Epiphany

Today, January 6th, is also known as Epiphany, when the three kings apparently visited Christ, twelve days after his birth. Some people–the English come to mind–still do celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas. Usually, by January 6, I am ready to take down our decorations which I am (starting) to do today. It is always a laborious process for me, like so many organizational tasks (but a closet or cupboard, especially if it is food-related? I am all over it...). In Appalachia, the custom of Old Christmas is likely a thing of the past but perhaps there are readers here who can elaborate on that. That link provides more information than I can and here is another. IMAGE–Giotto's "Adoration of the Magi," 1304-1306, one of the fresco panels he was commissioned to paint for the Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel in Padua, Italy. While I studied these frescoes extensively in college, I have never actually seen them. Here is an interesting modern interpretation of the frescoes, with more photographs.

I am a great one for epiphanies and I am always open to them throughout the year. Sometimes the awareness is external, from other sources or friends or even family, and sometimes it is from within. Over the years I've learned that my intuition–call it female, my soul, my alter or the God-voice–should never be ignored. It is our most primal gift and should never be feared, but embraced. I believe it is the same thing that would have caused us to perk our heads up from the campfire and listen to the cracking of sticks in the woods. What prickles the hairs on our neck. What makes the deer in our fields pause, listen, and respond. What, at times, just clicks.

I've had epiphanies that radiate from within me, like an enveloping warmth. I've had them when being very still and almost seeing an inverted external radiance from the natural world around me, like a glimmer on another realm and then, just as quickly, it is gone again and the world looks the same as it did only moments before. An epiphany is like a voice of great clarity or the manifestation of the divine. I've had friends tell me of a booming external voice or hearing only the faintest whisper. At its most basic, an epiphany is "a light bulb moment." Any way we experience it, we should listen.

Adoration of the Child (1439-43) by Fra Angelico

One of my favorite moments in The Common Book of Prayer, the Episcopal service liturgy with which I grew up, was a benediction spoken after communion: "The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding. Keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord." I always took it to mean that we should listen and keep our minds open to God's wonders and wisdom, but don't spin it for your own purposes. God and his "peace" are beyond our understanding and I don't believe we as mortals are supposed to always have all of the answers or solve all of the mysteries on Earth, either. But we are to be open to them and to discovery (and yes, that includes scientific discovery, too). That, to me, is what Epiphany is all about: being open to the wonder and the mystery of it all. To behold something so great from something so very wonderful that even three kings were brought to their knees. What writer Madeline L'Engle termed "the Glorious Impossible" in her book of the same name (and one of my favorites in our Christmas books) reflecting on the birth of Christ through Giotto's frescos: Possible things are easy to believe. The Glorious Impossibles are those things that bring joy to our hearts, hope to our lives, songs to our lips.

I watched a disturbing film this vacation in the wee hours of the night, when the rest of the house was sleeping, that I probably shouldn't have watched. Occasionally I am just a sucker for the morbid–or at least trying to understand a person's psychology, what makes us as mortal infallible humans "tick." [I am also a fan of redemption but there is none in this movie and there is no happy ending, either, which is why it is not for the squeamish.] Seven was about a serial murderer, played to the chilling hilt by Kevin Spacey (as good a performance as Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, just not as much screen time). In his mind he was carrying out a plan of atonement, in what he claimed were God's whisperings to him, for the seven deadly sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, envy and wrath. [I think I've got that right...] In his own mind and deeds he became jury, judge and executioner in the name of God. [Yet, it is not really clear who is whispering, just that this guy has issues with mortal sins, big time.]

What I realized is that we all have an inner voice of sorts but that some of us use that voice differently–and that some of us use God's voice, or what we perceive to be God's voice, for great hurt and harm, sometimes even persecution or a minor, but self-interpreted, judgment call. Perhaps that has been my greatest lesson here in the Bible Belt: God is used as a cross, shield and even a crossbow at times. But I have to wonder what he would really have to say about what is often said or done in his name?

I am aware this is just a fictional movie but yet we have many modern and historic examples of sociopathic and narcissistic leaders who have listened to their inner voice, too. And many psychopaths, certainly. So when is that voice evil and when is it good? I suspect it is evil when harm is being leveled, when intolerance is preached, when personal and wider boundaries are crossed, when tears are shed or blood is spilled. This can happen in a home or a country. Goodness is so very easily seen but evil can be more hidden and at times even defended, by individuals or entire governments. Perception and reality can be two murky concepts.

And yet, there are so many "good people" and glimmers of good, too. It's the high and mighty–and often the terribly insecure–among us who want control, to bring us down, to be the first to throw stones. It can be the ultimate in persecution and, sadly, it is at the root of what is dividing this country–and world–right now into two very different political and social realms.

There is a wildness here in our new world that is refreshing and open and yet there can be menacing voices in the woods, too. I see despair all around me. Poverty, drugs, people who won't or can't work and have just given up from generations of despair. But I also have encountered people who are, on the surface perhaps, all clean and shiny and allegedly Christian but their appearance masks great judgment and probably even greater unhappiness. We also have people "around" who have outright stolen wood, hay and fencing materials from us and yet go to church every Sunday. It is a dichotomy that ingratiates or amuses, depending on the day. [I've often thought we should just leave out extra food and hay like the Scandinavians do for their barnyard Tomtens: so they'll bless their farm rather than pillaging it.]

I've always preferred real: true grit, honesty, and an attempt at mutual understanding and respect, even if there is not agreement. "Good fences make good neighbors," wrote Robert Frost in his poem Mending Wall, but make sure you provide a gate that opens both ways once in a while. [Then there is that great expression: "If you don't like my gate, you don't have to swing on it!"] The people most dear to me in my life are not afraid to challenge me or tell me like it is and neither are they afraid to validate and support who I am and respect my own journey. They are also not afraid of my authentic self, the one that radiates from inside and not on the surface–which, depending on the day, varies from dowdy to downright pleasant. All I ask of others is that they not judge my own journey as I try not to judge theirs–but sometimes you just have to take different paths to the same end point.

Teddy and the Bear-with-No-Name (I never named her!) are still a part of the family and have always sat in old chairs. They wear some of my daughter's clothes from when she was a little girl. I try not to choose favorites and love them both.

Then there is that most marvelous, scruffy, ready-to-toss out old stuffed animal or doll. Do you remember that most magical children's story, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams? Did you ever have something that you loved so much that the poor thing got so bedraggled or patched back together? Each of my children had (and have–of course I still keep them!) one of those: Addie had a Raggedy-Annie doll, "Annie" that my mother bought from a doll maker when she was one or two, Henry has a mohair bear that my father (Grandpa) gave him, "Teddy," of course, and then there is Eli's "Piggy," who came in his Easter basket when he was a toddler. Piggy is no longer pink but has faded into a pinkish-gray and much of his plush hair has worn thin. Each doll or animal is covered in love.

I still have my father's mohair bear, "Teddy," that he gave to me in my early childhood and that my grandmother tried to replace with a newer model. I wouldn't have it and I remember my father smiling at my youthful defiance–we're talking before the age of five (and yes, I was a precocious brat but that's beside the point here). I even remember overhearing their conversation at my grandparents' house about it: "Jim, you have to get rid of that old bear!" "No, Mother, Cathy loves him." I still have the replacement bear, too, that my grandmother was pleased to give me that day but my father's bear is still my favorite in my own nursery arsenal.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

So here is to growth and meaningful introspection and to earned and well-deserved shabbiness–to becoming real in our journey. To learning from our own voices and to hearing the voices of others, too, even if at times, we don't want to hear them. We can even choose to tune them out or turn them off, certainly, but make sure you at least listen, first, or keep an open mind and heart. Acknowledgment is always good, too, if not polite and gracious. Even as I age I can't ever imagine not keeping an open mind to new possibility, friendship, outlook, change or a different perspective or way of doing something. I tell my children that even though I have a lot of education and the paper to prove it (sometimes I question if it was really needed, but don't tell my children that!), I'm still a student and always learning. I will forever be a seeker because, as much as I am comfortable with old and sentimental or well-worn things and concepts, a new idea or way of being can sometimes be a revelation. Perhaps even a "glorious impossible."

Keeping Vigil

I haven't written much about our neighbor Ida and her farm because, well, I'm probably leery of writing too much about other people here or their stories. Or perhaps it is because I have not wanted to intrude or that it is all just too close to home in the literal sense. PHOTO–Ida has always been proud of her hollyhocks and blackberries. These have always flourished on the east side of her house and she made sure I got some seeds this summer.

We we took a real shine to Ida when we first met her two years ago in her board-and-batten farmhouse across the road from our doublewide farm property and the "knob piece." My husband, being a generally more knock-on-the-door and say "Hi-ya" kind of guy than I, paved the way for our friendship.


"House when new" and Ida's sister, Maythel, c. 1940 (not certain of photo dates)

Mr. and Mrs. Walter (Bannie) Dye (Ida's parents) and their three youngest children (some of Ida's siblings): Pete, Dickie and Maythel with the guitar.

She immediately reminded us of our dear neighbor and friend, Dot Grim, who had lived across the street from us in New Hampshire (and sadly died only a few weeks before we moved to Kentucky). They were both feisty women in their late 80s who lived their lives their way, inspiring in me a kind of awestruck admiration. One day, during the fall when we moved our things and I was cleaning house in advance of the moving truck, Ida brought me a pile of huge tomatoes that she had grown as a housewarming gift. "How are you today, Ida?" I asked. "As mean as ever!" she said with an impish grin. It seemed you always knew where you stood with Ida and that's a rare and welcome thing.


Ida's brother Dickie with his horses, Dock and Dan and Ida's mother, Bannie Dye.

Another time I was sharing with her some concerns about someone who was always talking about how Christian they were, but yet there was something I didn't quite trust about them. Ida's answer was the wisest counsel I've heard on the subject: "Do they walk the walk?" I said I wasn't sure–I only knew them at our house when they did some work on the place. "Well, that's what matters–if they spend too much time talking, they probably aren't doing a whole lot of walking!" Ida told us how the three Baptist churches on the ridge used to baptize people down on the creek below. I always looked forward to spending more time with Ida but in this past year she has been in Tennessee for much of the time. She was independent, too, and you have to respect when someone wants to do for themselves so we tried not to intrude too often, and usually only when asked. This fall she often liked to spend time at my husband's shop having coffee with him. She loved it when our boys mowed her lawn and insisted on paying them something, even if they refused.


"Stock barn and Pap's wagon" [sadly, we had to tear the barn down last year as it was ready to fall down and needed too much work to be righted again.] We will one day build our farmhouse to the rear left of it. Now, with the barn gone, the famous "short-core" apple tree is in full view, a kind of indigenous old heirloom apple that even Kentucky novelist Janice Holt Giles wrote about.

In 2008 before Thanksgiving and after we had been here a year, Ida's daughter–who lives out of state and had bought the farm from her mother about ten years ago–approached us about buying the farm from her. We couldn't believe it as we'd often thought to ourselves, "maybe one day, wouldn't it be nice..." So much land here is sold at "Absolute Auction" where it is subdivided and often split up in rancorous battles between families, which is sad and demeans the spirit of the land. We had left our own family farm situation back home in irreparable shambles after trying to carry on with the legacy, and yet had purposefully left the land as intact as we could, even getting protective conservation easements. We sensed that Ida's daughter wanted the same kind of thing for her family farm and have come to know that with certainty.


"Dempsey Dye–their home place at the end of the long field."

Ida's daughter knew we were planning to have a cattle farm here and she came to the realization that, apart from the occasional visit, she would not be living here enough to justify owning it any more. As her daughter had done, we gave Ida life estate of her home and nearby in the past year we have built a shop and woodshed. It is on her farm where we will eventually build our own farmhouse. The land sits across the road from our knob pasture and doublewide home and so we've joined, effectively, two old ridge farms together.


"Brooder house and Grandma's (Bannie's) chickens across the drive near the corner of road and drive." (person unidentified–our shop is now at this location as the brooder house is long gone)

When we saw Ida on Saturday, in a local nursing home, I was stunned by the change in her, and so quickly. We last saw her two months ago, before she returned to Tennessee where she has another house, and the place hasn't been the same without her around. All she could say when she saw us was, faintly, "It's all going to be beautiful." And she said my name, repeating it as if to place me. She smiled when I told her that our boys were there, too, and that they'd been taking care of her golf cart. And yet I wasn't certain she knew who we were.


"Grandma's (Bannie's) chickens and yard (and) barn before wings were added."

Before Ida headed south for the holidays two months ago, my husband drove her around the farm, showing her what we had done to restore the fields and hedgerows. She told him, repeatedly, "Pap would be so pleased with what you have done." Over the past two years she has pointed out old places, like the "pennywinkle spring" (pennywinkle is another name for vinca or myrtle which grows wild in the woods here) where the neighbors used to gather for water and gossip, the various houses on the ridge where she has lived, of the ghosts that have visited them from time to time. In the past few years Ida has shared many stories about the farm and I always wanted to hear more (fortunately some are written down and my husband has a great memory for the spoken word). She told us how they stored the apples from the "short-core" tree out back (under where our dog Lucy is now buried) in the haymow and how they kept through the winter until the spring. She shared some darker stories, too, of harder times and circumstances. Ida did not always live on the ridge, and for many years as far away as Chicago, but she came home to it again. Her brother Dickie, for a time, lived up the road in a small house on the farm.


"Dock and Dan and Pete?"

This morning we learned that Ida's grandson had been visiting before we were there on Saturday. He was telling her about the farm and commented on the changes we had made and about the fencing and cleaning up here and there that we'd done this fall. So Ida's daughter believes that she did know who we were and that she was talking about the farm when she said, "It's all going to be beautiful." I'd like to think, too, perhaps, that she might have already been catching glimpses of a world beyond as I've seen it in people before they pass on, as if they are straddling two realms of existence. Now her family waits by her side or in their thoughts and prayers. As her daughter said this morning, "Mother has always known how to live her life." But it is never easy to let someone go and getting older myself doesn't make that any easier.


"Front yard looking east." Apart from the gate and the tree in the foreground, this view hasn't changed at all.

Today, in a strange kind of epiphany and after a week of some occasional doubt and a bit of holiday homesickness, I realized why we are here in Kentucky (a question people often ask of us): I believe now it is to keep Ida's home fires burning, even if we could not tend to our own, try as we might, back in New Hampshire. This was a gift, beyond any measure or real estate transaction: Ida and her daughter have allowed us the opportunity to create our own family homeplace, our own roots on an old family farm in Kentucky, a place where only a few years ago we knew no one. It is our own slice of heaven in a strife-filled world–without the chords of upset and baggage, while cared for with our best intentions.

Dear Ida–we will miss your spirit and your warm welcome to our family here on your ridge: to your land, your farm, your Kentucky homeplace. We will always try our best to honor what you and your family have kept here–intact and well-loved–while cherishing it ourselves. We now have a chance to be caretakers of another family legacy, while also making it our own. This I am sure about–we never really own the land beneath us, except on paper, but the land has a way of binding us to it.

Postscript. This morning, Wednesday, I learned that early Tuesday evening, January 4, 2010, Ida Elizabeth Doyle, passed away. She was 88. Here is her obituary and it reads, in part, "She was born on her parents, Walter and Bannie Dye, farm on May 23, 1921 in what is now Nancy, KY and returned back here in the 1970s. Ida was widely traveled but loved the home place best, perhaps because she intimately knew every tree, stone, spring, and field."

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
in Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

~ Robert Frost

NOTE on Photos: To best appreciate this you have understand that my office is an absolute wreck and I'm not kidding (think Hoarders kind of wreck). So today, when thinking about blogging this entry as I do not have a photograph of Ida, I remembered the copies of old photos of the farm that Ida's daughter had given us and I thought, "Where must they be? I only saw them a few weeks ago..." But a few weeks in a cluttered office, especially at the holidays, is like a small epoch. Before two minutes had passed I had found them: my intuition told me to look in a box to the right of my desk, and there they were. In another pile I have transcriptions of many of Ida's old farm and ridge memories that her daughter wrote down several years ago. With her daughter's permission, I might share some of them here from time to time.

Holiday Fare, Part Deux: Easy Bûche!

I have a huge magazine problem. I keep telling my husband it's "market research" as I do, from time to time, sell an article to a national magazine. [Sheer laziness keeps me from doing that more intently and nor do I have a lot of patience with non-responsive editors, even those I have worked with before. Blogging, while it doesn't pay the bills, can be just as gratifying.] But being a foodie and loving lifestyle imagery in that "jump in the pavement painting" Mary Poppins-y way–even though I know from experience how staged these photos can be, at least those rooms look magnificent and inviting for that magazine moment–I would buy them any way. I also have a huge "can't-seem to throw-the-magazines-away" problem, but that's a blog post for another day. So is finding the answer to the question of "why do you even buy food magazines when most recipes are on line today?" I suppose for the same reasons that I will never buy an Amazon Kindle® (and I stand true to what I wrote in that blog post at Cupcake Chronicles two years ago). But it's a rhetorical question in our household and fortunately my husband doesn't even realize this fact or he would likely complain about my hundreds of cookbooks and the magazines.

So here's what's fun about piles of magazines, especially during a quieter holiday week at home like this or on winter evenings or when your husband and kids keep flipping back and forth between The Three Stooges and Looney Tunes marathons on New Year's Eve and you are feigning "quality time" with your family. Occasionally I will sit in my comfy chair and go through them, clipping recipes or ideas (my good artist and writer friend Edie uses them for her collage art). Many magazines actually survive "my cut" unscathed or missing only a few pages and I hate to just toss them. I used to give them to friends or the "swap shop" at the town dump back in New Hampshire and this might be one reason I've let them pile up here these past two years. [Yes, I have no friends! Well, or at least sensible friends here who don't read a lot of magazines...]

Seriously, if anyone reading this in Kentucky would like my magazine cast-offs, let's meet for coffee and they're yours! I will gladly meet you somewhere: Lexington, Berea, Frankfort, Midway (I'm always looking for new restaurants, too). I'll also be traveling back to New England by way of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Woodstock, New York and possibly northeastern Ohio in mid-February with a big empty Honda Pilot. If there are a lot of you, let's use this as a reason to meet up in the New Year: there are plenty for all. Old copies of Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Victoria, Country Living, Country Home, Paula Deen, Old-House Interiors and the occasional O Magazine or MS Living in the mix, and oh so many random lifestyle and shelter pick-ups...I do keep all copies of King Arthur's Baking Sheet, Cook's Country, and Mother Earth News (and any magazine with an article of mine in it, of course). In sum, I do my darnedest to keep the foodie and shelter magazine trade flourishing.

When Gourmet suddenly went under this fall, I returned to Bon Appétit and might, I said might, even subscribe again. I can understand why Condé Nast kept that magazine over Gourmet (although there is so much about Gourmet that I enjoyed: Ruth Reichl's editorials, the essays about food from writers, Jan and Michael Stern's column on "Road Food") as the recipes are more user-friendly and there are great theme issues.


I could have bathed in this easy espresso cream, it was that delicious.

All of that was my usually lengthy preamble to a recipe from the December 2009 issue of Bon Appétit. I wanted to make a Bûche de Nöel this year but time, as always, was my enemy and it just looks, well, so needlessly involved (even though I, one day, will make meringue mushrooms). Also, when you have a friend who is an extraordinary baker, and could easily be, and has been, a professional, and who made the most magnificent bûche a few years back for your husband's birthday, the same one who makes amazing pies (Rosemary, sorry, I have to give you credit here), it's hard to imagine even coming close.

So when I saw this easy variation on those fabulous old "Famous Chocolate Wafer" icebox cakes–did your mother make those in the 60s with whipped cream?–I said, "She's gotta have it..." It was the perfect Christmas Day dessert which we brought to the Hursts for supper after Temple got his "Friendship quilt" (and yes, that will be my next blog post in the New Year: that marvelous quilt!). I would happily make it again for just about any occasion. [And kudos to King Arthur Flour Company for shipping out their espresso powder the very next day, along with some other ingredients, without my paying an additional surcharge. I used to get to their store and bakery several times a year when I lived in New Hampshire and now return from annual treks to New England with large sacks of their flours.]


Before I served this, the boys and I scattered fake candy "rocks" around it...and I forgot to bring some holly! But you could certainly make yours look more festive than in this picture!

Super-Quick Mocha Yule Log from Bon Appétit (December 2009)

Chocolate wafers. Coffee. Whipped cream. Does it get any better than this? [NOTE: I used chocolate wafers sold in bulk at our local Mennonite bulk foods store (for ice cream sandwiches). They were almost as good as Nabisco's Famous Chocolate Wafers® but certainly more readily available. And no, I did not make the meringue mushrooms, either...next time!]

• 1/2 cup powdered sugar plus additional for garnish
• 1/4 cup natural unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons instant espresso powder [This would also be good in any chocolate cake.]
• 2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 9-ounce package chocolate wafer cookies
• 8 purchased vanilla meringue cookies [I couldn't find any...]

1. Sift 1/2 cup powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and espresso powder into small bowl. Using electric mixer, beat cream and vanilla in large bowl until soft peaks form. Add cocoa mixture and beat until stiff peaks form.
2. Spread 1 side of 1 chocolate wafer with 1 rounded teaspoonful mocha cream; top with another wafer. Continue layering wafers and mocha cream for stack of 5 cookies. Place stack on its side on long platter. Repeat making stacks with remaining wafers and some of mocha cream; form log on platter by attaching stacks with mocha cream. Using offset spatula or rubber spatula, spread remaining mocha cream over outside of log to coat. Cover; chill at least 2 hours. Can be made 1 day ahead. Keep chilled.
3. Place platter with yule log on work surface. Using fork, gently pull tines of fork along length of frosting on log to create design resembling tree bark. Sift powdered sugar over log to resemble snow. Arrange meringue cookies or Meringue Mushrooms (click for recipe) along sides of log. Cut log on diagonal into thick slices. Serve immediately.

Et voila! Bonne Année et bonne santé!

A New Year's Renascence

From Recovering: A Journal by May Sarton (1980)
Sunday, December 31st, 1978

"Tenderness is the grace of the heart, as style is the grace of the mind, I decided when I couldn't sleep last night. Both have something to do with quality, the quality of feeling, the quality of reasoning.

The last day of what has been an uneasy and painful year for me. I look forward to dawn tomorrow and, as the days get longer, to begin to feel my way into renascence. It is not strange though it is mysterious that our "New Year" comes at the darkest time in the seasonal cycle. When there is personal darkness, when there is pain to be overcome, when we are forced to renew ourselves against all the odds, the psychic energy required simply to survive has tremendous force, as great as that of a bulb pushing up through icy ground in spring, so after the overcoming, there is extra energy, a flood of energy that can go into creation. Painting of "Miss May Sarton" by her friend, Polly Thayer (1912-2006) 1936. Collection of Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Harvard University.

Monday, January 1st, 1979

...Now on this first day of a New Year, I am in a quiet way blooming. And this year, no more wild hopes. Then maybe the Furies so present in the last two months will go elsewhere."


An old abandoned Kentucky homeplace where daffodils and forsythia bloom each spring: "the psychic energy required simply to survive has tremendous force, as great as that of a bulb pushing up through icy ground in spring..."

NOTE: Poet May Sarton (1912-1995) was also known for her many published journals–quiet and luminous reflections long before the popular memoir genre of today. For many years, before she moved to York, Maine, Sarton lived in the small village of Nelson, New Hampshire where she is now also buried. [She was a good friend of my friend the author Elizabeth Yates McGreal, although I never met her during all of my years in New Hampshire.]

For more New Year's musings from the literary world, see our book blog, Cupcake Chronicles.

New Year's Resolutions-Why Not?

I'm trying to resolve to do things all the year round but I love a clean slate so why not go public about it?

• Children–More present and in the moment with our boys and more letters and visits with our daughter.
  
• Communication–I want to be in better touch with people and I don't mean via email or Facebook: a letter or note, visit, tea, lunch, dinner party, or phone call (will take some work as I hate the phone). Consolidate: two basic cell phones and no land line more practical? (especially with satellite internet expense)
  
• Computer–I will try to be on the computer for work or play only when my children are at school or asleep.
• Cupcakes–Be a better book group (and blog) participant!
• Exercise–More of it. Enough said. And let's start with walking all over this beautiful farm of ours as much as possible.
  
• Family/Friends–See Communication, above.
• Farm–Develop a working plan with my husband. What are we doing and when? A girl's gotta know these things.
  
• Farmhouse–Same deal, even if it will be on paper for a while.
• Food–Continue to eat only when hungry, not depriving myself but not going overboard, either. Balance indulgences with sprees of great health and limits. Be more proactive about menu planning.
  
• Garden–Plan what can easily be tended and managed and remember the bounty in the next county. [No, I did not intend for that to rhyme!]
• Hormones–Need I say more? Can't live with them, can't kill them. Continue to explore this new realm of sight and sound.
  
• Houses-in-Order–This is a literal as much as figurative goal of mine...and on-going, always. Pick up, put away or pitch. Repeat. Clean often (yes, more often than I think).
  
• Laundry–Laundry, laundry, LAUNDRY! And while we're on the subject, how about those two baskets full of ironing? (I should see it as a chance to catch up on all of those taped Barefoot Contessa and Dr. Oz episodes...)
  
• Marriage–More time to pause and plan together.
  
• Past Issues–Burn 'em or bury 'em; reconcile 'em or write about 'em.
• Photos–Organize, copy, scan, duplicate, share (same with all family archives).
  
• Recreation–Literally, "recreate": more reading and day trips and family pauses together.
• Restaurants–Once in a while, like once a month in Lexington. Really. Home cooking so much better (and cheaper) and we have all of those freezers and stuff.
• Sleep–While I seem to require less these days, no one is well served by my regular 2-4am bedtimes. So, I will try to be more of a morning person by going to sleep before midnight!
  
• Song–Join the Pleasant Hill Shaker Singers in March and sing my little heart out several times a year, and maybe dance a bit, too (even if in costume).
  
• Spirit–More "morning time" and find a church that moves and inspires and is good for the family.
• Volunteer–Do more for others and more often. Find a niche and commit to it.
  
• Writing-for-Blogs–More often or when inspired, but don't let it get in the way of other writing, too. Be more bloggy, if possible, and less of an essayist! (Save that for the books.)
  
• Writing-in-General–Pick a project and work on it. Make a year plan. Prioritize. Enough of these ADD-driven snippets. Follow through!
  
• Writing-for-Hire–Generate regular articles in a variety of new and old media and while we're at it, let's market those cases of books that are in storage to some museums and gift shops.

So there it is, everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. It helps to write it all down and be accountable, even if I forget to check the list from time to time.

Thank you, always, for visiting me here in the pantry!

Happy New Year to you and yours and may 2010 be all that you hope and dream.

Enjoy the rare New Year's Eve "Blue Moon" wherever you are. A great way to start a new decade and by New Year's Day it will already be waning again.

Catherine