It was early February of 1999. I was almost 52 years old and in my first year of retirement from a long teaching career. I was trying to reinvent myself as a writer of fiction and memoir. I was searching about on the World Wide Web (probably not using Google yet) for personal journalling ideas, story starters, writing prompts that might get my pen moving and help me shape the often inchoate ideas bouncing around in my head.

Thus did I fall into two e-mail discussion lists: Diary-l, and Journals.The lists were populated by many of the same people, almost all of whom had something called an “online journal.” They were posting diary entries, personal essays, and other bits of writing, using space either at a free host such as Geocities, or space that they paid for at any of the commercial hosting outfits.

I’d had my first Geocities site back in 1996. I’d discovered the World Wide Web that spring at the end of my sabbatical. When I returned to school, I established a site for my classes, calling it “English at 808″ (my classroom number). I posted assignments, due dates, reading lists, links to study aids, that sort of thing. When I left the profession I took down all the material and used the space to post the occasional update on what I was doing with myself, sending the URL to friends whose e-mail addresses I’d collected. I didn’t know that what I was doing was part of a new genre, the “online journal,” something of a cross between a private diary and a newspaper column.

I joined both discussion lists, asked for advice and followed links to resources, and spent the first two weeks of February getting a rudimentary understanding of page design and HTML coding. I learned enough to be able to understand in a limited way what the WYSIWYG editor (Netscape Composer) I depended on was doing. I secured my own domain name and obtained space at Dreamhost, a company that many OLJers were using. My domain name and my host are the only things about my web presence that have not changed in all these years, and they are choices I am still comfortable with.

Almost everything else about the site, however, did change. In the beginning I used lots of decorative elements such as floral sidebars and fancy separators. I divided the content into a number of sections, and I renamed the main section every year. There were times when I posted frequently, and times when I posted not at all for several months.

But I never gave it up. I acquired a loyal coterie of readers, a number of whom joined my notify list. My content was catalogued by all the major search engines, and readers continue to come to my site after searching on strings of words I use frequently. If you type “The Silken Tent” into Google, my site will turn up as either the first or the second suggestion, either above or below a reference to Robert Frost’s poem. This fact seemed to both surprise and annoy the director of the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont when I told her about it on my visit last summer.

In 2004, after resisting the term “blog” to describe my site, I began using space at Typepad, a site for the clueless web author that used a version of the Movable Type publishing platform. This content management software allows users to post using any internet connection rather than upload their files through a file transfer protocol program. This allowed me to post when I was “gallivanting,” traveling to author appearances and writing workshops and conferences. When I returned home, however, I went back to posting at my own domain.

When Dreamhost began offering “one-click installation” of WordPress, another publishing platform with a web interface, I decided to start using that. I mistakenly thought it was “Blogging for Dummies.” It’s not. Only the installation is. But it is easy to use, and makes updating much more streamlined, so I continue to learn how to use it.

After all this time, I’ve settled into a name for the main section of my site. It appears that Markings – Days of Her Life will be the permanent name for my journal-that’s-not-really-a-blog. What to do, though, about all my old stuff and the travel material and commonplace book residing at Typepad?

The answer is this. Over the next months I’ll be cleaning up all my old posts (lots of dead links after all this time) and transferring the Typepad posts to this.This post will likely remain the front page of The Silken Tent 1999-2005. Use the links in the sidebar to poke around in the archives. Happy reading, and thanks for being here.

Tomorrow is the last day of Holidailies. I missed six dates and won’t be able to post material to each date in time for the final official tally. Once again, I enjoyed the whole enterprise. I started writing again, I got interested in some new journals, and I even once again saw a piece recognized as a “Best of” entry. Once again, thanks to Jette and to the panel of readers. If you’re reading this because you’re a regular, thanks for sticking with me. If you’re reading this only because you read at Holidailies time, thank you as well, and see you next year.

I finally wrote my holiday letter today. I’ve always made mine an end-of-year thing, usually dating it on the Feast of Stephen (December 26, my father’s birthday) and getting it out before year’s end with the thank-yous to those who brought gifts to the party hand-written in the margin. This year I just couldn’t get to it before today. One thing that held me back was knowing that when I printed the address labels I would have to cut five records from my database because the people died since last year. Only one record was that of an elderly couple, friends of my parents. Three were high school classmates. One person was younger than I am.

I have always posted the contents of my letter online. It repeats some material given over my Holidailies series. To those of you already on my postal mailing list, or those of you who hate the genre, click away now. And thanks for reading!

There is less sunlight than
shade today; . . .
. . . the light
shining at the edges of the clouds
                    — Prentiss Moore, “November 7”

Dear Friends,

Usually I date my “end-of-year” letter on December 26, the Feast of Stephen. On that day I did look out to see that not snow but fog lay round about, deep and even, if not crisp. The air wasn’t cold enough for that. The fog has returned intermittently since then, giving central Pennsylvania more the look and feel of November than of January, so I thought that the lines from Prentiss Moore seemed suitable.

It’s taken me ten days beyond my usual letter-writing day to begin this. The “holiday letter” is a genre I particularly enjoy. Indeed, if you’ve known me very long, this might be the tenth or eleventh one you’ve received. I think I was a bit reluctant to begin because it seems this season I heard more negative chat about such letters from more people than usual, some of them people who actually receive mine! “I never read them, I just throw them away” said one person. “Those things are just bragging,” said another. I think I bragged only once, when I reported that, when asked why she chose Millersville University, Lynn answered, “My mother went there, and if it was good enough for the best mother in the whole world, then it’s good enough for me.” Oh my, I did it again!

So, for those of you with impatience toward this genre (who haven’t actually thrown this in the fire yet), I’ll give the PowerPoint version:

• All of us are well.
• Lynn’s still in school and doing well.
• Ron still enoys model airplanes and computer train simulations and (brag alert) his new flat screen HDTV.
• I’m still writing.

The lowlight was the death of Ron’s mother, Eva DeAngelis, in August. She turned 90 in April, and had been experiencing a slow buy steady decline for several years. She never complained, through all the losses she suffered of friends, of loved ones, of the familiar things and activities she had always taken joy in.  In the weeks before she died she would say to visitors, “I’m glad you came by. I’m going home soon.” We took that as a sign of an increasing loss of orientation in time and space. On Thursday, August 18, she said to one of her dearest friends, “I’m glad you came by. You know, I’m going home tomorrow.” And on Friday, August 19, she did. You can read the words I said for her (and see her engagement picture) at “A Woman of Courage, A Woman of Peace.” We miss her every single day. The highlight, at least for me, was my trip to Wyoming. Yes, I went alone. Ron dislikes (not a strong enough word) travel, and would not be interested in visiting Wyoming even if it were at the west end of the Wade Bridge. (Well, maybe if it were at the west end of the bridge and Lynn were playing hockey there . . . )Why did I go? Because it’s there. Because ever since I read My Friend Flicka when I was ten I wanted to visit that land where everyone owns a horse, you ride him to school and hitch him up outside the classroom, and at the end of the day take him into the hills in search of adventure. And because planning and executing a solo trip to a faraway place (albeit not an exotic one – after all, I speak the language and I didn’t need a passport) roused me out of the funk I fell into in February. I spent two weeks touring the Wind River Range in western Wyoming, after an initial stop in Buford (in eastern Wyoming near Cheyenne) to stand on the land where Mary O’Hara lived when she wrote the Flicka books. You can read my travelogue by going to The Silken Tent 1999–2005 and clicking on the link for pieces in the category ”Wyoming.”

So, have I mentioned all the news? We’re healthy, we miss Ron’s mother, Lynn is in her second year as a biology student at Millersville (well, as I write she’s in Utah, visiting McKenna, still her best friend though wheat fields and clothes lines and highways come between them), I’m still writing (visit my sites!!). And I think of you, reading this, whoever you are and however you got onto this list. May 2006 be a year of joy for you.

January 5, 2006
Thursday

When my house was built in 1976 it stood on a strip of land that was bordered on the north, the south, and the west by open farmland. In fact, the cluster of houses that comprises my neighborhood is on land that the Reichert family farmed until the day they sold it to the developer. They retain only a small portion now. The rest is occupied by more houses, and three churches.

The stand of trees behind my house that separates the Church of God property from that of Word of Grace seems thinner this winter than it was last. This morning I could see traffic moving on Progress Avenue that I wasn’t aware of before. And most of what I saw were school buses.

When I was a teacher I didn’t like it when Christmas fell on a Sunday. Going back to school on January 2, when the chip and dip from the New Year’s Day football games was still on the table and the tinsel was still on the tree seemed disheartening.  Today is the holiday for most government offices and businesses, and I’m told there are daytime football games yet to be played.

I think if I were still in the classroom I wouldn’t be ready to go back to work, but in the life I have now I certainly am. I’ve done nothing since the end of November but get ready for and accomplish “the holidays” — parties given and attended, special foods prepared and eaten, old friends met for lunch or dinner. Everything else has been on hold. The last entry in my fiction notebook is dated October 10.

I want my ordinary life back. I’ve opened a new blog at my Silken Tent site. It’s “powered by WordPress.” When Dreamhost announced that they were offering WordPress to their customers I completely misunderstood what I’d be getting. I thought it would be “blogging for dummies,” but it’s not. All Dreamhost does is install it for you. (This is not insignificant. They make sure they have all the technical properties to run it successfully and will automatically update it when new versions are released.) It’s harder to use (for me, anyway) than Typepad, and the instructions for use and the documentation are (for me, anyway) nearly incomprehensible. But I have one post up for 2006. I’ll finish Holidailies here, but visit the new Markngs at your pleasure.

And happy Back to Normal, whether that means school, work, or just silence in the house now that everyone else is back.

I started my Winter Count before the official start of Holidailies with a picture of the Stabler Trees, one of the first images I took last year with my new camera. Above is how they looked near sunset on the day of the solstice, December 21, 2005.

In December I woke up. I saw that I was headed for another year of spinning my wheels if I didn’t change my patterns. I saw that repeating myself in some ways might be good, but that I didn’t want to get to the first day of Holidailies 2006 still dwelling in possibility instead of accomplishment.

This picture is taken from a slightly different angle, showing four trees instead of three. Even I didn’t realize, until I compared the two, that there was a tree directly behind another in the first picture I took. I am going to let that say something about growth and self-realization, about bringing out hidden parts of myself, about the way forward.

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I love trees. One volume of The Silken Tent was called “The Gestures of Trees.” I took the name from the work of Loren Cruden, a naturalist and herbal healer who studies Native American and Celtic spirituality. In The Spirit of Place she writes, “Life moves most gracefully in the gestures of trees — resilient, responsive, unafraid.”

In the summer of 2002 I took a series of lessons at a local art school called “Drawing for Everyone.” Although my primary medium of artistic expression is words, I long to be able to draw, to create with pictures rather than essays. Under the direction of a talented teacher that summer, I made progress. In Massachusetts I bought a little book called Sketchbooking by Barbara Stecher. Although she works in watercolors (even while traveling), I was able to adapt her ideas and techniques to the ink and colored pencils I’m most comfortable with.

Something in me keeps wanting to go back to drawing. On November 4, 2005, I gathered up all the art materials I could find — some very old stuff from 1995, the first time I tried art lessons, the drawings from my classwork in 2002, and the sketchbook I’d carried in New England that summer and continued to use when I came back. The last drawing was labeled “A Tree Grows in Harrisburg,” and was of the tree pictured above. It stands in a corner of the Emerald Street playground, one block north of where I lived from the time I was seven until I was fifteen. The drawing was dated “November 4, 2002.”

I took my camera and drove up to the playground. The weather was similar to that of the day I did the drawing. And the tree looked almost the same. I took a picture of it, seen above, and promised myself that this year I get all those pencils and papers and notebooks and ideas out and try again.

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Although by the end of September I was wobbling on my focus to craft a literary novel set in contemporary times, I did not abandon fiction and writing altogether. Instead, I stepped back into the nineteenth century, and even farther.

In 1992, when I began writing again, my main impetus was to develop a story around the facts of a gravesite in Hain’s Cemetery in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. I took a master’s degree in American Studies, focusing on domestic life in 19th century Berks County. I learned a lot about writing, and research, and I came to love both the “plain” and the “fancy” Pennsylvania Germans. I wrote 6000 words of the novel, a manuscript that became the basis for my first admission to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. And then I stopped, mostly because I let the tutor I had that year, who clearly had great disdain for both me and my work, steal my confidence in myself.

I haven’t abandoned my historical novel, but I did decide that learning to write fiction would be easier if I didn’t also have to learn to convey a 19th century sensibility in 19th century diction at the same time. But I still perk up when something related to Pennsylvania social history comes along.

In October, Deborah Larsen’s novel about a white girl kidnapped by Indians near Gettysburg in the 17th century was chosen as the community reading project by the two public library systems that serve the capital city. I’d read The White when it first came out, attending a reading by the author, whose first work of fiction was not published until she was 61 years old. (I have six years! I exclaimed then. Well, three of them are gone.) Among the many programs given in conjunction with promoting the reading of this book was one on the story behind Conrad Richter’s book The Light in the Forest, also about  the kidnapping of a white child. I learned that the incident took place about six miles from my house, something I hadn’t known before even though I passed the historical marker noting it about three times a week.

Finally, in the end of October, I stepped into a world that seems to straddle the 19th century and the modern day. For the twentieth anniversary of the release of the movie Witness (about an Amish child who witnesses a murder in a Philadelphia train station and then must be protected from those who wish to silence him), Paramount Pictures developed a tour of the sites in Lancaster County where the movie was filmed.

The farmhouse seen above is the actual house where the filming took place. It dates from the early 19th century, and was not owned by an Amish family in 1985. It is now, however, and they made the summer kitchen (where most of the scenes were set), the barn, and the property available to tourists. So I did the very touristy thing, going to the Witness exhibit (“This is the actual hat Kelly McGillis wore to keep the sun off her face!” “Here’s a picture of Harrison Ford showing the extras how to hold a hammer!”) at the museum downtown and then riding on a bus for three hours through the beautiful rolling farmland of southern Lancaster County. I bought sweet potatoes and pepper jelly from the Amish woman who now lives in the house (along with her husband and four children under eight, with another due to be born in February).

And when I got home I pulled out my Katherine Project crate, reviewed it, and decided that all is not really lost.

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I looked out this morning, on the Feast of Stephen. A fog lay round about, neither deep nor crisp, but even.

I’m usually all about starting over on the Feast of Stephen. By this time in The Season I’ve had my fill of party prep and arranging decorations and anticipating events — in general, weeks of getting ready for something, dwelling in possibility instead of accomplishment.

So I tried to find my old life this morning. I read some fiction (a very short story by Amy Hempel — no sense in tackling a complicated generational saga) and even wrote a paragraph of meandering fiction-like prose, about a man who arrives home from work, finds his wife in bed with her lover, turns on his heel, and begins driving, north from the little town in Texas where they are living all the way to the Canadian border. (“Based on actual events,” as the opening credits on a tv drama might say.) It wasn’t much, but it was something. I think that reading and writing fiction have a certain kinesthetic quality, and the mental muscles that I do those things with have lost some tone in these past two months.

I’ve set Six Goals of a Quality Life that I want to achieve in 2006. They happen to be the same goals I set last year (and wrote about in a piece that alludes to the source of the name). As I feared then, I made very little progress in 2005. But Advent puts one in a hopeful mood, and I was determined today to achieve something tangible in some area.

I chose something that would fuel progress on two goals at once: Declutter My House and Create Visual Art. I opened the Drawer of Jumbled Memory Stuff.

I made a decision when I bought my camera last year. I was going to follow the advice given by the scrapbooking industry: Don’t start with the oldest stuffed shoeboxful of pictures and memorabilia you can find. Instead, get current and stay current, and review and arrange your old stuff a little bit at a time.

At least I accomplished the staying current part. I shot 18 rolls of film last year. Each is in a separate envelope with a written index identifying the subject, location, date, and other information that might be useful some time. They’re all lined up in a pretty blue box from Exposures.

And the truth is, of those 18 rolls, at least a dozen were shot in Wyoming. Four rolls shot in January consisted of “school figures,” shots I took as part of my photography class assignments, pictures of flowers or fruit in a bowl, buildings, children or animals in motion, etc. designed to make me familiar with the camera and the way it worked. That leaves only two rolls for all the rest of my life, which included trips to New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. And I’m thinking now that I can’t remember seeing the pictures I took in Washington when I went to a reading by poet Sharon Olds and then took a tour of the Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and that was in October.

That’s because the roll is still in the camera, with seven shots left.

This is still better than one of the envelopes I withdrew from the jumble drawer. The first two or three were of Lynn and her friend Kim in party dresses.

“What is this?” I asked her.

She glanced at the pictures. “Homecoming, ninth grade,” she said. “2000.”

The envelope also contained some field hockey pictures (one seen at left), a few of the Christmas party, then the Valentine dance, and finally the 2001 Homecoming dance.

A whole year in 24 frames.

Not anymore, I say resolutely. In 2006 I will shoot at least 24 rolls of film, and identify and organize at least 24 old rolls.

And tomorrow I’m finishing up those seven shots left in the camera. My Christmas present this year was a telephoto lens for last year’s camera. If the sun is right in the next few days, I might even shoot one more roll for this year.

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I am about to violate one of my rules of writing and use a quotation whose source I can’t verify and whose author I can’t learn anything else about.

Christmas—that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance, a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.
                                      — Augusta E. Rundel

I saw that today on another Holidailies site, Nikki’s Kiss My Grits. A Google search on Augusta E. Rundel returned nearly a thousand hits. The first two pages appeared to be collections of quotations, and the several that I clicked just had the same words and the same author’s name, so I didn’t drill down farther. Who is Augusta E. Rundel, I wanted to know, and why is she qualified to say something about Christmas?

But I liked the sentiment, and in the end decided that the only qualification one needs in order to say something about Christmas is to have experienced it.

We had our day of prayer yesterday. Lynn got teary early in the service. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Brandi,” she whispered. And so I thought about Brandi too, and Mr. Rosenthal, whom we lost a year and a week later, and my mother-in-law who died in August, and the five high school classmates who passed away this year, before we have even turned 60. We don’t feel sad because somebody’s not here this Christmas, we feel sad because they once were. Even if we never actually saw them at Christmas, they were part of our lives, and now they’re not, or are part of it differently, and we can’t go back to that other time.

Our feasting was today, just the three of us. We had filet mignon so tender a fork went through it like butter, and a baked potato. (I had a green salad planned, too, but nobody really wanted it.) Since that was a whole new Christmas menu, I decided to do something else new for dessert. In honor of the first night of Hanukkah I made latkes with a three-apple salsa for topping. I thought about my mother’s sand tarts and the cookbook she gave me in 1970 and the New Year’s Eve meal I had that year in The Library restaurant in Denver, Colorado with a man I thought had taken me on a romantic getaway but who really had just wanted to get out of this town the week the One True Love of his life was getting married to somebody else. I thought about Shawn, a former student (and Virtual Son) with whom I used to share soft pretzels and fruit in my classroom and whose face has not been seen in this place since 1994, and Larry, and the countless others I could paste links to, some still living and some not, whose presence runs through these pages, some memory of them triggered by some random happening in my life.

Later we all three sat on the couch and watched “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” as we did so many Sunday nights when Lynn was little. One of the hapless souls caught on camera falling into a decorated tree looked like my first husband, and I thought about the fake Christmases we’d spent together, especially 1980 when all three of his brothers managed to find their way to this city (which none of them had ever visited before) and his parents spent a ton of money on stuff in an effort to act like a real family. I still have the picture of the seven of us taken with his father’s fancy new camera with the timed-release shutter. I’m the only daughter-in-law on the scene. I am the only one not smiling. But even that represents something I once loved, or thought I did.

I was the first one up this morning, largely because I was the first one into bed last night. But I’m the last one up tonight. The house has gone quiet again, and not a creature is stirring, not even the blue and white bird who sings until the last light downstairs is turned off. But they’re still breathing their beautiful energy into the atmosphere as I sit here and think about everything I have ever loved, and somehow the darkness seems closer and holier still.

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It was very warm in the little house. . . . Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down. I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
                                              — Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am alone.

Some variation on that line is probably being written tonight by a lot of people, if not in a paper or electronic journal, then in the diary of the heart. Most will be sad, touching pieces about the absence of a loved one, either through death or distance. Some will be self-pitying or angry polemics on the cruelty of a spouse or other significant person who has chosen this season to run off with a lover or go paint in Tahiti or just move to a new city to find himself. In the mid-seventies, and in 1982, I probably wrote one of those myself.

But tonight, as I write those words, I do so with a sense of comfort and joy.

Ron and I met on December 29, 1982, during the first holiday season each had experienced since divorce. We were married eight months later. Lynn was born in 1985. For many of our years together we had a traditional Italian family Christmas that started with the vigilia di Natale, a fish-based meal before midnight Mass that we had at his family’s homestead and then was followed the next day with a big multi-family Christmas dinner at a restaurant. Gradually, though, Ron’s parents’ generation began to age and then pass away. Their older grandchildren grew up and established their own families, some of them as far away as the west coast and Japan.

For the last ten years or so Ron and Lynn and I have had a modified vigilia (ceci soup and maybe some pasta with cheese, but not the seven fishes) late in the afternoon. Then we’d go to the early evening family-oriented service at my Lutheran church, primarily because Lynn had some part in the program. Afterward we’d open presents and at about 10:30 Ron would leave for Hershey to sing midnight Mass with the choir of the parish he’d belonged to all his life. On Christmas Day he’d bring his mother to our house from her assisted living community and we’d have a turkey or ham dinner with all the trimmings.

The “children’s service” on Christmas Eve at Tree of Life was never very spiritually satisfying for me. It could be chaotic, filled with children who’d had too few naps and too much sugar and a liturgy radically different from our usual pattern. I liked it when that service was shifted to 5:00 and we were able to attend the more sedate and traditional service at 7:30. That still gave us time for dinner and presents and being together before Ron left. Then Lynn and I would cuddle on the couch, maybe watch a Christmas movie.

A few weeks ago I realized that things were going to have to be different this year. Ron’s mother died in August. He stopped attending the parish he’d grown up in (15 miles away) and transferred his membership (and his singing voice) to the Catholic cathedral parish (not the one the diocese thinks he should belong to because of the neighborhood we live in, but still only a few miles downtown from us). Their choir sings at a 4:30 Mass (choir robed and ready for warm-up at 3:30) and at the midnight Mass (music begins at 10:30).

Christmas is a time to honor tradition. But a lot of people make problems for themselves by clinging to old ways even if those ways are no longer logistically sensible or even meaningful. There can be arguments over whose tradition to honor, whose needs should be met. Lynn’s 20 now. She wants to spend time with the friends she grew up with, scattered these days to various colleges but still converging on their hometown at this season of reunions. I decided that this was the year we would cheerfully acknowledge that we have changed, and do what would serve us spiritually and socially.

I made a big pot of tortellini en brodo at about 5:00. The brodo had a chicken rather than an anchovy base, so there went the meatless requirement of the traditional vigilia. Ron was just getting back from his afternoon service as Lynn and I were getting ready to leave for ours, so we had our soup separately.  There were some bumps at Tree of Life — the substitute organist had only one volume (LOUD) and played “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” at the same tempo. The acolyte was tall enough to reach the highest candle of our tilted Advent wreath on its handsome brass column, but the breeze from the organ pipes behind it blew out two of them during the opening hymn. I did have a very nice conversation with the young man who sat beside me. He is a junior at the high school I served during my rookie year in the classroom (1969-1970). As it happens, I taught his father, also an eleventh-grader that year. And an inter-generational singing of “Silent Night” by candlelight, even if too fast, is still pretty inspiring.

Right after the service Lynn left for a gathering at the home of one of her friends. Who goes to a party Christmas Eve? People who attend church on Christmas morning (the host family) or not all, and the many Jewish youngsters Lynn is close to. When I got home Ron was resting on the couch and watching a broadcast of Gladiator. I watched with him for a bit, remembering how Maximus’s ancient pre-Christian religious traditions informed his life and gave him the strength to endure the trials he faced.

As a family and as individuals, Lynn and Ron and I are growing and changing, always coming back to the center. Tomorrow we’ll open the few small presents under the tree. (We’re into Big Things now that don’t really wrap well or serve as surprises — Ron got a new computer, Lynn’s going to Utah in January, and I’m staying at a more luxurious place than usual in Vermont next August.) We’ll have a steak and baked potato dinner together in the evening. We’re honoring the promise we made at our wedding, from a thought found in the work of Dag Hammarskjöld: “together may we grow firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.”

It’s just after 11:00 now. I’ve had a hot shower and slathered myself with soothing aromatic lotion against the very dry air in the house. I’m having a glass of my Nissley’s Holiday White. And soon I’ll say some words to the close and holy darkness, a wish for good will and peace and joy to all, and praise to God from whom all blessings flow.

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Which of us does not have grievances to air, especially regarding unfinished business from the past? Here’s one of mine.

In 2000 I noted in my annual letter that Lynn had been confirmed at Tree of Life Lutheran Church. Most people who know me know that I was brought up Catholic. From the time I was in college until about 1980 (when I was in my early thirties) I professed no faith at all. If pressed, I would identify myself as an agnostic rather than an atheist. Then I had a spiritual awakening and, through a process too complicated to recount here, reclaimed my heritage as a Christian. At first I joined with a congregation of the United Church of Christ whose pastor was my mentor during my conversion. Eventually, again for complicated reasons related to my spiritual growth, I joined a Lutheran congregation. Lynn was in first grade then and so has little memory of anything else. Ron remains a practicing Catholic. Raising Lynn as a Lutheran, however, has never caused a conflict.

Also in 2000 I wrote a brief memoir of my childhood Christmases. Here Are Poinsettias: A Child’s Christmas in Harrisburg, ran to some 5000 words. I printed it as a booklet and gave a copy to (some would say foisted one upon) everyone who came to my party. I also sent it along with the end-of-year letter to those whom I hadn’t seen. Many of my correspondents had shared the experiences with me, or at least had similar ones.

One person who received that letter and booklet in 2000 is a cousin who lives in California. She is six years older than I am, and since she’s lived on the west coast for more than thirty years, I don’t see her often. Her mother and my mother were sisters, and our families were close during my growing up years.

Where my mother could be brittle and controlling and motivated by a grim world view, my aunt seemed more relaxed, more open, more interested in letting her children follow their bliss than my mother was. My cousin calls her upbringing “haphazard.” I remember thinking it was perfect.

This cousin wrote to me in early January of 2001. She made a few comments about the memoir, giving her perspective on some of the experiences we’d shared. While I remember our families as close (perhaps because her brother and I were classmates and shared many friends and activities while she was out on her own before I entered high school), she remembers that we “didn’t intersect very much.” She acknowledges that she thinks she and I “didn’t know each other very well,” yet she goes on to make this observation regarding the present conduct of my spiritual life:

” . . . no matter what you pretend to yourself, you are very much a Catholic. It sounds like our Lutheran cousins have wonderful things to share. But you are still a Catholic among them.”

She might have reached her arm across 3000 miles and struck me, so stinging was that pronouncement. I actually sat down and cried that day.

As I said, I have never responded, but I’m about to. I don’t know if she reads my online work. I suspect she does not. But I include the addresses of my various blogs and online journals in my holiday letter every year, and this year I’ll call attention to the chronicle of my trip to Wyoming, so it’s possible she’ll be dipping into this space. This is probably something I should have said five years ago, but I didn’t, and something I should say directly, but I can’t. So I’ll say it here:

“What you said in response to reading of my participation in a Lutheran congregation hurt me very much. You know nothing about my spiritual life, about my beliefs, about the reasons why I have chosen not to practice as a Catholic. In fact, you know very little about me. You might remember the little girl and the teenager that I was, but you don’t know the woman I have become because you have never made it a point to. You don’t know my wonderful husband and my splendid daughter, you don’t know the love and the joy that inform our lives. You just judge, and slap me with words because I am not what you think I should be. In this regard you are more like my mother than your own. Nevertheless, I continue to keep you in my prayers, even if you think they avail nothing.”