Those babies arrived last week and more beautiful babies cannot be found in the tri-state area.  Your babies, if you have new ones, of course, are as beautiful, but really, only ours.  And my friend’s new grandson, who was almost born on the twins’ birthday.  He is beautiful, but that’s it. 

Such anticipation for such tiny little bundles.

And such exhaustion.

You would think we all gave birth to twins.

No big event is without a wobble or two.  One of the twins needed a little extra help so spent some time in the nicu. He was so well taken care of, so carefully watched, I managed to keep my fear at bay.  His parents never mentioned the nicu without using the word “angel” in the sentence, and they were talking about the nurses, the respiratory therapists, not necessarily their baby. 

He’s doing well now, but when I first heard the news, I was on my way out to look at big slabs of stone at the place across the river.  I was scared about the nicu news, but I was assured I wasn’t needed, and things were stable, go on and go. 

So,  I put my shoes on and headed to Newburgh. It was a beautiful day and I sashayed all over that yard, chatted with the guys moving the big stones around, pranced in and out of the showroom, engaged anyone who looked my way.  

It was only when I got home that I noticed I had on one white shoe and one grey one. All I can say is, thank goodness the white one was filthy.

Not even the same style shoe, exactly.  Allbirds, yes, but one grey with a dark sole and one white all over. 

So, maybe I was a bit more upset than I knew about little Harmon.

My job has been fairly easy. I cook. Get in provisions, promise with all the flair I can muster homemade delectables, and I make a big deal of it in a subtle way. And nothing but the best for this sweet little family.  Potato soup, the most humble of dishes, but one that takes seventeen ingredients and three hours to perfect.  I exaggerate a bit, but it did take awhile because I had to make two trips to the store. 

My famous lasagne, which is easy but involved. Three trips to the store for this one and every pot and bowl I own.

In between there is big brother, nineteen months, and learning the word “no” as if he were in the gifted and talented program.  He is learning to use it, I mean. Not hear it when directed at him.  As deaf to it as if it were a dog whistle. 

I give him a whole lot of slack, though.  He has been uprooted and sent to the grandparents, everyone in high dudgeon and he doesn’t get it.  His routine is upended, and he can’t quite figure out why he goes to the hospital to visit these little wrapped up loaves of bread they make him kiss. 

But, eventually, the sweet little family is released to go home, somewhere around midnight, so Harmon, who is staying a while with his new friends in nicu, can have his farewell dinner, but they don’t go straight home. 

Oh no.  They can’t do that.  No electricity.  

The wind storm saw to that, so off to nana’s.

Monday dawned, warm and beautiful, and while Mama rested and Daddy assessed the situation at home vis-a-vis the power, I spent an active and eye-opening afternoon with the toddler. 

He has just about had it.  He did some digging in the yard, which I am all about, too. He threw lots of potting soil out of the pots, he thinks that is is his job, and I don’t mind a bit. He was a little hard to settle from time to time, but he has to be as tired and discombobulated as the rest of us so I didn’t get too exercised about it. 

But then, he took my phone and wouldn’t give it back, and when I finally wrested it from him there grew a great revenge in his heart. Not in his eyes, though, and this is the scary part.  He turned to the coffee table and swept all the books to the floor. Calmly.  Unemotionally.  A real “leave the gun, take the cannoli” moment.

It was then I knew, the real fun is about to start.

I am early this year procrastinating all my Christmas preparations. After I was felled by the flu or whatever it was, I was very late  purchasing my tree from Hilltop Christmas Tree Farm.  Mid-week after Thanksgiving my sister and I made our way out Hwy. 144.  We thought perhaps we had missed the trees altogether, but no, there were still some, but my, they were petite.  Perfectly shaped but small.  

Which suits me fine, especially this year for some reason.  In truth, I have been hankering for a tiny see-through tree like they have in the Czech Republic. Small and  so light and you can carry them home by grasping onto the top and walking it through the streets like a toddler. Inside Hilltop, workers were rocking and chatting and it was if they opened up just for us.  

They had been swamped right after Thanksgiving and were taking a breather. I am happy with my tree and it will mean less trips to the basement for ornaments and lights.  In a week or so, my niece, Hannah, will come and do my “install.”  This means my Christmas install, which is a thing now and something she is very good at.  I keep telling her, I really don’t think my house is install-worthy, but she has shown me I am wrong.

Last year she hung the wreaths in the window by the gorgeous bows she made.  She filled out the door swags with rosemary, magnolia and I don’t know what all.  Mostly, I just like having her in my house for a little while, like when she was little.  We chat and laugh, and if all she did was stick some holly around the candles on the mantel, I would be happy. 

I still avoid, whenever possible, Hallmark movies, although one was on mid-day last week. It crested a new high for improbable. My friends have encouraged me to write a parody of them, but really, you can all write your own parodies better than I.

On the other hand, there is this little Christmas gift.  My television, the actual TV, has been a source of bewilderment and embarrassment for my nieces and nephews for years.  It is neither smart nor dumb, but one of those average TVs that falls through the cracks. But then I was visiting friends, and their TV was a thing of beauty, an object of envy.  

So I bought one. 

It is gigantic. 

It is very smart. 

It will display art, my own or the Great Masters, if I want. 

And it is on, right this minute, on the YouTtube Channel, with a video called, “Christmas Coffee.”  A steaming mug of coffee on close-up, pinecones and holiday scene all blurry and bokeh. Piano music is playing, mellow, with jazzy undertones, but happy and inane in the way you can enjoy it without thinking about it. I am my own Starbucks.

I was once accused of pulling pages out of magazines on how to “live a beautiful, singular life.” Pages on “creating new traditions when the old ones fade,”  All that.  I will cop to this, in part.  I would not say my life is “beautiful,” in the way Condé Nast means.  But it is comfortable, and kind.  Nor is it “singular.”  I need a couple of sheets of paper to list all the people who I care about, love, even. 

As for new traditions, it is interesting the way we abandoned so many things during the pandemic, or when parents die, or our lives move in directions we had not seen coming.  It is difficult and fraught with bad feeling and upset to spend all your energies trying to please Granny, especially when she has been gone for fifteen years.  Stop it. 

Unless Granny’s traditions still make you happy and warm inside.  Then, by all means, continue. That Christmas afternoon hike in the woods?  Of course!  Unless you would rather flip through those old pictures you never seem to get to. 

Me?  I am going to start baking next week or so. I’m re-reading “A Christmas Carol,” which I haven’t done in a couple of years. I might get Truman Capote out, too. But mostly, I am gonna watch that big ole mug of Joe steam on my TV.  Gonna enjoy all that Christmas Coffee on YouTube.

The nights grow long and with them my level of boredom.  I am between series and I find myself  on Youtube as often as not, telling myself I am looking up a thing, but really, I am cruising the latest news on the Harkles — I didn’t make that up, someone else did —and then I want snow, so I visit weather sites, which leads to snow camping, which leads to camping inside your car, which leads to doing so in winterscapes, which leads to Walmart and Cracker Barrel overnight stays, and then I am in a camping gear review jungle, which leads to survival camping, which leads back to the snow, bringing us to fire starters and survival and bushcraft knives. 

You can’t imagine how many knives. 

Hand-made knives, Scandi blades, some with bow drill divots in the handle, stainless steel blades, high carbon steel blades, four inch long blades, eight inch, ten.  Hand-made leather sheaths, plastic sheaths, other kinds of sheaths that ride high, ride low, can be clipped sideways behind your back, which gives off a serious stealthy self-defense vibe. 

And ferro rods.  All of the videos I watch feature individuals with enough pockets to house  several small lighters, but they all build fires by striking sparks into a little nest of wood shavings with a ferro rod.  Now, the ferro rod is a slender rod crafted of ferrocerium, an alloy of materials that make lots of sparks when struck. 

The are small and will work when wet, cold, hot, you name it, and affordable as all get out.  Mine arrived last week and I spent a good half hour outside in the dark thrilling myself with all the mighty sparks I was throwing.  This afternoon I plan to set alight something combustable to see if I can start a fire in earnest.  I have loads of lighters around here, but honestly, it is just so tough to be able harness fire in this sparkly way.  

The ferro rods come with a small metal striker, but, really, you want one of the survival knives for that, one with a flat spine.  Again, because it is just so tough.  My choices in survival/camp/bushcraft knives are so extensive, I will need a few more hours in front of the TV to decide.

These videos lead to other videos, especially of the prepper persuasion, and I can now heat a corner of my house for several weeks with a match, a long taper and a can of Crisco.  

Warmth is a big theme in wilderness survival as well as with the doomsday crowd.  Toward that end, I have also purchased a stack of those survival blankets, the shiny ones that look like you are wrapping up in party balloon material.  Well, actually, you are.  But they can save your life. 

As t the small packs of hand-warmers I have sitting in a box in my vestibule might save your life. They aren’t just for your hands while sitting at the football game or up in the deer blind.  You can throw them into your sleeping bag, your socks, lots of places to keep you warm.

A canteen filled with hot water can be taken into that same sleeping bag or under the mylar blanket, and clutched in desperation against your chest—it, too, can keep you warm. 

Which led me to some web pages for plain old garden variety hot water bottles.  Our cousins across the pond love them, use them almost every night, and I have friends who set their houseguests up with them, too. 

And they are the most wonderful things.  Why don’t we use them more often?

If you come visit me overnight, I can fix you a hot water bottle.  I have several.  And when I fix you that hot water bottle, it will be cute, too, because it will be wearing a sweet little cable knit sweater, a turtleneck sweater, to be exact. When I ordered my hot water bottles, I was led to Etsy, and an artisan in Latvia knit these for me. 

So, lots of old and new going on over here.  All the algorithms advancing my horizons in new ways, taking me to sites that embrace and celebrate starting fires with sparks, sleeping in the snow under a tarp, warming the family around a can of Crisco, a hot water bottle at your feet, which will surely hasten every sweet dream.

The last white Christmas I remember was many years ago, at a time when I was entertaining on the regular, and I was getting ready for my annual Solstice party.  The idea of celebrating the Solstice horrified my mother, even when I explained it was the most benign of parties,  merely a symbolic awaiting for the return of the light, but she was having none of it. 

Early on the day of the party I began receiving calls from guests who were traveling for the holiday.  They had decided to leave town early to beat the weather and so had to send regrets.  Because I was busy cooking and cleaning I hadn’t watched the news for a couple of days and assumed my pals were worried about the weather where they were headed. 

As I saw off the last of my guests that night,  it began to rain a little, maybe a flake or two thrown in.  I awoke the next morning to a foot of snow, as unexpected and as magical as I remember snow when I was a child.  We were snowbound for several days, with only the most trepidatious sorties out for family gatherings, or supplies. 

Again, we look to the skies for signs of snowfall.  We are assured the temperatures will be frigid, dangerously and life-threatening cold, with or without the white stuff.  The eight-year old kid in me hopes for snow, the running to the front door at night, checking for the shimmery swirl of flakes in the lamplight.  Peeking through the blinds in the middle of the night, the way the room is brighter in the morning after a snow, even with the shades drawn, the thrill of untouched drifts in the backyard. 

But another part of me has already been on the phone minding other people’s business as it pertains to their Friday appointments in Nashville.  Already I have offered my car to make a late-in-the-week airport run because I have all-wheel drive, and I think those are magic words this time of year. I have helped to crash the weather website I like best, checking every half hour or so for updates, even though the updates are still just speculation, at least for snowfall.

I have the luxury of sitting in my warm little house with no travel plans and dreaming of snow.  And I also have the grown-up worry of traveling loved ones, icy steps and pregnant nieces. I have become my worry-wart grandmother. I am not just concerned about my family, either, but yours, and anyone who will travel, or have their travel plans derailed because of the bitter cold, the snow that will fall somewhere this Christmas weekend. The disappointment of that.

To be on the road, and cold, and worried—pregnant, perhaps, and stranded.  This is how the Christmas story begins. An ordinary, “story of my life” kind of tale that seems to hit hardest those with the least. 

The innkeeper often comes off badly in Nativity plays.  We think he’s mean.  Yet, he didn’t turn them away.  He sent them around back, to the only sheltered place he had left.  Might he have brought them blankets?  We don’t know, but, surely if he had one to spare he would have.  Some bread, an oil lamp for the long night ahead. 

I chatted today with my friend, Kveta, by email, sending her Christmas greetings and remembering our time together in Ukraine. War-town, cold and cast into darkness now, and what can we do?  The suffering in so many places.  It is enough to make us hide in our beds and view the world through the same blinds we peek through, waiting for snow.  

We only have so much room. 

But might we still be a blanket for others, that manger of hay?  Might we look for and keep some small corner swept out and tidy, somewhere warm and safe for anyone who needs it?

The gift of that. Small perhaps, but loving.  Just enough, and therefore, perfect. 

I rise from my sickbed to send you post-Thanksgiving greetings. My illness has been impressive, with high temperature and aches, and a couple of times there, I may have hallucinated.  This is not hyperbola.  This is fact, and had it persisted I would have been in the ER, along with some of you, I hear.

I just partied too much, I guess. Not the partying of my youth, with late nights and smokey places, but with so many family gatherings, beginning on Wednesday and carrying over to Saturday evening.  I was already run down before the festivities began.  For all my gathering up celery and day old bread, for the all the bags of sugar and brown sugar and pecans, I failed to check my vanilla. 

Vanilla. Another trip to the store.

But the idea of being spotted in public looking as I did, all streaked with flour and blobs of butter was more than even I could bear.  I decided instead to use bourbon, which mostly went unnoticed by everyone except for one super-taster nephew.. 

I cooked, baked, stirred, folded dough, and brined the turkey in a Gott cooler. My nights were late, my mornings early.  But really, things pulled together pretty well, better than last year when I set the oven on fire. We had fourteen for dinner, but mercifully not here, and it was all so pleasant we stayed until evening.  On Friday my niece, Alex, thought it would be fun for the two new toddler cousins to gather at my house to make cinnamon ornaments, as she and her grown cousins had done at Sutton Elementary.  

She showed up with supplies and all the toys her little one, Arthur, had outgrown, bringing them  for Cy, the younger cuz. I decided why not ask all the adult nieces and nephews, and their parents to join us, not to make ornaments, but to visit—my grandmother’s favorite word—and to spend an nice afternoon before they all take off for evening plans.  

We never got to the ornaments, as you would imagine, but the boys, who hardly know each other, thank you Covid, played well and sweetly, with only little bitty grabs for toys.  Cy, who was born smack dab in the middle of Covid, couldn’t get over his cousin, the little person just like him, and he spend a good deal of time squatting down and getting in Arthur’s face, saying. “Baby?  Baby?”  

It’s his new word, and everyone is a baby now. 

Then Saturday and dinner with the newlyweds, Brad and Hannah.  I think there was a game on, too, and part of the point of the party, but by then I was beginning to fade.  It was still nice to get to know Brad’s parents a bit better, to spend time with his kids, who are great. But mostly I wanted to go home and cough my head off in peace. 

By Sunday, I could hardly move. I crawled to the medicine cabinet for a  thermometer, and after a time, as I faded in and out, it began to beep in a frantic way to signal I was in the danger zone.  I lay on the couch with my barking cough, my fever-addled dreams, and moaned a lot.

My sister, ahem, was unwell, too. So I am inclined to blame her. Of course, I was out and about in an intense way getting ready for Thanksgiving.  I spent time with more people in a three day period than I have seen in the last three months. And the little ones.  Who knows where those hands have been?

I did my due diligence and took one, then two, Covid tests.  Both negative. I rallied a bit, my temperature went down, slowly, but still.  I had a doctor’s appointment already on the books, so with luck she can help me to a full recovery when I see her later today. 

And yet, the time with my dear hearts couldn’t have been better, unless a few more of them had been able to join us. I don’t know about the others, but I loved every minute of our being together.  So, let’s face it.  Sometimes your family makes you sick.  But then, sometimes, like this past weekend, it is worth the risk.

I wish I could tell you who said it, but last week I read someone—someone famous—said he thought having a favorite football team was one of the best life lessons there is.  It was a Brit who said it, so when I write football, I mean soccer. 

Loving a football team is a large life lesson in losing. It teaches us about disappointment. 

And, oh, the exuberance when they win.  The clan celebration, boisterous cheering, the singing. 

I’ve been in pubs when the game is on and one can only say that the place is heaving.  The walls swell when the local’s team scores a goal. They constrict and suck all the air from the room when the opponents do. 

Once, in a nursing home I was touring with my Czech colleagues and the nuns of St. Elizabeth, we lost Martin, their boss and and my friend. We were chatting with residents about relatives in America, admiring the sweaters still on the needles they were knitting for grandchildren. Later on we found Martin sitting beside one of the few elderly men there, both of them glued to the soccer game playing on the small TV at the foot of the bed. 

Teams are patriotic.  The night we were with the nuns the Czech Republic soccer team was playing another country in some big match up.  But teams are familial, too.  Loyalties are passed down from father to son, generations worth, and grown men strut down the pub in garish scarves, not caring they look about twelve years old.  

In fact, it’s charming.

I think about this as the day after Election Day dawns. Some mornings in the past I have awakened early, happy in the results.  Some mornings I have awakened disappointed.  There was a time when we allowed ourselves a few days to mope, but then Thanksgiving is on its way, Christmas, and we commiserated with each other, but only briefly.  And privately. We coped.

My mother loved politics, had grown up spending every Saturday night with her parents as guests of my great-aunt Georgie and Uncle Jim.   Dinner conversation was a back and forth politician argument between my grandfather and his sister—she a capital D Democrat, he of the GOP persuasion. Politics was served up along side the mashed potatoes, and Mother remembered it was lively, heated at times.

And yet, at the end of the evening cheeks were kissed, hugs passed around, thanks given for the meal and plans made for next Saturday night. 

Imagine that.  

Perhaps the stakes are higher now.  This is what we have been told.  This past election has been touted as “The Most Important Election of Our Time.”  Well, aren’t they all?  I mean, really, don’t we hear that almost every election cycle?  

I get it. Maybe this election was the most important.  But I think how we react to it is equally important.  How we move forward is critical. I don’t see much hope for civility, so I try to channel my Aunt Georgie ginning around all Saturday afternoon so everything is perfect and inviting when she and Small, my grandfather, go hammer and tongs. 

In fact, a good debate helps clarify our own views, exposes the chinks in our own logic, and opens up a path for mutual agreement and consensus. I can’t imagine it in this environment.

But I wish it were so. My grandfather and his sister surely loved a good match of mental fisticuffs. And each surely held their beliefs and political leanings quite firmly, and weren’t afraid to say so.  I think, also, they surely must have respected each other, knew that people are different, want the same things—or don’t—and compromise is almost always the only path forward. 

It may be too much to ask for; civility and thoughtful debate, when civility seems almost nonexistent and nuance seems lost and beside the point. But surely we can try. Spitting into the wind, perhaps, but how else will we fix things, all the messes we have made?

(Image by Alice Hale Adams)

My pal, Alice, is in Wales to bury her cousin, Katherine Anne, in a country churchyard.  Her cousin loved Wales, loved her Welsh ancestors, and so did her sister, Beverly, who made it to the small churchyard first. Their ashes now lie side by side, and they chat, I like to think, about the summer trips they took each year, the stone abbeys and churches they explored, the archives and libraries they busied themselves in, those long summer days while the sun shone until late in the evening. 

It is a pilgrimage, of course, and Alice does not travel alone.  What pilgrim does? Her grown children are there, and Neffra, who, from her very beginnings, has been more baby sister than first cousin to Alice. 

It is as if Alice is far away and like she is right here.  We have texted and chatted on the phone, although the calls drop in and out.  This first week of their travels they are in a cottage, and it is perfect, right down to the wobbly wi-fi and phone service.  In a place such as this, the south of Wales, so quiet and bucolic, one can be tenderhearted and tolerant about such things. 

Last night Alice sent a message from one of the designated dark places. She said the dark places are for star-gazing, and the street lamps, if there are any, don’t come on all at the same time.  Wales has hundreds of such places it turns out, including parks and reserves set aside just for the sky at night.  The stars.  The wonder of it.

The first time I saw the stars, more than just Orion’s Belt or the faint and blurry dippers, I was sat on a bench in the high desert of New Mexico.  I was visiting family and as the window glowed orange then pink, we trooped outside for the nightly show. The temperature cooled and the stars appeared overhead at just the same speed as the horizon changed from pink to purple to ink. 

I had never seen such stars. Had never felt such coolness on my skin in the middle of summer. We sat without speaking, such a rarity, and some of us smoked our pipes, and some of us sipped our drinks, and some of us did nothing at all but breathe.

As much as I love light, love to think about it, admire it, capture it in pictures—for that is all photography is, capturing light—I long to experience that kind of darkness, too.  Even now, I am afraid of the dark, just a little, and I once had a claustrophobic meltdown in a pitch black cave, but there is something about total darkness, with only the moon and stars for light, that compels me in what must be a primitive impulse.

Light pollution is all around us, and it is hard to find a spot we can get to where it doesn’t exist. The app, Light Pollution Map, will show you everywhere in the world where artificial light brightens the night sky. A quick look and we can identify urban areas, name the cities by the sprawl of illumination radiating from the hub.  

There are some patches of pure dark, too;  over the Atlantic, Greenland, central Africa, Uzbekistan. And I want to see it, total darkness. Turns out, we have such a spot close to us.  Head to the Falls of Rough and find the raggedy shaped diamond of land between Fordsville, Short Creek, Olaton and Horse Branch and there you will find no discernible light pollution. 

For some time I have fancied traveling to dark places and writing about what it is like there. A daytime trip to reconnoiter that little island of dark a couple of counties over might be a good start. Then, when I am feeling brave, a night trip.  Maybe when the time changes. Maybe I’ll bring along provisions.  And a friend, just in case.  Someone to hold my hand in the dark.