Was It Cold in Your Part of the Country?

     Last week was a cold week in America, everywhere it seemed, except in southern Oregon. After my six inches of snow and a good ski trip at Lake of the Woods, which was crowded with snowmobilers and children on sleds, suddenly the temperatures were in the fifties and everything was rain—which, of course, is a good thing, but it would be better if it were snow.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the country was having a hard time of it. Eight degrees in Blue Ridge, Georgia, my sister reported.  Minus four, said my friend in Boulder, Colorado. 

    I was so envious.

    But not of conditions just north of me, where the world turned to ice. The phenomenon, my son explained, was that the rain froze when it hit the ground. Chaos ensued.

    My nephew who works for the fire department in Portland said they were getting a thousand calls a day.

    My nephew who lives in Pennsylvania had to bundle up indoors when the heater in his house broke and couldn't be fixed till parts came in. When he built a fire in a long-unused fireplace, the house filled with smoke, necessitating open windows on an in-the-teens day.

    I might envy eight degrees and even four below, and certainly I wish my landscape would look like the pictures of snowshoe trips my Colorado friend sends me, but there are some parts of a hard winter I would just as soon avoid. 

    But I did ski at Crater Lake today, in perfect snow, with a deep blue sky filling the interstices of ink-dark clouds, occasional light snow kissing my cheeks, and snow-burdened firs on the distant mountains glowing in strips of sun. You see why I want more snow?

Words from My Father

    Every day I receive a new word, via email, from Word Daily. Yesterday's word was "obstreperous" (noisy and difficult to control). 

    Obstreperous. When I read this word, I heard it in my father's voice. "You're just obstreperous!" he would say to me, teasingly. I was too young to know what the word meant, but I could tell by his tone that he loved me. 

    He told his children they were "obstreperous," "perspicacious" and "impudent" before they understood "doggie" and "moo," but he spoke these words to us with such affection we glowed under the supposed compliment. He would say, "You're my p-i-double-l pal," and we thought it was grand to be Dad's pal. Only years later, after we learned to spell, did we get the joke.

    He could be serious about words, too. "Enunciate," he would say sternly. "Say 'get' not 'git.' Don't say, 'It's somethin' I'm plannin',' but 'It's something I'm planning.'" He and my mother were both from Kentucky, but he had no patience with poor enunciation. Surely because of that training, I was able to be a radio commentator for twenty years.

    My father had a repertoire of three or four memorized poems. When he was well into his nineties, my son called him on the phone one day and asked if he could still recite "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe.  Yes, he could, and he did, right there on the phone, and my son recorded that wavery old voice giving one final recitation of my dad's favorite poem.

    My father was famous for telling a story that centered around words. It started with an explanation that the Hottentot language built words by adding words together. "For instance," he would continue, "the Hottentot word for mother is 'muder.' The Hottentot word for children is 'trotter.' If they were stuttering children, the word was 'stridle-trotter.' So a mother of stuttering children was called a 'stridle-trotter-muder.'" And so on, until he got to the climax of the story with "the butel-rotten-lotten-gitter-wetter-cotter-Hotten-totten-stridle-trotter-muder-otten-tater has escaped." It means "the murderer of a Hottentot mother of stuttering children who was kept in a kangaroo cage with a slat cover to keep the rain off" has escaped.      It is a word dear to my heart.

 

Winter Weather Warning

     The winter weather warning was right! It snowed all day yesterday, and I am so happy! What a white and glorious wonderland is framed by my window!

    The firs and pines are bowed down with their white burden. Each limb of the apple tree is outlined with a ribbon of snow. Six inches of snow soften the ground. Humpy Mountain looks frozen in place.

    Everything is so still, hanging in the balance of beauty.

    Here is my

Ode to a Winter Landscape

Nothing is so beautiful as a winter landscape

    When fire-folks of frost in the frozen fields

        Wink rainbows at the morning sun

    When the unity of white undoes dappled things

    When the squeak of skis on snow

        sneaks into the unity of silence

        in the snow-muffled forest

    When the air is so cold it hurts your teeth to smile

        But you can't

                stop

                        smiling

Because nothing is so beautiful

    as snow-laden fir boughs against a cobalt sky

    the descending blue rushing towards whipped-cream peaks

Nothing is so beautiful as the kiss of snowflakes

    whisper-soft from steel-gray clouds

Nothing more magical than the inaudible fall

    of snow outside the window

    descending like down from overstuffed clouds

    the fire at your back shining like shook foil

Nothing is so beautiful as winter stars

    splintering in the cold air

    of a landscape which—

            winter scene

            sweet, especial winter scene—

                    is charged with grandeur

                                and

                    gathers to a greatness

                                of insuperable cold

                                unsurpassed silence

                                unconditional beauty

A Party with Harmonious Parts

     Concinnity, I think, just might be the secret to a good party.

    "Concinnity" means "the harmonious arrangement of various parts," as at my New Year's Day party, the parts of which were:

    Food. In the South, where I grew up, eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day brings good luck throughout the year, so I gave my guests black-eyed peas and cornbread. And cookies—stained-glass cookies, rum raisin brownies, date bread, chocolate chip mint cookies—on plates around the room. There was wine, beer, or sparkling water. Later, I hand-ground coffee beans for fresh coffee. (See post on April 14, 2023, for a description of my coffee grinder.)

    Atmosphere. A few days before the party, three friends came over to help me strew cedar boughs on the bannister and cedar swags along the wall, all accented with Christmas lights and Christmas-fabric bows.

With those boughs and Christmas cookies on the window-sill, the house looked festive and party-ready. 

    Theme. T. S. Eliot provided the theme:

        For last year's words belong to last year's language

        And next year's words await another voice

    My invitation had suggested people bring three words for this year. At the party, we drew words from a vase and read them aloud. "Fitness, friendship, adventure, hope, health.…" One person wanted "lots of fine poetry." Another wanted to "raise [her] vibrational frequency." This worked even better than I had envisioned. People enjoyed discussing meanings and philosophies.  (My own words came from my dread of 2024: "politics, climate change, fire," but we didn't discuss them.) My favorite word, of course, was "concinnity," as described above, which a friend had brought specifically for my linguistic delight.

    Guests. This, the most important part for a harmonious party, I had in spades. I was the only person who knew everyone—neighbors, skiing friends, hiking friends, friends from the Applegater, from the Siskiyou Crest Festival, from my poetry group—but harmony among strangers created friends. One of my favorite images of the party was seeing various people, formerly strangers, enjoying each other's company. I have such wonderful friends!

    Appreciation. As guests left, I offered each a small cellophane packet of rum balls, tied with a ribbon on which I had written, "Happy New Year." But perhaps what I should have written was, "Thanks for contributing to the concinnity of my New Year's Day party!" 

    

Barbie

    I never had a Barbie doll. Barbies came along  after my doll days, and, besides, wasn't Barbie a symbol of all that was wrong—having to have the perfect body, being a sex object, having to wear high heels? These were Barbie associations we scorned in the hippy days.

    Nonetheless, without question, my favorite Christmas present this year, from my sister Laura, was a Barbie doll. I opened the Barbie package—Laura and my other sister, Sharon, were watching on Google Meet—and I burst out laughing. They were laughing, too We were sharing again the moments of watching the Barbie movie in Laura's den the week after Thanksgiving. Oh, how we had laughed. It was a sisters' bonding, sharing untold moments in our pasts as girls and women. 

        Laura had given Sharon a Barbie doll for Christmas, too. She held hers up to show me—Barbie, the yoga teacher. We reminisced about favorite scenes in the movie— Barbie walking into the shower on tiptoes, "Kenough" on Ken's shirt and the back end of a racehorse showing on a large-screen TV behind him when he talks to Barbie on the doorstep. The tribute to Ruth Handler. Barbie's concession, at the end of the movie, that every night didn't have to be girls' night. 

    We thought Greta Gerwig was brilliant, and we knew the truth of Gloria's monologue. "You're so beautiful and so smart." she says to Barbie, "and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough." Such familiar attitudes.

    Barbie no longer symbolizes what's wrong with the culture; she symbolizes that a girl can be whatever she aspires to be. (Laura said she had tried to find me a Barbie who was a professor of Old English, but had to settle for the baker Barbie.) I love having a Barbie. Standing tall (but not in heels) on my windowsill, she reminds me of how much has changed for women and how much I love my sisters. 

Well by Christmas!

     "Well by Christmas!" my doctor declared, setting our goal. 

    Three days and counting. Bronchitis. What a bear. 

    Bronchitis was the doctor's diagnosis when, since my violent fits of coughing weren't responding to cough drops, water, hot tea, herbs, juices, and spoonfuls of honey, I decided I ought to see him. That was a Sunday (of course). I called first thing Monday, and typical of this, the best doctor's office in Southern Oregon, he saw me that same day, at 3:00. 

    By 4:30 I was driving home with medications in my pocket and "well by Christmas" in my ears.

    Certainly I'm better. I no longer spend the night sitting upright on the couch, as I did for days, since I couldn't lie prone without being thrown into a coughing fit. My route through the house has expanded from the few steps between the couch and the bathroom. Yesterday I even took an hour-and-half walk up the mountain. (Never mind that the same walk used to take an hour.) My throat doesn't hurt any more, and when my son called me yesterday, he said my voice was stronger. Although a few days ago I couldn't eat the zucchini soup I made (one of my usual favorites) or, the next night, my curried yam soup, a never-fail pleaser, or even, the next night, the butternut squash soup a friend made and sent up to me, I have found that, actually, now that I try them again, the butternut soup is delicious and the other two as good as usual. I knew how sick I was when I didn't want to eat.

    My doctor, whom I really, really like, told me that one of the best things I could do was to bundle up and sit outside. "This cold, moist air is good for bronchitis," he told me. "Don't get cold," he cautioned. "Bundle up." 

    So for the past few days I have been bundling up in a coat, a wool hat, a wool scarf, fuzzy slippers, and my lovely warm gloves and sitting on the back porch with a blanket wrapped around my legs. I sit there for about an hour, reading or just watching the rain in the trees, breathing the cold moist air, loving the freshness, thinking, "Well by Christmas!"

    I'm not out of the woods yet, but the trees are thinning. This morning I spent hours planning a Christmas menu: salmon with mushroom orzo and red wine sauce, a green bean and feta salad, and Kahlua-and-chocolate pecan pie for dessert—a real meal, with fresh food and good tastes. Because, after all, I will be well by Christmas.

    Here's to a happy and healthy Christmas and holiday season for you, too.

Prayers for Humanity

     One of the 75 repetitions of 75 things each that I did for my 75th year of life on this Earth, five years ago, was to write 75 prayers for humanity or the earth. (Item suggested by Mariposa Kerchival.) Last Thanksgiving I posted prayers for the earth. Today, in thankfulness for the many examples of beautiful, kind, life-responsible people in my life, I offer prayers for humanity.

    Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

May the children know laughter, love, song, and freedom from fear.

May all children know the joys of childhood.

May the balm of sleep and the calming touch of an adult ease the pains of childhood.

May the voice of reason and the aura of compassion prevail in all circumstances.

May women and men be treated with equal respect all over the world.

May communities thrive with compassion, respect, neighborliness, and conviviality.

May those with illness find relief from pain.

May we learn to tune our hearts to the aches of others.

May music resound everywhere in the world, always.

May the cities flourish with art, music, and the good works of the poets.

May we learn to trust again.