Christmas Letter 2024

Merry Christmas 2024

and Happy New Year 2025

Christmas 🎄 🤞🎆 

Martin Luther King Jr. "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope"

Dear Family and Friends,

I almost decided not to write one of these this year. It’s been a year that flew by and yet it’s also been filled with so many things, good things yes, but often I’ve been too distracted or depressed to appreciate the good things. It isn’t a year with actual tragedies like several recent years. I have the same number of people in my family as I did when the year began, and still it felt heavy and cold and loneliness was my most common companion. Living is hard, yet I love my life. Enough feeling down bad and crying. 

 So one thing I have done consistently this year is paint with the watercolor set my granddaughter, Daisy gave me for Christmas. It was a challenge to myself to not just stick it in a box of my other craft materials with the intention of getting to it later. I’ve never done much watercolor before, and my days of constant art classes ended in 1986 with a weaving lab that I ran while in college in Ashland. But I gave up that job when Greg and I decided to go to China as exchange students. 

I also have been feeling better, still undiagnosed but some meds have reduced the symptoms enough that I can stay awake and not having as many muscle spasms means I’ve done things like shorter, 7 hour or less road trips, and attending plays and concerts again. I also take a lot of breaks on the road  to move around, so like with the painting, I paint every day maybe an hour total but usually in ten minute stages. And I’ve been volunteering in the granddaughters’ classes at times. But it exhausts me enough to know I really couldn’t teach even a half day anymore. I used to read books, even write books, but now I tend to start them and then abandon them. My concentration is also more short term and more visual like photography and art and less wordy. Writing this letter is really hard and I rarely write actual Facebook posts but just share pictures and other people’s posts  

I have been blessed by helping at the very beginning as people came together to create a “stiff Person Syndrome, and related disorders support group.”  I have friends there who understand what I’m experiencing. Even though I haven’t gotten a definite diagnosis, the symptoms we share are so close that they have suggestions for things that really do help, and encouragement when I get exhausted assuring everyone I’m “fine” even though my fine is so much less ok than it used to be.  

Greg, I guess he’s still doing good. He seems tired but liking the things he does. His friend who conducted the community chorale got sick and retired and no one else stepped up, so now Greg conducts three community singing groups, and is starting to plan a chorale trip to Europe for 2026. He also is still teaching full time at the prison. Our oldest granddaughter is in both the kids choir and the youth choir as well as having played basketball and soccer and started in band with playing trombone and in a chess club. She loves working with her grandpa on music. So anyway, he’s maintained the hundred pound weight loss all year, goes biking and swimming for exercise and goes camping, mushroom hunting, out on a friend’s boat and on road trips for fun. Emerson and Greg took Daisy to the San Francisco area to amusement parks and The Great Wolf Lodge at the end of June. That was one trip I knew I couldn’t handle physically. Lately Greg has been working on the not fun task of replacing the ancient plumbing in our house. We had our 40th wedding anniversary on May 21st.  

Emerson and Austin are hard at work on the same jobs they have had for years now. Plus Austin and Tricia are raising chickens and a gorgeous garden and going hunting   And all the grandkids are in the grade school years between first and fifth grade, so that is both fun and exhausting. Emerson took on coaching Daisy’s soccer team and that turned out great, both he and the team grew a lot and plan to be together again next season.  I see the girls the most because they are in the same school, go to the same assemblies and activities a lot. My grandson is in a different grade school so when I’m really missing him I have to get out of the daily routine and go find him but he is worth it. He usually lights up when he sees me and gives me a brief hug, but pays me lots of quick smiles and giggles. He’s non verbal but pretty good at communicating nonetheless. He teaches me to be patient and appreciate every smile or glance or high five  

Everyone who knows me knows I wanted Kamala to win and am very nervous about the future. So that said, I’ve never hoped to be wrong more than I do now. I have “seen the past and love today” so I haven’t lost all hope yet. May we all have a happy and safe 2025. 

Ireland's Rustic Lodges, Gold Beach, Oregon

 Starting in 1985, My husband and I found a quaint little cluster of cabins on the Beach in a tiny So. Or. town, called Gold Beach.  No phones in the cabins, a woodstove, or fireplace, a few even came with kitchens.  We started going there a couple times a year, Thanksgiving, and in the summer when family came to visit.  Everything that has been important in the last couple of decades has been discussed and shared in those cabins. We were there when I got the message that the baby we were adopting had been born, and again when the owner knocked on my door to tell me my Dad had died in the middle of the night back in Wyoming.

My Friends have sat around the table, playing the old board games and laughing.  My Grandmother and in-laws and parents, and friends from Germany have  all been there at one time or another.  My husband and I curled up in front of the fire reading, "What to expect the first year" and then watched our son learn to walk while we barricaded the fire with coffee tables and chairs.

 Over time there have been more changes in us than in the cabins, but there have been changes in both, so the fire is now artificial and the toddler is in his Senior year of High school.  The property was bought by the motel next door and there is now an observation tower and hot tubs on a deck on the beach.

 But deer still stroll the grass, and seagulls beg for handouts and friends still come to share Thanksgiving.

 since the fireplaces went fake, the massive woodshed was removed and a fountain put in its place.

 The hot tub, "Spas on the beach" is on this lovely deck.

 Twenty years ago, I painted a stone and placed it on the dirt of the flowerbed, and now the whole area overflows with painted mementoes, around the tower, the trees, bordering the trails.  This time, instead of painting, I was writing my novels, a sequel to "Duffy Barkley is Not a Dog" and another one about two girls, on the Oregon trail 150 years apart.  That is where I turn my imagination and creative spark these days.

 The gulls come to visit and beg, but the eagles prefer to keep to themselves and perhaps fish, or steal a fish from an unwary osprey.

 My husband and I have aged a lot since the first time we walked the sand here, but coming back always makes me feel younger.

 I always see things, in other things, like a heart, or a baby dragon asleep on the sand.

The sunset was one of the few moments the sun broke through the rain

 I don't often see the Rhodies starting to bloom at Thanksgiving.  But the raindrops lining every needle and leaf are just as lovely.

It is strange to think of the life of the cabin through the rest of the year, filled with other couples and families and groups.  But if I keep going there, a week at a time, there will come a day, when I can say, "I lived in a cabin by the sea, for a whole year."  Even if it takes me 52 years to do it.