Bare Patches

Did you know that Groundhog Day represents the midpoint of winter, that on Wednesday, we will have lived through as much of the cold season as we still have to go?

It's been over a week since we've had any appreciable accumulation, a real blessing because it's mighty deep out there. I noticed when I drove back from meeting a client in Lebanon that the south-facing snow banks are retreating because you can feel the strength of the light returning.

I even spotted a bare patch of ground near a spruce tree in our yard.

But of course, this is the most tenacious of seasons and there's another big snow event cruising our way tomorrow with LOTS of snow predicted for Wednesday.

Groundhog Day.

Halfway there.

This has been one very, very long January.

Fourth Time Is the Charm

The huge storm of last week (the latest in a series of weekly huge storms) missed us entirely. But that doesn't mean our snow level is anything but really DEEP!

I've been avoiding the coldest days for walks with the dog because it's just too much for us. We've played in the yard instead where we can get back inside quickly when the wind comes up.

So packing down the trail through the woods has been slow. In my experience, which has a 17-year history by this time, it takes four passes to make the trail.

Walk Number 1 is the most difficult as you break through the snow, sinking often up to my knees. I leave behind a series of intersecting ovals that Goldie weaves through.

During Walk Number 2, I alter my pace so that the places where I didn't step before now get squashed down.

Things are getting easier by Walk Number 3 during which I try to squash any snow that remains standing between these footsteps and Walk Number 4, which I am about to take, finishes off the rest.

So yeah, fourth time is the charm. And then, of course, there's another snow storm.

The Eight of Hearts

On Wednesday, I met with Diane Church of the Parkinson's Center for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. When I left, I had agreed to make a quilt that they can use on their brochure for their symposium in April.

This is the top of that quilt, sans decoration at this point. These eight hearts have a story to tell.

During the month of August, I spent a lot of time on the Cape with my Mom. When I packed for what I knew was my last trip to see her, I packed a few books (schlocky mysteries) but I also set up and brought some hand sewing because I figured that reading would become impossible.

I was right about the reading. I arrived on the Cape on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday, I could no longer read. The words just wouldn't stick in my head and dividing my attention between a page of text and my Mom's next breath was not doable.

I switched to appliquéing these hearts. I learned a needle-turning appliqué technique from one of the women in my quilt guild and wanted more practice. Hearts are a great shape to appliqué because they are curves and points, both innies and outies.

I sewed while I sat on a chair next to Mom's bed. Keeping my hands busy helped keep me focused and calmer but in many respects, I had no idea what I was sewing.

It wasn't until I got back to Vermont and got my feet back under me a bit that I unpacked my stuff and started putting it away. That's when I discovered I had sewn eight hearts, these eight hearts to be specific.

Now eight is Mom's number—eight kids, eight grandkids, eight years more with us than Dad, eight months to say good-bye, etc.

Eight hearts.

This quilt will be the focus of much of my attention over the next few days because it needs to be photographed in its finished form before February 10 so that it can be on the brochure for the Parkinson's symposium.

For the first time since she died, I feel Mom's life extending through mine.

Eight hearts. I'll bet she likes this quilt.

Predestination and Other Forms of Hooey

For the life of me, I can't figure out whether Malcolm Gladwell's book, OUTLIERS, interests me because it ticks me off or ticks me off because it interests me.

Gladwell is the author of THE TIPPING POINT as well as a book on intuition called BLINK. I've read both of them and found them provocative and informative.

This one, which purports to be THE STORY OF SUCCESS is also interesting (the man's a very good writer) but there's something about his theory that's really bugging me.

He posits the idea that success is more a matter of birth circumstances than personal initiative. This strikes me as another form of the theory of predestination, that your fate is written before you are born.

This has always struck me as one of the gloomiest philosophies on the planet. I mean, if everything that happens to you is already planned, then why get up in the morning?

But I can't completely deny Gladwell's point that where you're born and when you're born and what your family's culture is like has an impact on the person you become. What bugs me is his all-but-total negation of personal initiative's place in that becoming. I think his theory is too simplistic if taken just on its own because no one's life is an either/or situation.

He does make one point that really grabbed me, however, and that comes under the general heading of "practice makes perfect."

In one chapter, he looks into the backgrounds of several successful people including the Beatles and Bill Gates, pointing out that virtuosos of very stripe become virtuosos because they practice their craft. Gladwell states that it takes very successful people—no matter the field—10,000 of practice to master their skills.

I can attest to that just based on my experience with this blog this year. I set out on my birthday, May 18, with the express purpose of writing in this space every single day for a year. I have missed two days—one when I was with my Mom in June and another in October after a very long day when I crawled into bed close to midnight and realized I had not written.

But I expect that when I reach May 18, 2011, I will have composed 363 posts here.

And you know what has happened among those mini-deadlines? My writing has improved. The flow of my work moves even easier than before. I'm excited about my craft again, recovering from a period of staleness over the past few years. I'm nearly done with my book on publishing—Your Book, Your Way—and I'm deep into another novel and working on some non-fiction projects.

I've used my pen to effectively protect my Mom in her last months in the nursing home from the carnal profit lust of the corporation that owns that facility. I've plunged myself into the joyous creative experience of starting a program that I hope will bring hundreds of comforting quilts to people with Parkinsons disease.

In other words, I am writing again, and I'm loving it. And it started with this blog.

Now Gladwell might contend that I owe this to the folks who created blogs, who created the web, to Virginia Hegvig who got me excited about writing in junior high, to my parents who raised us in New England at a time when the schools were decent, in a town with a quality library, etc. And to a point that is all true.

But who's responsible for taking advantage of that library? Of following up on Miss Hegvig's lessons by writing and dreaming of becoming a professional writer? Who signed me up to do this blog?

Me. My personal initiative.

We are the sum of our parts. But what we do with those parts once we become aware enough to understand that there are choices to be made is up to us.

Sorry Malcolm, I just don't buy it. But that stuff about the family feud culture in Harlan, Kentucky is fascinating!

Potato Leek Soup

It's not so cold today, downright balmy in fact with temps leaning toward 30 degrees ABOVE zero.

I even got out to snowshoe our trail with the dog, the first time we've been out in nearly a week.

This is soup season no matter the temperature, however, and the Coop had leeks on sale when I was there yesterday so there's Potato-Leek Soup on the stove as I write this.

The recipe is simple:

4 to 5 leeks
Cut the roots off the bottom then slice the leek up to the point where it branches off into its leaves. Keep a careful eye out for spots where dirt is lodged among the rings and remove it where it occurs.

5 good-sized potatoes or the equivalent in small potatoes
Wash and scrub the potatoes' skins. Slice into half-inch rounds.

3 tablespoons salted butter

6 cups water

5 chicken bouillon cubes

1 cup milk

Melt the butter in the bottom of your soup pan. Saute the leeks in the butter until limp. Add the potatoes and stir together about one minute. Add the water and bouillon cubes. Bring to a boil then turn the stove down until the soup will simmer, about 20 minutes or until a fork slides easily into the potato.

Let cool then spoon into a blender, mixing just enough to make the mixture smooth. Do not blend too much or you'll end up with a gooey mess. Return to the pot and stir in one cup milk. (Whole milk works best here.)

Warm for dinner. Serve with warm bread or cornbread or your favorite crackers.

Eat.

Enjoy.

Marcia's Quilts

It's really begun. My desire to start an organization that supplies lap quilts for Parkinson's patients was truly kicked off this morning during a meeting with the enthusiastic director of the Parkinsons Center affiliated with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Her name is Diane Church and we're going to make this happen.

This effort has its genesis with my brother Mark. In the days leading up to our Mom's death, he and my sister and I spent some time together. This one evening, we were sharing talk and food. Mark was leafing through an AARP newsletter and found a small notice about the arthritis foundation seeking quilts for folks with arthritis.

Hey Son, Mark said, you could do this for Parkinsons patients.

The first quilt will be a small one dedicated to my Mom's memory. I was appliquéing hearts while I sat with her during her last days in this life. It was something to keep my hands busy and me a bit calmer. I didn't realize it until I got home that over that time, I sewed eight hearts.

The number eight is my Mom's number—eight kids, eight grandkids, eight years more with us than Dad, etc. Of course, when you tip the number eight on its side, it becomes the infinity symbol.

So these eight hearts are going to be joined to one another in a nine-patch with a picture of Mom (Marcia) in the middle square. It will be the symbol of the April symposium sponsored by the Parkinsons Center where I will be to talk to folks about my project.

Making Mom inifnite in my own way.

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

The author of Paddy: A Ruffed Grouse Chooses Our Farm stopped by this morning to pick up the new pages of her book—we've revised it to include tons more pictures—and its cover. So now I get to work on my own book on publishing because I've set February as the deadline for publication.

Yeah, I'd better hurry.

So what does that have to do with these steps going down to the river?

All books, I don't care what kind, are all created one word at a time. Even those filled with images are created that way. The images may come first but organizing them, placing them on the page, writing captions—it's all the same idea.

One word—like one step—at a time.

Your Book, Your Way: The Hands-On Guide to Book Publishing for Everyone has some significant parts completed. I've gone out of my way to define terms, to explain how the system works (and doesn't), and how to read behind the marketing hype put out there by self-publishing companies.

In other words, how to make sure a book is published in the way that best suits its author's needs.

Even though I've been through this before, I still get impatient. I wonder why my sentences and paragraphs are not right the first time. I mean, I've been talking about and teaching this stuff for quite a while.

But then I think about shoveling or weeding a garden or walking down to the river on these steps. One at a time.

So I go back to the page and work.

And it will get done.

Yes, It Is Indeed THAT Cold

The temperature on our thermometers here at Fiddlehead Cottage registered a whopping 24.7 degrees BELOW zero this morning.

The snow nearly squeals when you walk on it. Cars groan when you insert your key into the ignition. You can watch the woodpile melt in front of your eyes.

It is that cold.

I usually like winter. Usually like January.

Not this year.

New (to me) Author Alert

I honestly can't remember where, exactly, I tripped across Louise Penny's work. I think it popped up as a cross recommendation from another book that attracted my attention on Amazon.

No matter. I keep a running wish list on Amazon, a place where I store the titles of books that I'll either search for in a library or buy at a later date. The other day, in one of my ongoing fits of needing change, I visited my wish list because I'd looked at the books on my own shelves so often, the unread felt too familiar.

(Really, we're all suffering from bouts of cabin fever the like of which we haven't experienced in a long time. And I mean everyone we know. Too much snow, too much cold, too much staying inside too early in the season.)

Anyway, I copied a list of likely looking titles from the wish list then stopped at one of the three libraries maintained in Hartford. I came home with a reasonable stack of interesting stuff, and fell in love with the cover of this book so it made it to the stop of the stack.

The book is called Still Life and it's by a Canadian author, Louise Penny, who more or less lives due north of us in an area of the province of Québec called the Eastern Townships.

It's lovely up there. We visited quite often when my aunt and my late uncle invited us to spend summer weekends at their cabin on Lake Memphremagog. (Oh yes, you can pronounce that word. Just approach it slowly.)

Penny's writing is so good, her characters walk right off the page into your head. She shares a lovely quality that I enjoy in Alexander McCall Smith's work, adding insights into humanity through the people who inhabit the worlds she creates. This is not something I find in American work very often where the emphasis is always on what happens next, not who happens.

I prefer the who which is why I gravitate toward the books, movies, and television shows created by Brits and Canadians and other non-Americans. There's an appreciation of people in them, a willingness to be introspective and thoughtful that, to me, is missing from most of American culture. I mean, who else would think up television shows that purport to be "real" and have so many tune in to watch this staged reality?

Anyway, I digress.

Find Louise Penny's books. Read them. I hope they all have covers this good. I've had at least three design ideas from this one.

Yawning my Way Through Much of 21st Century Culture

Jay and I have been watching a series from PBS about art in the 21st century. Some of it has been fascinating to look at, particularly the work of a pair of graffiti artists who make interesting designs from found objects, among their other works.

All of the interviewees have tweaked our way of thinking, some a lot more than others. But I have to say that even while many of these artists' words have been interesting, their work is, to me, a great big yawn.

This photo was taken almost ten years ago on a trip to the Williamstown, Massachusetts area. We had tickets to a show (Madeline Peroux) at Tanglewood but decided to make a longer trip of it because that area of the Berkshires is just stuffed with so many cool things to do.

This sculpture, of which this is a small piece, was on the campus of Williams College. It's huge and fascinating, fun and a bit eerie. We spent some time with it, enjoying how it fit the rise of the ground on which it sat, how it enhanced its surroundings.

Definitely not a yawn.

There's a ton of great stuff being made by contemporary artists, interesting, thought-provoking stuff. So how, I wondered, did PBS choose their artists?

When I wrote about the arts regularly, I spent a lot of time in art galleries looking at stuff that someone thought was good enough to take up wall or floor space. And I became fascinated by the lengths to which art gallery visitors will go in order to justify the time they spend looking at stuff that's just a drag. It's as if no one wants to admit they "don't get it" or that the reason they "don't get it" is that what they're looking at is just not very good.

Or maybe they're just more polite than I am.

I find the same is true in much of what passes for modern poetry. I remember going to a poetry reading at a local bookstore in honor of National Poetry Month (April) a few years back. I usually avoid these things like the proverbial plague because most of what folks write really belongs in a therapist's office. But a friend whose writing I respect had been selected to read one of her works so a bunch of us went to support this woman because she's painfully shy.

There we were, seated while more folks filed in. I spotted a man with dark curly hair artistically long and swept back from his face, a beret on his head, a vivid plaid scarf around his neck. I nudged the friend on my right. "How much you want to bet he teaches poetry," I said.

My friend eyballed the specimen then said "No bet."

Our shy friend got up to read her short work, a funny yet sensuous ode to a John Deere tractor, if you can believe it. Really, I haven't looked at a tractor since then without recalling her work and chuckling anew.

After our friend, we had to sit through a parade of stuff that, as I said before, should have been shared only with a therapist.

And then the grand finale who was, you will not be surprised to discover, our friend with the swept-back hair.

By that time, I was nearly crying from boredom and had a hard time resisting pulling a book off the shelves by my left elbow in order to have something good to read. The teacher's stuff was bland and immediately forgettable. But I'm glad I stayed to hear him because he read it with such an earnest pompousness that I couldn't help but think he'd be perfect in a Monty Python sketch.

Yep, that bad.

Which brings me to the point of this rant—just cuz you call it art or poetry doesn't mean others have to.

And who gets to decide, anyway?

For Mom

Way back in August, my brother Mark had a splendid idea—making lap quilts for people with Parkinsons disease and syndrome, like my Mom.

This is a picture of the last quilt I ever made for her, a small one that she cuddled until the day she left this life.

That idea is now becoming a reality. I've been asked to bring this idea to a symposium on Parkinsons disease that will be held in April at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

I can see Mom busting her buttons over this and bragging about me to everyone who will listen.

I am very touched.

This one's for you, Mom.

Bad Directions

I've been spending a lot of evenings on the couch with my husband lately. Our more usual evening routine is Jay watching a video from Netflix while I cut and sew in my studio downstairs.

But lately, there have been a number of interesting DVDs coming to our mailbox in those red envelopes.

Now I come from a long line of bustling women. I find it nearly impossible to "just sit." In fact, one of my worst nightmares involves waiting for something to start with nothing to read.

Shudder!

Now quilting and sewing are not exactly the most portable of hands-on activities. Don't get me wrong, I do hand sew from time to time and love it. But I'm mostly a machine girl.

But crocheting—that's another story entirely. To me, this is a craft born to take with you anywhere and to do during town meetings, while waiting for a movie to begin or while sharing couch-time with your beloved spouse.

Crochet is the ultimate in simple as far as tools are concerned—a metal hook of a certain size and yarn. You're done. But there are nearly an infinite number of ways you can manipulate them, many of them incredibly complex, requiring total focus.

But not when you're watching a great foreign film like the just-seen-at-our-house Bread and Tulips (yes, do rent this one—sweet, funny, a bit absurd, well acted) or a documentary called The Human Face with John Cleese (fascinating, by the way). Nope, when you're keeping your hands busy under these circumstances, you need simple and familiar so you only have to pay attention with half your mind.

Enter my hat project. This started life in a book of patterns that I bought many moons ago. I used scrap to make the prototype, and realized I had uncovered one of the worst set of directions ever committed to paper!

But I could see the nub of a good idea among the wreckage so I rearranged the orientation of the pattern and tried again.

Hat number two was OK.

I paged through more books, changed the hook size, changed the stitch, found a very cool pompom substitute, figured out an alternate way to make the hat, and developed a pattern that's simple, interesting to look at, fits snugly without squeezing, and doesn't leave me with dangly ends to weave into the fabric at the end.

I hate weaving in ends. No matter how diligently I apply myself, I'm not happy with the result.

When I'm done, these hats will be donated to the Upper Valley Haven, a local homeless shelter run by a crew of extraordinary people. They have a clothing shelf and I know my creations find good homes there.

The hat is also going to be patterned in a book that I'm producing. I'm fine-tuning the one on my hook now, the simplest version of the hat, for photographing. Then there are a couple of alternatives that are a bit more complex that are next in line.

Not bad inspiration from a set of really bad directions, eh?

We've All Got a Story to Tell

I wrote about Vivian Moore and her book Paddy: A Ruffed Grouse Chooses Our Farm in this spot before. For the past two days, I've been revamping the book so that it fits my printer's size criteria.

It's charming me all over again.

And since this is an expanded and revised edition, I'm putting in as many pictures as I can.

Of all the photos that Vivian took of this remarkable bird, this one is absolutely my favorite. This is a deep cold picture and Paddy's feathers are all puffed out to help keep him warm.

Every time I look at it, I start to chuckle because he looks just like a Christmas tree ornament to me.

This book has had quite a history and I'm glad that the constraints of book publishing have changed enough that a little charmer like this will have a home with my company, Full Circle Press. Before digital printing and online bookselling on places like Amazon, Paddy would probably never have seen the light of day.

Which would have been a shame.

We've all got such great stories to tell, and it's important that we do so.

Win-Win-Win

This is an Oster blender/food processing unit. My husband and I spent a bit of time searching for just the right blender to add to our kitchen stuff when the glass container of our old one hit the floor which chipped its rim making a very sharp edge.

We don't use a blender every day but in winter, there are a few soups that call for blending before serving, carrot and pumpkin-lentil riding on the top of the list.

We purchased this blender because it had a glass blending container and a second unit that purported to be a food processor. We figured that it would be handy during pesto-making season. About three weeks after purchase, I was tightening the base onto the glass when the black plastic split in my hand. (You can see the results in the photo below). I believe it was the second time we'd used the thing.

And, of course, you can't buy just a plastic base to replace the shoddy one that just split in your hands. You'd think I was the Hulk!

So the hunt's been on for a good replacement ever since. As you know, I believe that the stuff for sale in second-hand stores is actually of better quality than what you find new in the stores, especially junk chain stores. Last week, I stopped by my personal favorite, the Good Buy Store near the Hartford High School (part of the Southeastern Vermont Community Action program) and there it was, my dream blender come true, a Hamilton Beach with a nice glass container, sturdy base and a price tag of $8. I also found some of what I call "skinny yarn" to use in my hat project (at $.25 a skein) and a great LL Bean jacket ($8) for my son whose favorite outerwear had succumbed to a crummy zipper.

Second hand. Supporting recycling and quality at the same time. And around here, supporting some great non-profits.

Win-win-win.

To Every Season, There Is Beauty: A Photo Journey Through the Year

This morning, the temperature was well blow zero and steam rose off the river like a simmering cauldron.

Spring—and the crocuses—will come again.

The fronds of fiddlehead ferns (actually they're ostrich ferns) poke up from the snow along our trail.

Beech leaves stay attached to their trees until new leaves in spring push them out of the way.

Sometimes, the Quechee Balloon Festival comes to us.

When you play, you gotta commit to playing.

The dusky blue of juniper berries on Martha's Vineyard in October.

Jay took this picture of Monarch butterflies feeding on the nectar from these yellow flowers.

Snow Is for Playing In

When Jay and I first brought our cocker spaniel, Goldie, home, she was so tiny, barely five pounds. Ohhhh, so cute.

We put her on the living room floor where she promptly found one of the cats' toys—a small green ball. I rolled it across the kitchen floor, she chased it, brought it back and we've been doing that ever since.

Nine years of ever since.

Now Golds, as she is often called, chases anything in season—sticks sometimes, drops of water in summer, leaves in fall—but I truly believe her favorite is snowballs.

It's been very cold here over the past week so you couldn't make a snowball no matter how much pressure you exerted on the crystalline water. Way too dry.

And Goldie's been pretty content to get outside for short periods of snow chasing. But more content to snooze in her favorite chair.

But the temps reached 30 today—a minor heat wave—and the sun came out. Suddenly, our little girl was rarin' to go. She danced by the front door. Circled. Orbited us. Whined. If you reached for your boots, she positioned herself by the front door, ready to stick to your ankle if you headed outdoors. She knew, she KNEW, that it was a prime day for snowballs.

When she gets in high-energy mode, it takes three of us to amuse her. Jay took her out first, for about 15 minutes. Then it was my turn. I shoveled snow for her to chase then discovered spots where the sun made it packable.

I packed while Goldie watched with the most focused stare a dog can manage. I wound up, pitched and she flew.

The snowball orbited until it landed in an untouched part of the lawn. Goldie launched herself at the crater to tear it up, her whole head and front shoulders in the snow, her backside tipped up in the air, wiggling faster than you can imagine.

We played for about an hour when Jay returned to spell me while I went grocery shopping. When Jesse got home, he did his bit.

And so it went, ending with a trek in the woods for Goldie and I with me breaking trail in snowshoes.

I'm a little tuckered but grateful that we have a fur bearing friend who reminds us that snow is for playing in.

Where Would You Live?

Back when I sat with my Mom in her last days, I had a lot of time to think. Now four months later, I realize that losing Mom was a lot like getting hit by a meteor in slow motion. The thinking I did then—an assessment of what's really important and what's not in my life—is still making deep but quiet inroads in my heart.

Part of my assessing has to do with where we live. Don't get me wrong, I love the Upper Valley, Vermont in particular. But I'm not crazy about America, haven't been for a long time. If it was more like Vermont, I think that would be terrific. But it's not and never will be. In fact, I think we're spinning in some frightening directions.

My friend Micky lost her Mom about a year before me so this is something we share, that being hit by a meteor thing. This morning, we got an unexpected opportunity to have breakfast together and talk.

Micky has traveled widely in her lifetime, usually for work though she and her husband have vacationed in some interesting places. And she's lived in several different countries. I am quite the homebody by comparison.

So I took the opportunity to see the world from Micky's perspective this morning. Where would you live if you could live anywhere, I asked.

Europe was her first and immediate answer. My first choice has always been the U.K. But then, I watch a lot of BBC stuff which probably colors my view.

But, Micky said, it's not reasonable to go there. It's very expensive, she says, and while Europeans like our tourist dollars, they don't want us as permanent residents, taking up space in their health care system when ours won't take care of us.

Can't say I blame them. Why should anyone else pay for American stupidity?

Same with Canada, my second choice. Micky's too.

South America?

Living expenses and medical care are far more reasonable. Americans are welcome to live there and many are.

But South American governments can be very unstable.

So I'm sitting here shaking my head. Do you suppose Dorothy was right? There's no place like home?

[Insert the sound of a loud sigh here.]

Ahoy There Mates!

I've been a fan of Edith Wharton's work for quite a while. Somehow, I never got Ethan Frome in high school so this bleak novel didn't get the chance to turn me off from books by the woman I consider one of the best authors of the late 19th–early 20th century.

Because of my research for my Nellie Bly novel, EXPOSURE (which will be out in April), I've become quite a student of the Gilded Age and its denizens, such as the three women in the portrait on this cover.

This edition's publisher, Viking, does not identify this painting but I believe that the woman on the far right is Consuelo Vanderbilt while the woman in the center is Jennie Jerome, the American mother of Winston Churchill.

It is possible that the woman on the left is one of Jennie's sisters.

Unlike Jane Austen, who has a sunniness about her as well as a deep appreciation for the silly in humankind, Wharton is reserved, her outlook constricted. This is the ruling tone for Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth (which is anything but mirthful).

But I think this constriction is a bit less bleak in The Age of Innocence. And by the time Wharton started working on The Buccaneers (it was her last novel, left unfinished at her death), she'd lived through World War I and wanted, perhaps, to feel that love should have its way at last.

I also think that The Buccaneers could be classified as an author's revenge novel. All fiction writers harbor thoughts of getting even with those who have wronged them by exposing them in the pages of their books. Mystery writer Sue Grafton, for example, killed off her first husband in her first novel, A Is for Alibi.

In The Buccaneers, Wharton creates a cold, monsterish husband for the youngest of the four American women who bears a close resemblance to Wharton's own husband, the dissipated and disappointing Teddy Wharton. She also includes parts of the stories behind Consuelo's marriage to the Duke of Marlborough as well as Jennie's wedding to Lord Randolph Churchill.

Let's just say that what lies beneath is not pretty.

I think one of the best ways to appreciate Wharton is by listening to Age of Innocence on audiobook. Her sentence structures are so tight just the slightest change would destroy them. She is a mistress of reserve, saying no more than necessary so that the reader has just the right amount of information to fill in the rest.

I love her understatement and her keen eye, well-trained by the society she depicted in her fiction. You know that expression "keeping up with the Joneses"? Well, Wharton was born into the Jones family that we're all supposed to keep up with.

I'd also recommend the BBC production of The Buccaneers. The acting is wonderful with lots of small scenes that stick in your head afterward. And the costumes are incredible!!

Oh That Itch!

Yesterday, during the Great Big Snowstorm, it was completely unpleasant to be outside. I cleaned off the cars, did a bit of shoveling but otherwise, I was indoors tending to the woodstoves and my work.

Now I work pretty much alone. Solitude is kind of the basic experience writers have in common. It's really hard to pen something when you're socializing.

So getting outdoors is key to my sanity in winter.

By yesterday afternoon, I could feel the bloom of my first bout of cabin fever itchiness, that urge to just go SOMEWHERE!!

Jay's always hits the cabin fever wall earlier in the season than I do. About now is right for him. I can usually get through February before it hits me.

But yesterday, whew. The need to get outta Dodge was powerful!

Our Great Big Fat Snowstorm

It's just turned 9 a.m. and the snow is falling steadily. The wind has just started to pick up—the smaller branches of the trees outside my window have started to dance. A few moments ago, a lady cardinal landed on a tree close to my window, a reminder that I need to clear the bird feeder.

As it's moved across the country, this storm has been edging north. On Sunday, we were supposed to get about 4 inches, a nuisance storm.

By Monday, we were up to 3 to 7 inches, which calls out the shoveler and snowblower in all of us.

This morning, we're in "major clean up" territory, 9 to sixteen inches.

When we have this type of storm—not too much wind, very steady snow—the light is so soft, a very pale gray infused with white flecks. I can barely see across the river to Route 14. Our island is a blur. When the wind stops to catch its breath, the snowflakes swirl about like those white plastic bits in a snow globe. They remind me of dazed shoppers in a mall, not sure what they want but certain they need to buy something.

Then the wind returns and everything has a purpose.

Hope you are all safe out there. We have a friend who's supposed to be coming into Logan Airport this morning. Safe landings.

All Projects Great and Small

I have a friend named Lynn in my quilt guild who once nearly bowled me over when she told me she does not have a UFO (Unfinished Object) pile, that she finishes everything she begins.

Now every artisan I know, most definitely including me, has at least a small pile of projects that got started but were never finished. Quilters can be particularly prone to this because for many of us, the fun is in piecing the top where you get to play with color and design, etc. Like this top here, the first star in my book on designing with scrap fabric called New Cloth from Old.

It's called Cate's Quilt because it is made by a character of the same name in a novel I'm working on called The Road Not Salted.

(Yep, I read more than one book at a time and I write that way as well.)

Anyway, Lynn's words got me inspired to take inventory of my UFOs with the idea of getting them done.

A worthy goal, I'm sure you'll agree. (Especially if you're a crafter yourself.)

A subsequent conversation, however, revealed a hidden depth to Lynn's madness. I always have at least two projects going at the same time, she said, one that I can do by hand, one that needs to be done by machine. In other words, portability (which is impossible with a quilt of any size) is key here.

Which is why I crochet.

I decided that, at least for the time being, I'm going to stick with small, simple projects in crochet, things I can finish in a very reasonable amount of time.

Last winter, I started developing a pattern for hats. This winter, I picked that pattern back up, read my notes, and have been working on variations. And I think I finally hit on one that truly works for me. Of the three pictured below, the one made from the purple and white yarns is the prototype.

The light blue hat is in the original pattern. The dark blue is my first variation and the purple/white combo is the final tweak.

I can make one of these hats over the course of three evenings without breaking a sweat. And that finished feeling is terrific.

I'm Not the Only One

In his signature song "Imagine," John Lennon tells us he's not the only dreamer in the world. 

I'm a dreamer, almost always the one in the room with the half-full glass. But for some reason that I've never understood, the world makes pessimism much easier to maintain than optimism.

I'll bet you feel that way too. After all, we have a loud, overwhelming cacophony of empty-headed blabbermouths on TV, in the newspapers, and on the web whose only job in life is to get us all to worry. And buy whatever their sponsors are selling.

Then there are the downers in our workplaces, the ones threatened by our competence. Or the family members who advocate giving up.

Yep, the Inferi (the name for the undead in Harry Potter) are everywhere.

I say we swim against that putrid tide. Let's dream together, shall we? And encourage others around us to do the same. 

Repeat after me: Why not? Why not?

"Your resources are always far greater than you imagine them to be. Never ask, 'Can I do this?' Ask instead, 'How can I do this?'" —Dan Zadra

Temporary Membership in the Clean Desk Club

I recently came across a list of anxiety-lessening acts, simple things you can do every day to relieve stress. Most of the time, this stuff is bogus but there were some practical suggestions on this particular list so I paid attention.

The writer singled out clutter as a generator of stress. She pointed out that when we leave a bunch of "stuff to do" lying around undone, we react to it in less-than-positive ways. One of the suggestions was to judge the time it takes to do a small task—file a bank statement, let's say. If that time is 60 seconds or less, do the task.

This eliminates much of that stuff that piles up until tomorrow.

Here's another way to tackle the same problem, one that I have used for years.

When I was the marketing manager for The Countryman Press, there were times that the piles of correspondence, catalogs, sales materials and books to send out for review threatened to engulf me. Bob, our sales manager, sat in the same office space as I did, and had to deal with the same issue. In fact, given the cyclical nature of publishing, everyone in the company got crushed at times.

One day, it seemed as though everything on my and Bob's desks needed to be done yesterday, and all of it was screaming for our undivided attention. Just before lunch, Bob went down to our warehouse and came back with an midsized, empty cardboard box. Without looking, without sorting, without any organization whatsoever, he swept every piece of paper or memo or spreadsheet into the box, making one big pile.

He put the box on the floor next to his chair, picked up the top piece of paper, dealt with it, and then moved onto the next.

Bob dubbed it his "box-o-stuff" method. It didn't take long before I was in the warehouse looking for my own box. You know what—it worked. Without all of those piles screaming at me on my desk, I moved through my paperwork faster. I got a lot done. I was calmer.

And by the time I reached the bottom of the box, I got a reward. The stuff at the bottom turned out to  be unimportant, and could be thrown away or recycled.

Paddy in Winter: An Excerpt

Early next month, my company, Full Circle Press LLC, will re-publish Paddy: A Ruffed Grouse Chooses Our Farm by Vivian Miller Moore.

This is a wonderful story about a young bird who comes to live on the farm Vivian owns with her husband Wil. Here's an excerpt from the book in which Vivian describes her efforts to keep Paddy in food during the winter.

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Just when I thought we had a routine, Paddy changed it. One morning I went out but couldn’t find him. I called a few times but heard nothing, no movements anywhere. Since I’d already made the trek, I took out the dish to leave a few pieces of corn on the tedder.

As soon as I rattled it, I heard Paddy tune up with a very excited “whisp-whisp. whisp-whisp.” There he was, sitting on a branch directly over my head. He lifted his wings as soon as I spotted him and dropped down to the snow at the front edge of the lean-to. He was very content to sit on the cold metal of the tedder and eat but I made an impromptu platform with a flat board that I tied to a couple of round steel rods on the tedder. Now I could observe another of his eating habits.

I fed him seeds from two different winter squash called Delicata and Sweet Dumpling. When I cook the squash, I pierce them, bake them whole then scoop out their seeds on a cookie sheet. The seeds go back in the oven while it’s still warm, and stay there until I think of them the next day. Sometimes, if I take them out too soon, little bits of the sticky squash pulp remain on the seed. Paddy loved the squash seeds but not this sticky pulp.

If he got his face dirty, he’d rub both sides of his beak on his perch or jump down to wipe his head back and forth in leaves and dirt on the ground. He’d clean one side of his face then the other. If he went by a snow bank on the way down from his eating platform, he quickly “washed” his face in the snow. The board I set up for an eating station turned out to be a wonderful addition for him because he could rub the squash debris off on its rough edges.

Once Paddy ate all he wanted, he would find some snow to eat. Not a lot, but most of the time he made a point of doing it. Then he’d return to a favorite perching place, fluff out his feathers and sit. A soft, contented sound usually accompanied his feather arranging. He didn’t sit and preen as other birds do. Instead, he’d stretch, lift the feathers all over his body, then let them fall into place.

Meet Paddy

Several years ago, I got a call from a woman I did not know. Her name is Vivian Miller Moore.

We have a friend in common, she said. And indeed she is right, we both know Civil War historian Howard Coffin, author of Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War.

I have a book, she said, and Howard said you might be able to help me get it published.

It's been a very long time since a phone call like this ceased to be unusual to me. I most often work from referrals and I figured any friend of Howard's...

The bird in this picture is a ruffed grouse, often referred to as a partridge. Three years prior to my meeting Vivian, this bird (whom she named Paddy) adopted the farm she shares with her husband Wil as his hangout. In fact, Paddy adopted Vivian, Wil, their extended family, and many of their friends. That's Vivian feeding him here.

Soon after Paddy chose their farm, Vivian began keeping a journal that she wanted to turn into a book, which we did, printing 300 copies that Vivian sold by consignment. It's been out of print ever since.

But Paddy is coming back. By the end of this month, Paddy: A Ruffed Grouse Chooses Our Farm will be available once again.

Of all the books I've worked on over the years, this has to be the most charming story to come my way. This year as I celebrate 25 years as a freelance writer and publisher, I'm sharing parts of that life with you from time to time. Paddy is a good place to start. I'll be posting an excerpt tomorrow with some more of Vivian's pictures.

And the M.I.T. resolution is still holding sway. I got through all of my file drawers yesterday, filled a laundry basket with recycling, and got reacquainted with projects from the past that have a very good future.

M.I.T. for today—clean up the last pile of to-dos on my desk!!

Twelve of my Many Blessings for Twelfth Night

1. The privilege of living here, on this river, among these hills.

2. Turtles who remind me to live life at the speed of a biological organism.

3. My husband who is the best of friends and one of his best friends.

4. My little sister.

5. The colors of autumn.

6. Mom.

7. My son, my nieces and my nephews.

8. The warm good humor of my brothers.

9. The color of flowers.

10. The beauty of swans in the last light of a winter's day.

11. Celebrations that light up the night sky.

12. Seeds, like these dandelion seeds, that wait under the snow for spring.

In Praise of Critters

My sister called early yesterday morning, a time when my response was "uh oh."

Now Heidi and I are both early risers so waking me up was not the problem. It's just that, normally, we call each other between 9 and 9, like Mom taught us.

But it was well before 8 a.m. so an "uh oh" was in order.

Everyone in our family is an animal lover. We grew up with a succession of dogs and cats so even if we don't have pets of our own, we're well aware and appreciative of one another's, like our little girl Goldie pictured here.

So the news that Heidi and Terry's cat Tickle had died was sad indeed. Tickle was 17 years old, a little bit of a thing, nearly all black and when there were two other cats in the house, she ruled the roost despite being outweighed by the other felines.

She was a sweetie, a lap seeker if there ever was one. But Tickle had been showing her age for some time and on Monday, she had a stroke, probably more than one.

Just before Christmas, our sister-in-law Sandi lost one of her two cats, a yellow tom named Henry.

As any pet owner will tell you, our little friends leave gaping holes in our lives when they depart. They give us unconditional love under all circumstances. They give comfort in so many ways. (I remember on 9-11, I kept picking up our cats and holding them to my chest so I could feel them purr. It helped somehow.) They make us laugh.

But their life spans are so much shorter than ours.

And it hurts when they go.

So there's always the question when you lose a life companion like Henry or Tickle. Do you do it again? Do you make that commitment knowing that it will, eventually, involve a lot of tears?

In the Holiday Rush, I Almost Forgot to Tell You

At some point in the middle of November, the latest issue of Upper Valley Life magazine showed up in my mailbox. Inside is a story about letterpress printing and a man who lives in North Thetford, Vermont named Bob Metzler.

Bob is an avid practitioner of what devotees call the "black arts," letterpress printing with equipment made in the late 19th, early 20th century.

This is printing as Johannes Gutenberg conceived it. In letterpress, whatever you want to mass produce is first set up one letter and space at a time in a holding device called a composing stick. When complete, the text is inked, pressed to paper, and the result is a copy of what you've set up, over and over again.

When you compare letterpress printing to what a writer had to do in order to create a book pre-Gutenberg, the improvement in mass communication is immediately  apparent. Just think about these two numbers if you're in the market for a mind-boggling experience: in 1439, the year Johannes perfected his printing system, it is estimated there were 5,000 books in all of Europe.

That's all copies of all books—5,000.

Fifty years after Gutenberg's printing system was in place, the number of books in Europe numbered 5 million.

That's a lot of pent-up demand.

I've long believed that in order to understand what's happening in book publishing, you have to know what's happening in the print industry because the creation of a book is entirely dependent on printing, no matter how it's done.

Letterpress, because of its long setup process, made it uneconomical to print a single copy of a book. Offset printing, which was the next big development in printing, made single-copy printing impossible.

Digital printing and electronic books have freed folks who want to publish their books from the necessity and expense of having to print a thousand copies or none at all. Books are, once again, being printed one at a time.

Ironically, digital printing has done a lot to preserve the art and craft of letterpress printing because we have re-learned how to think of books as something that can, and perhaps should be, created in small batches.

There are thousands of letterpress enthusiasts like Bob all over the country. They are the place to go if you want something beautiful done on paper in a small quantity, like a chapbook of poetry, perhaps. And if you find the right printer, you may get the opportunity to get your own fingers inky. Imagine printing your own work, one beautiful copy at a time.

Foodus Interruptus

On the second day of my resolution to focus on one Most Important Task per day, I slammed into a Re-Learning Curve.

My Mom had a saying when, as kids, we took a larger portion of food than she knew we could eat: "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach," she'd say.

(An aside—when I was very young, I tried to figure out how this could be because our eyes are so little in comparison to the area our stomachs take up. I imagined that our eyes extended way into our skulls, making my Mom's saying true in the physical sense. But I digress.)

I think that Mom's saying has more than one application. Can I see a show of hands as to how many of us have said "Oh, that will take only a few minutes" only to realize that that few minutes is actually a few hours?

I thought so.

All of us have had the experience of a day getting away from us, of somehow believing we can fit 16 hours of accomplishments into an eight-hour span.

So it was for me yesterday. I figured I'd have a couple of hours to spend on plowing through my files (my Most Important Task yesterday) while baking the bread I planned to take to a party last night.

But while my hands were in the flour, I remembered there were still some Red Empire apples waiting in a cool room to be made into a pie. When I checked on them, they were getting soft.

And one had already gone over to the Dark Side and was in dire need of composting.

Wasting food. Now that won't do at all.

So after making a Garlic Küchen for the annual Garlic, Butter and Chocolate party put on by some wonderful friends (you can see part of the chocolate festivities above thanks to Carl and his iPhone), I ended up peeling apples to make a pie. By the time the treat got into the oven, it was time to go.

Which means that I never touched my files yesterday.

While I didn't achieve the M.I.T. for yesterday, I did get the house clean and good food cooked. And then got to hang out with a big bunch of my favorite people and eat great food.

Not a bad way to spend the day, eh?

M.I.T. for today: Make sure all the financial info for my business in 2010 is complete so I am ready for tax season wwwwwaaaayyyyyy ahead of time.

A Little Spot of Red

When it's warm around here, the bird watching is incredible. This past summer, a bald eagle visited. We have two types of merganzers—regular and hooded. There are the rasping, laughing kingfishers that always make me think they were constructed from spare parts, a lot like Welsh corgis in the canine world.

Walking in the woods, we get serenaded by birds that sound like calliopes. Sometimes, we get that adrenaline rush that ruffed grouse always cause when they burst out of the shrubbery near your feet with a sound that closely resembles a burst of thunder.

There are so many, as a matter of fact, that our appreciation gets chopped into little pieces.

Not so this time of year. With the leaves off the trees, our avian friends are more visible. We have a bird feeder that we watch from the front windows of the living room. We call it kitty TV because George loves to perch where he can see the early morning traffic. It attracts chickadees, nuthatches (both white and red-breasted), goldfinches in their olive drab winter plumage. And then there are the cardinals.

Jay took this picture of a pair who came to our feeder the other day. The Mrs. of this pair is a beautiful bird in her own right. There are beautiful details of color in her beak and around her eyes. But when her beau shows up, his scarlet costume always steals the show.

When the cardinals visit the feeder, I slow whatever I'm doing so I can drink in their color, a reminder that when life gets dull, it's time for a spot of red.

M.I.T. for today: starting on a big sort through my office file cabinets. It's a time to find what's missing or discover you don't miss what you do find. Always a treasure hunt, this task.