A Christmas Gift

Although it’s not my first Christmas without my mom and sisters, I felt their absence more keenly this year. Especially the absence of my sister Shirley since Christmas was her favorite holiday. I still remember the utter shock on her face when, years ago, I said that my husband and I had stopped exchanging gifts. I barely managed to stifle a laugh at her reaction.

I do give gifts to my family, but I expect and ask for nothing in return. The gift is in the giving, as they say. But this year, I received a very special gift.

Inside this book are copies of my sister’s recipes for cookies and cakes.

I can’t express how it felt to see her handwriting, the old recipe cards with smudges and stains from frequent use. I can only say that it was a lovely gift to receive at the close of this year and one that I will always cherish.

Writing

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t make goals anymore. I often have tasks related to housekeeping, doctor’s appointments, grocery shopping, but they are not the sum of my days.

Still. I do want to renew my focus on writing. I have four unfinished novels. Three of the novels are a kind of trilogy as they share the same characters. One is a standalone. All were first drafted during a National Novel Writing Month. I want to finish them. Get them done. I don’t want to write anything “new” until they are out into the world. I haven’t set a way for publishing them yet (all of them need considerable editing first) but I’m not in this for the money. As I did with my short story Love Me Tender, I might produce the novels using Bookfunnel and Lulu.

Nature

I’m continually surprised by what I sometimes literally unearth on our property. While weeding around the tendrils of our strawberry plant, I found this little critter.

At first I thought it was a wooly seed of some kind. Further investigation through my iSeek app revealed that it was a caterpillar curled up in defensive mode. If all goes well, it will eventually morph into a Giant Leopard Moth.

Knitting

While I contemplate renewing my focus on writing–that is, finishing my novels–I’ve been knitting. In early November I started knitting an intarsia shawl. Kind of like painting but with yarn. The shawl is still in progress but I wanted to share a couple of photos.

While intarsia isn’t difficult, the changing shapes and colors can be a challenge.

Here’s what the finished shawl should look like when completed.

I don’t work on this shawl every day. What I like least about knitting is the finishing process (well, I guess that’s true with almost everything I do) so, as with writing, I procrastinate. One afternoon I procrastinated by taking a virtual workshop on knitting little cats.

This is supposed to be a cat in a box but with the edges curled under, I think the box looks more like a bed. And I like it like that.

Which leads me to my fifth thing at the end of 2024.

Cats

Wendy isn’t so much reaching out to touch Raji as she is letting him know that he better not get any closer to her.

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Thank you for reading. I hope you all have (or had) a Happy New Year. Here in the U.S., some of us feel dread as we begin 2025. I hope it’s many of us feeling that dread because we’ll need a lot of us to show up in 2026 and vote out the authoritarians and broligarchs and vote in Democracy. We won’t be alone. We’ll have lawyers: Democracy2025.

As one of my favorite lawyers, Joyce White Vance, would say, “We’re in this together.”