The Christmas Letter – 2013

“And we walked off to look for America…” Well, perhaps not in the way that Paul Simon’s lyric suggests, but our travels in 2013 took us to corners of the country less familiar to us.

My Dear One and I fled Maryland’s January chill to Tampa, Florida, and enjoyed gardens, manatees and the company of friends Jack and Shelly. Our rental car only allowed Jimmy Buffett on the iPod

at first—not all six albums let alone the full contents of the device– just the AIA album. Was Buffet controlling our music from Key West? Dan got stuck with an earworm: A Pirate Looks at Forty. What a treat the trip was, though. We started with the Ringling Museum, visited the Tampa aquarium, went ga-ga over orchids in Sarasota, and ended with a spectacular sunset on Clearwater Beach.

Spring break sent us to Arizona: Tucson, Sedona and Phoenix. The desert was entirely new to me; for My Dear One it meant returning to a place he holds dear. I quote from my blog: “My lips are chapped, the top of my shoulders faintly pink despite sensible shirts and the omnipresent wide-brimmed hat, and my mind is filled with constant contrast of an arid, spiny and primeval beauty locked in a death struggle with ugly human sprawl.” We dined daily on Mexican food—so good! A flight over the Grand Canyon in a tiny airplane was an awe-ful experience—and one of our fellow passengers found the bumps and dips an awful experience for her tummy. A Soleri bell chosen in the shop at Arcosanti for its perfect resonance now hangs just outside the window by my desk.

The American midsection was our destination in October: lovely people, incomparable barbecue, stellar art museums. The circuit began and ended in St, Louis, MO, and took us on roads through farmlands and forests to Kansas City and Bentonville AR, a lovely drive. I think the final count for road kill seen was ten deer, half a dozen raccoons, a couple of woodchucks and skunks, and an armadillo. The best food was in Kansas City, both the KS and MO sides of the river. Can you do something more wonderful with a piece of protein than steep it in the fragrance of fruity smoke? It now occurs to me that the sequencing of topics in this paragraph may leave something to be desired. Ah well.

As the US congressfolk decided to reopen the government for a few months, we were able to explore Independence, MO. This is the site of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library, the Wallace-Truman home, and the Jackson County Historical Society and Jackson County Museum of Art, the latter two housed in the historic and gorgeously renovated Old Courthouse. The weather was gorgeous, probably the warmest, sunniest day of our trip. Town-center Independence has no traffic lights, plenty of free parking and an abundance of shops and restaurants. There are so many reasons for “Kansas City, here I come.”

The most provocative art experience occurred at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Absolutely not gonna get into the details here, but the Walmart billions have funded an astonishing collection: more than twenty paintings by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904); great works by early twentieth-century moderns; real surprises of 1940s abstraction. The art is housed in handsome buildings by Moshe Safdie at the heart of a rustic campus filled with sculpture and wound through with walking trails. What appears to be Walmart arrogance, however, has created stumbling blocks in terms of presentation, interpretation, and a humanistic vision. Whoops, said I wasn’t gonna go there.

In St. Louis we rode to the top of the Gateway Arch for a view both scenic and thrilling. For me anyway. My Dear One indulges my love of heights while he doesn’t share the passion. Later, while en route to the downtown sculpture garden, I tripped on a curb and went down like a sack of potatoes. It’s getting to be a habit; I did the same thing in Kaunas, Lithuania, and Aix-en-Provence, France. Getting a little old to take such tumbles; thank heavens only my ego suffered significant damage.

It has been a quiet year on the homefront. Plenty of wildlife, of course. The warm weather was greeted by the return of Sid Vicious, the Black Racer snake first encountered several years ago. He slithered across stone blocks of the retaining wall behind the house and was quite annoyed when I insisted on taking his picture. My Dear One spied a boy Eastern Box Turtle snoozing on the velvety moss beneath a tree one afternoon; not long after that a girl turtle was uncertain how to navigate our driveway and found herself trapped between garage door and curb. We transported her to the woods and closer to the fella. Playing Cupid? Maybe. The deer, of course, are plentiful; a doe produced triplets; twins seem to be the norm; we are rarely seeing singletons any more. One afternoon in early fall I counted a herd of fourteen out back and it put me in mind of bison surging across the American plains in the early nineteenth century. Then about a week ago we were treated to the almost successful wooing of a young doe by a six-point buck. Almost successful. A neighbor emerged from his house and broke the mood.

This spring we began to confront the errors we had committed over the past eight years as we landscaped. Had to call in the Tree Guy to get rid of three Goldenrain Tees which were bent on seeding themselves from here to kingdom come. Shrubs in the terraced gardens have gotten way bigger way faster than I anticipated and I need to extract a few Bird’s Nest Spruces. The Ostrich, Royal and Autumn ferns and wildflowers added along the forest edge are looking natural and woodsy. Hellebore added here and there and Siberian Iris on the northeast slope are both starting to look right nice at different moments.

There’s nearly nothing in the way of family news. My adored Uncle Jerry and Aunt Doffy, celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary on October 3, a milestone for them, an inspiration for all of us. My Tattooed Boy is doing bartending as well as serving at a restaurant in Baltimore. My Dear One’s grandchildren are absorbed in college and work. All’s well with the world.

We are experiencing relatively chilly temperatures this fall. As I write the sun is bright, the sky a clear blue and blustery winds are rattling around the house while brown leaves, as Clement Moore would have it, “mount to the sky.” Gloves, scarves and hats are near-necessities when we head out and it’s time to light a fire in the fireplace, a thought that is the perfect segue to this year’s literary offering. Whether it be the heat of a Yule log or just the crackle of a blue gas flame, there is something about the warmth and light of fire at Christmas time. Three years ago, Richard Cohen touched on this image in his piece about the winter solstice for the New York Times:

“Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun’s fire by kindling flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset villagers around a bonfire in ‘The Return of the Native,’ offers an explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:

“‘To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.’

“So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice—but maybe that celebration is still touched with a little fear.”

Best wishes to you all in 2014 and may you all be cheered, even inspired, by the expanding light of a New Year.