip through the ice.

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Christmas week I felt unsociable avoiding Catan, but after all, only 4 could play, and I was a 5th wheel. Too bad, so sad. But this week, my sister Ginnie is here (YAY!), Lesley and Brian are gone (BOO!), and there are exactly four of us. Rats. No more excuses. So the other night I fought the delicious temptation to go to bed and sleep at 7:30 (I'm becoming my mother) and at around 7:45 sat down at the kitchen table to learn the intricacies of Catan, feeling dull and resistant. Why do games have to be part of holiday family time?

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About a half hour into game setup and Peter's lyrical instructions, I started waking up. Suddenly it was 9pm, the game was rolling, and I was eager to build settlements and buy roads. I've lost count of how many times we've played Catan since then. I am currently fantasizing how to set up the board differently to get more ore and wool.-

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Today is January 2nd and I've learned something new that I didn't want to one little bit. It's a good way to start the year. Maybe next time Don explains how something like electricity works I'll have a crochet hook for chipping through the thick ice of my brain.

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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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