year's end

The collards are cooking, the black-eyed peas are soaking, the pork tenderloin is marinating. Jim is gigging -- New Year's Eve is the biggest night of the year for a working musician. If you've made reservations at the Crown Plaza Hotel Ravinia in Atlanta tonight, Jim's band is the one serenading you. Dance!

We make eggrolls on New Year's Eve around here. Couldn't find the wrappers this year, so we're making steamed (or fried) dumplings with the eggroll filling. I'm undressing the tree. At 11:30, I'll chant in the new year with friends at the Vedanta Center of Atlanta. Then I'll come home and tuck myself into bed so I can dream about the year -- the decade -- to come. What I wish for you, and for the world: Peace, my friends. Peace. Happy New Year.

the revelers

We don't have an official name, but there is a group of us that meets on Monday nights to meditate and then have supper. This Monday night happened to fall on the winter solstice, so we decided to meet for pot luck and music at Jim and Debbie's house. Chez moi. or... C'est moi.

The first order of business was bringing the outside in.
Then we set a table for sixteen. We lighted the lamps.
Then we filled the room (my office; do you recognize it? That's my desk filling in as one table)... we filled the room with friends and spaghetti. Under each plate was something to read aloud about the solstice, about Old Winter, the dispelling of the gathering darkness, and the coming of the light. My favorite was by Susan Cooper -- you can read it below.Then it was time for music! We stoked the beseeching fire, readied our various instruments, found our voices (and the brownies!).
Trying something new...Listening.Appreciating.Laughing! Cyndi Craven led us in the Bob Dylan version of "Must Be Santa."
An evening of merriment and laughter, food and friendship, songs and stories (you shoulda heard the stories!) to welcome the depth of winter and the gifts it brings.

What a blessing it is to have friends.

From Susan Cooper's The Shortest Day:

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

welcome midwinter

Robert Louis Stevenson: "The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life..."
...and maybe the little white tree that your daughter brought home to sweeten a lonely corner where the old tree used to live at Christmas.

Out with the old, in with the new, as the great Earth tilts and spins and we move toward the light. Happy winter solstice.

seeing christmas

Many years ago, a lifetime ago, we cut down our Christmas tree as a family. It was a gigantic thing, too big to fit into our home, and we loved it. It was always white pine. We cut off the top, we cut off the bottom, we tethered it to the wall using guy wires (our version), and we decorated it with abandon -- popcorn strings, cranberries, birds' nests, pine cones, saved ribbons and bows, and all the ornaments of a long family life journey.
Those trees are legend. One Christmas future I will dig out photos of them and share. You won't believe it. They took up the entire wall of the living room, and the whole house smelled of them. Neighbors came to see how big they were. Kids envied them and told their parents they wanted one. We were (affectionately) called crazy, and we didn't mind.
When I moved to Atlanta and began a new life and new traditions, I didn't have a house that would contain such a tree and I had little enthusiasm about cutting down a small one or toting one home. My friend Kay arrived at Christmas and insisted that I needed a fake tree I could haul out year after year, and we duly purchased one at a K-Mart that year, fully lighted and ready to be plugged in.

I was underwhelmed. Still, I put it up, and I kept that tree for five years. But I couldn't help it; I felt cheated.
Then I found this tree by the side of the road in Virginia Highlands in November. A nice young man was selling various iron things, and sold me this seven-foot bird feeder. It's massive, as bird feeders go. But I knew just what to do with it.
I put a candle in the space where the bird seed goes. I draped wooden cranberries from the branches. And I set about creating a space for the memories of a lifetime, the stories of our family; a place of honor to celebrate our ups and downs, our scars and triumphs, and to remember.
With this tree up in my gathering room, I remember where we come from, who we were, how we hoped and dreamed, what we longed for, each of us, and what happened to us, and it all has purpose.

Here we are, laid out in our grime and glory -- the lean days, the homemade days, the overflowing rich and full days, the blended days, the many firsts, the old guard, the new paradigm, the mix of past and present, the hope for the future. It's all here. A long family life journey... and my journey, too.
I no longer feel cheated.

miracles

So she called, my daughter (the miracle of cell phones), from her car, right off Main Street in our little town of Tucker, Georgia, and shouted: "A camel! There's a camel!"

I was baking cookies, directing operations like I was Patton and the ingredients were Third Army. "What?"

"There's a live nativity right here in downtown Tucker! Right now! And they've got a live camel!"
"Really?" I pulled a tray of jam thumbprints out of the oven. "Are you sure?"

"I drove by twice! It's a camel, and there's a donkey and sheep and goats! Across from the post office!" Her tone of voice said what are you doing still sitting there?

"I don't think I can leave my cookies," I said. My feet hurt. I was tired. There was still the clean up to do.

She hung up, excited. And I, for some reason, thought about my Aunt Beth telling me the story of the medicine show coming to town when she was a little girl living in a tiny town in Mississippi much like my tiny Georgia town.
It was miraculous, she said. Entire families gathered in the Oak Grove to be entertained in those Depression years. The side of the medicine man's wagon dropped down to make a stage. A magician, a singer, maybe an accordian player and a dancer entertained the eager, excited crowd. In the spaces between acts, the barker sold his miracle elixir, guaranteed to cure whatever ailed you. The Prices always bought two bottles. They were healthy and very happy.

Today we have cell phones and zippy little cars and thousands of sophisticated cookie recipes to make. A camel coming to town just isn't all that exciting.... or is it?

I wiped my hands on my dish towel. "Jim! Want to go see a camel? There's a camel in downtown Tucker right now!"
We take our miracles where we can find them. I'm awfully glad for mine this night.

early kitchen morning and tradition

When I was a kid, my mother made "Christmas Bell and Tree Cookies." I have her handwritten recipe for a butter cookie that was so delicious it melted in your mouth. She dyed a third of the dough green, a third red, and saved out a third for lining the cookies with "white."

It was a painstaking job, and a cookie she made all by herself, for some reason, perhaps so we wouldn't mess it up -- it required technical skill to wrap each bell and tree in white -- or perhaps she just enjoyed the solitude of making those cookies herself on a day we kids were in school.
We always made the regular sugar cookies decorated with colored sugars and red hots and those silver bells that would break your teeth. When I became a mother -- even in my poorest, youngest days -- I made those cookies with my children, too. It was tradition, and it tethered me to home, often when I was far away.

As my family grew and we all got older, we added M&Ms and licorice and Hershey Kisses, and eventually started making elaborate gingerbread houses with graham crackers and saved small cartons of milk (which got more elaborate, too), and all manner of colored treats -- sidewalks lined with marshmallows, windows of Brach's candies, roofs lined with Necco Wafers, and more.
Stories echo down the years as I tiptoe into this morning's kitchen to begin the annual cookie making. No wee ones this morning, but I have a grown one in residence who loves to bake. We have become more sophisticated in our choices through the years, just as my mother did when we kids grew up, and here are this year's cookies:

Brownie Roll-Out Cookies from Deb at SmittenKitchen. We made these last year to great acclaim (they are addictive), and Deb herself says, " According to my mother’s recipe, they’re called chocolate sugar cookies but I do not feel that it does them justice."
ReeRee's Pecan Sandies. My kids called my mother ReeRee (her name was Marie). Her pecan sandies recipe is in the old Better Homes and Garden Cookbook. My page of this cookbook (which I received when I first married at age 18) is stained up one side and down the other from making these cookies at Christmas. Let us just say that they are butter, sugar, vanilla, and pecans. That's about it. Some folks add rum and call them rum balls. We roll ours in confectioner's sugar and call it a day.
ReeRee's Divinity. Now y'all. This is diabetes candy. Not for the faint of insulin. Honestly, it's just sugar. Sugar, corn syrup (!), vanilla, egg whites, pecans... and my father adored it. My mother used to HIDE it from him at Christmas, those white pearls of spun sugar with a pecan in the middle that literally melted in your mouth. Mom ceremoniously brought Dad two pieces of divinity on a plate after dinner, while he sat in his recliner watching the news or a movie. They both laughed then at her subterfuge. And sometimes he found her hiding place. "Thomas P.!"

I haven't made divinity in years, but the resident adult baker says it's time, now that we have a stand mixer again. (Do not try it with a hand mixer; it will melt the blades and burn out the motor. There must be a hidden meaning in this.) If you want this recipe, leave a comment and I'll post it. Whoo-hoo!
Nibby Buckwheat Butter Cookies. Yes, we have a thing for butter cookies. I made these last year (though not at Christmas) and they are delectable (wish I could show you photos here, but click on the links for luscious photos of all cookies -- and we'll show you ours when we're done). This recipe is from 101 Cookbooks, which I've enthused about here many times.

Jam Thumbprints. From Martha Stewart. Very simple, very easy, almost instant gratification. A new try this year and on the list because I remember them from my childhood. My mother didn't make them, but a woman named Mary did, when we lived in the Philippines. I graduated high school there, and as I left to go back to the States for college, Mary gave me a box filled with jam thumbprints.

Apricot Bowties from Lottie & Doof's blog. These look and sound so delectable, I'm hoping they'll melt in my mouth. And I adore apricots, in part because my mother did. She would pull two dried apricots out of the box and munch them for an afternoon snack, which got me doing it. I still do.

Brown Sugar Walnut Shortbread, also from Lottie and Doof's Twelve Days of Cookies. My father's favorite cookie was a good scotch shortbread (followed closely by Fig Newtons). He adored Lorna Doone's, and my mother always had a box of them in the house for him. I'm sure that's why I feel great affection for them, too. I'm making this cookie in his honor. (And I, too, am a sucker for good shortbread.)

That's it on the cookie front today -- that's enough! We've earmarked a few more, such as Lottie and Doof's Orange Almond Buttons (I *will* make these, this winter!), and Heidi's Swedish Rye Cookies (at 101 Cookbooks), and her Hermit Cookies that make me drool.

Every choice is linked to a story and is, therefore, a tradition of its own. Even the Chex Mix. Long before you could buy Chex Mix in stores, making it from scratch was a novelty. My mother made it, year after year, every year, and we kids always swore it was the best. As air force kids, we lived in many different places at any given Christmas, but there was always Chex Mix.

Mom fiddled with it, fussed with it -- "I don't think this batch was a good as last year's!" -- she froze large quanitites when she knew we were coming home for Christmas, and we crunched it in front of the television on those Christmas week nights, all of us together with our own families in tow, and once again, even if for a few precious days, a family.
It occurs to me this morning as I begin to cream the butter and sugar, that no matter what befalls us or where we are... even if we have passed on... we are always strung together, link by link, cookie by cookie, by stories.

early kitchen morning and memory

There's a story here. Which one should I tell? Just a few choices:

1. How long it took me to gather all the ingredients this year, to dig up the jars from their basement banishment and wash them, and then how the actual making was (I always forget) a snap. An "inside" story, perhaps of lethargy or procrastination, or is it a wee bit of depression? Nah, it's something else... I could investigate.
2. Making Christmas in my new hometown of Atlanta, segueing into how much delight I'm finding in this holiday season, the first one in several years that I have enjoyed for just-itself, or as I wrote a friend this week, the first holiday in years that I have not been a) destitute, b) traveling, c) on deadline, or d) having my annual nervous breakdown. Nah... too wide. I want to focus on the granola.

Let me strive for one clear moment in time. I'll take a lesson from what I teach. Take one moment, beginning-middle-end. Write short. Use telling detail. Use your senses. Your feelings. Show us that moment in lovely (terrible, excruciating, hilarious, comforting, angry, amazing) bas relief. Let us live it with you. So. Try again. Why is this moment important to me?

3. The first time I made this granola, I made it with my son, Zach. He was almost three. The recipe has the date written on it: December 1984. I took it from an old Rodale cookbook that was falling apart by the time I moved to Atlanta, so I cut the recipe out of the cookbook and pasted it into the front of American Wholefoods Cuisine by Nikki and David Goldbeck.
But wait... I'm straying. I can add this in later if I want to, for texture and reference, when I revise.

I'm on to something. Let me grab my notebook. Scribble: making this granola with three-year-old Zach who is now almost 28. The way the day was so foggy and cold and damp, but inside the fire crackled and the young enthusiastic son stirred and tasted, stirred and tasted, standing on a chair at the table, wearing one of my aprons hiked up under his armpits, an enormous pot and a fat wooden spoon his companions, how he asked a million questions, how he wanted to gift the world with this granola, and how I learned he needed a funnel to fill the jars; how I wrote the recipe on homemade recipe cards, how he punched a hole in the corner of each, and how we, together, tied the recipe to the jar with a length of red yarn.

What else? How his eyes shined with his accomplishment. How we sang "Jingle Bells" as we worked. How he signed each card in green crayon with a crooked Z. How he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world to expect, "Let's do this again tomorrow." How flat-out happy I was... how young I was.

Yeah, let me write about that. Let's see: what happened first? I want a good lead. And what happened next? Let me capture this moment in time; let me preserve it forever.
This is how it begins.

writing is a job

The process of writing books is somewhat akin to a very long police interrogation in which the detective leans over the table littered with the butt ends of cigarettes and cold coffee in Styrofoam cups and says for the 87th time, "Now let's go over this again." -- Ann Patchett

The entire essay (so well worth your time), in my beloved Washington Post, is here.

This is what I'm struggling with right now.

S'okay. All is well. Just hard. Isn't it wonderful, and important, that we have others to inspire us and light the way?

tossing fearnando into the fire

It's cold in Hotlanta. We didn't get snow, but we've got freezing temps in the wee hours of the morning, which makes getting up to write in the dark a true wint'ry affair. So we try to lay in some wood for morning, and I try to start the fire when I'm up.
I have officially moved to the pink chair by the fireplace for the duration of winter, although you'll find me on the green chaise now and then, covered in quilts, in my office, just for a change of pace. We're experimenting this year with less furnace, more fire (including a kerosene heater and various electric radiators) and more layers. So far, so good. My new windows are doing their job, I am home until February, and Christmas is coming. What more can a writer ask for?

How about a chance to toss fear into the fireplace? That's what I want for Christmas this year. I'm staring at book two of the Sixties Trilogy, tentatively titled Hang The Moon, and I'm mustering all my courage to complete a revision of the draft I wrote in 2002.

I started this book in 1995. I didn't know what I had then, I just knew it was special. I fleshed it out along the way and years, but this story spent lots of time in a drawer while I wrote other things and attended to my life and family. I grabbed hold of a great idea in 1995, but I wasn't writer enough to grow those few fine but fractured chapters into a novel.

I have been living with the June family for fifteen years. I loved them from the moment we met. They arrived, noisy and fully formed. I created a family tree for these affable, fallible Junes, I described each character in detail. I know how old they are, how they fit into the story and with one another, and I love where they live: at the Pound O' Rest Trailer Heaven, which is a piece of property they own outside of Halleluia, Mississippi, with eight mobile homes set in a circle and a life-sized plastic Jesus in a bathtub surrounded by petunias at the entrance.

They are an eccentric, loving, boisterous, nutty family, these Junes, and I am set to spend the next year with them. They make me laugh, they make me weep. I need a full, revised draft by March 1. ("February?" asks my editor. Okay, I will aim for that.)

And my fear: Will I hear my own voice again? Will I find that vision I had back in 1995, when the story came to me of-a-piece and I knew it so well? For there have been so many more voices in my head as I've worked on this novel.

First there was Liz Van Doren at Harcourt. Then I took it to Vermont College, where I worked on it with Marion Dane Bauer, Carolyn Coman, and -- for an entire year -- with Norma Fox Mazer. I had a few trusted writer-readers as well.

And they all said different things, made different suggestions. Or maybe they all said the same things but I just couldn't hear it while I was so close to it, and in such a changing place with my life. I felt hopelessly lost in the book; I had lost my way. And these were all wonderful teachers. I learned from each of them.

And now... here we are. And what I have learned in the intervening years is that there is a time to move beyond your teachers and take up your unique voice. It's a little like leaving home. It's a starting-over. You take what works and leave the rest.

I'm inclined not to re-read my good teachers' many letters about Hang The Moon until I finish this revision. Maybe I won't read them until the book is entirely finished. Maybe I won't go back to them at all. That was then, this is now. In 2002, when I finally finished an entire draft while I was working with Norma, I knew the entire second half was dreck. I knew, then, that I had lost my vision and my voice, and I needed some time away from the story.

Now I've had time. I've written other novels. I've grown as a writer. And I have sold this novel, which takes place in 1966, as part of a trilogy of novels about the sixties. I have finished book one -- another book I started in 1995 and that I wasn't writer enough to finish for so many years.

But I did finish it, I love it, and now that I see what it will become, now that I understand its elements, I think I can see my way clear with Hang The Moon.

At any rate, here I sit, in the pink chair next to the fire, preparing to spend a winter with Margaret and her cousin Birdie, and Elvis...

... yes, y'all. It's the Elvis novel. I've been talking about it for so many years, people have almost stopped asking me where it is. It's here. Here it is. Thankyouverymuch. Now let's crumple up fear -- Fearnando, some friends and I call him -- and do a swivel-hipped Elvis toss into the fire -- begone!

working lunch

Saute fresh brussels sprouts in a bit of butter, slice and add an orange pepper left from Thanksgiving, s&p, and a bit of water when the whole thing begins to stick. Bake an earnest head of cauliflower. Make a spinach salad with sliced boiled egg. Pile cooked cauliflower and broccoli on top of spinach salad. Make mint tea. Sit next to fire. Consume lunch and commune with the last pieces of your new novel.
Author's note, acknowledgements, bio for back flap... new cover. New cover! Oh, it's stunning. It's right there, on my computer screen, below. Isn't it amazing? You can't see it? Let me see what I can do about that.
In the meantime, know that it's a pleasure to get to this point, the point where it all begins to come together and make a real book. I'm in the midst of the author's note -- it's hard. The bio for the back flap is done. I need to include a bib somewhere, maybe in the author's note. The acks are done. I wrote the acknowledgements first, because I love writing acknowledgements.

And did you catch the new title last week? The new and final title for this book that takes place in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this book one of a trilogy of novels about the 1960s? Countdown.

wedding thanksgiving

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~Thornton Wilder

A Thanksgiving meal is all about the organization, isn't it? (Well, when it isn't about the FOOD.) And I am this kind of organized:
I consider it art. It makes me happy. But it doesn't make an easy go of preparing Thanksgiving dinner for a crowd. But that's fine -- I like the challenge. Perhaps someone else doesn't...
I woke up early this Thanksgiving morning to find that someone had organized.... everything. Down to the cheese drawer in the fridge. Down to the pantry shelves and the drawer with the plastic leftovers containers and the drawer with the foil wrap and the rolling pins.
Smeone had even typed up the menu we decided on a week ago, and had printed out the recipes!
All of this was waiting for me in my silent kitchen as I padded into it just before the sun rose on Thursday.
As I searched for the turkey pan, I found this:
Really! I am not making this up. Does this young woman deserve a medal or what? She is one of the things I am thankful for this season.
As the morning turned into early afternoon, the house filled and many hands made our day happen.
Hands rolled the dough and chopped the pecans and washed the dishes.Several hands tended the fire.And when the feast was ready, we ate it... in my office. It was a touch too cold to eat in Irene, so we cleared off my door desk, shifted furniture a bit, and -- voila! -- had a grand dining room in what was originally the living/dining room of this old house.
What an amazing, strong, lively family I live in the midst of. We are not perfect, thank goodness. What we are is full of good humor, graciousness, and grace. These are our pearls of great price. They sustain us through the long absences and they lift us up in time of celebration.

My son Jason is married tomorrow. The celebrating that surrounds this event has already begun. It has brought family from near and far. Jim's mother is here from Charleston -- another mother for me to love. Steven is home -- how did we ever do without his smiling face and loving presence? And Stephanie... Stephanie is a beautiful gift to us all -- another sister for Hannah and Zach, another daughter in our family.

Something I learn, over and again, that gives me comfort on a Thanksgiving day is that humans are maybe the most resilient beings on earth. They keep putting one foot in front of the other, reaching for love. And, eventually (or maybe all along), it's there. It's there. It is.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

it is finished

Dear Alan Smagler: We have never met, but you wrote me the most wonderful, heartfelt letter 21 months ago when Scholastic acquired "The Sixties Trilogy:Three Novels of the 1960s for Young Readers."

Last night I finished the last-gasp refashioning of the scrapbooks for book one, which we have titled Countdown, and which will be published in May 2010. I clicked and sent the whole shebang back to my editor, David Levithan, and sat back, dazed at what we had created -- a documentary novel, maybe the first of its kind.

Then I looked at the pile of homemade cards that Scholastic sent me, lo these many months ago (and which has kept me company for almost two years), and pulled randomly from that pile of lovely cards, your note. I read it again. I got teary. Thank you, and thank you to everyone at Scholastic, for your amazing support. It is finished.