This is just a collecting post
January
I finished my first book of 2025 today.
And how I loved it! I was a big fan of Hayley Mills when I was a kid, as were most people my age.
As she wrote about the movies she has been in, I realized that I may have seen only Pollyanna and The Parent Trap. I am going to try and get ahold of some of the more serious ones like Tiger Bay and Whistle Down the Wind, as well as some of the ones she did when she was older.
She is a very good writer. Highly recommended.
I wish all my dear blogging friends a wonderful Christmastime. I am actually doing something I've done only once as an adult. I am keeping the tree until January 6. It just somehow feels right. I also plan to read one of my favorite books on that day, Little Christmas by Agnes Sligh Turnbull.
Every Christmas, Margaret, Matthew, and Hazel give us our Christmas tree from a local grower. This year newly11-year-old Hazel chose it. It is the fullest and most beautiful one we've ever had.
Last evening we got some snow!!! I have a friend whose birthday is the 18th and quite often the snow comes on that day, so we are ten days later. It has been a warm autumn and some bushes still have their leaves. The sun came out and melted most of it away, but I am just happy to see it. I am a cold weather girl.
If you have been blogging for a long time, you have made friends who mean as much to you as people you know in "real life". And the long time of blogging means that we have all gotten older, with the sad facts that may go along with it. Sickness. Death.
Some of my beloved blogging friends have lost their husbands And today I read that a woman I have been in touch with for a long time died. Her daughter posted on her blog.
I cried as if I had known her in my everyday life, because of course I did. It is made even harder because I have been away so much in the past year. If she was sick, I didn't even know. I've emailed her daughter.
I know a lot of you have been through this, too. The blogging world is slower, quieter than what came after it. That is why I love it and continue on. It lifts me up, teaches me, offers friendships, and sometimes brings sadness.
This is a followup to my January 1 post. In March, Tom had two seizures at home, and one at the local hospital after the ambulance brought him there. He later went down to the hospital I mentioned in the other post. He stayed only a day, and is now on an anti-seizure medicine. So far, it has worked. And he sleeps better than he has in twenty years.
This has been harder to deal with than the post-concussion because he cannot drive. He has a followup zoom appointment with the neurologist in October and he is hoping he will be able to drive again. Was the concussion caused by a seizure, or did the concussion bring on seizures? Or are they unrelated? There has been no real answer. We just have to accept what is. It is mostly okay. He tires easily, and must rest during the day. He does have some memory lapses but nothing really important. He has stuck to the low saturated fat regime, and though he misses some things, he is mostly okay.
I am really going to try and write more, and read your blogs which I have missed so much.
I've meant to post these pictures for nearly a week! The tulips are the most beautiful I've ever seen. I told the woman who grows them that the first week's were elegant, and the second week's were like a party! Such colors, and all mixed together. You'll also see a couple of poppies. I so love them even if they are often gone in a day or two.
After his snack of sunflower seeds, he headed over to the suet feeders and pulled them right off the poles and carried them off.
It is in the mid-fifties which is not warm, and there isn’t sunshine every day, but I just love this time of year. The air is full of birds singing away - white throated sparrow, woodcock, thrush, robin, finches both purple (which are really red - why are they called that?) and gold, mourning dove, chickadee, nuthatch, junco, crow, and still a few turkeys, though the mating season has wound down and the ladies are in the woods on their nests. I heard a red-winged blackbird today which I haven’t heard here for years. And the peepers and woodfrogs! It is just glorious. Every single day there is something new popping out of the ground or flowering. The pictures become a bit clearer if you click on them. The forsythia makes me feel like I am immersed in yellow.
We had an all day snow yesterday, and the weather folks say we got 22 inches. Best snow of the winter, and it isn't even winter anymore! I shoveled for a couple hours, and then Margaret and Hazel walked up while Matthew rode the four wheeler and plowed out the parking area, and a path for the oil delivery tomorrow.
I don't think there is any day in a year that is so beautiful as this. Bright white snow, blue blue sky, and warm sun that is melting the snow. Perfect.
My local library recently purchased a book published in 1904, written by a woman about the garden at her summer home in my town.
Gardening is completely new to her, and she freely admits the mistakes she makes as well as delights in the successes.
I loved the following which I think is a lesson we all must learn over and over again. At least this is my experience.
I have found it advisable, in buying plants from a florist, to buy from one whose nursery is either near by, or, at least, located where the conditions are similar to the climate. For they are more likely to fulfil the promises of the catalogue if they are raised in the same kind of climate as the one in which they will be expected to grow.
I have had gardens for a long time, and I still get wooed by a plant in a catalogue which grows perfectly the first year, or sometimes even the second, but then gives up the ghost!
At my age, one might expect to go to funerals. In New Tricks, Jack Halford played by the excellent James Bolam says that he goes to a funeral every couple of weeks. Well, very, very sadly the last five funerals or Celebrations of Life Tom and I have been to have been young men. I’ve written about two of them here and here. In between them there were two others, one a bit older than Margaret, and the other in Michael's class, and then last month was the fifth. This young man was a year, lacking two days, older than my daughter Margaret. He died on the local mountain he loved, doing what he loved to do, snowboarding.
There were hundreds of people there. The place was up a hill, and we were early enough to park in one of the parking lots. When we came out, there were cars almost down to the main road. He was much loved in the community. I didn’t know him personally, but I know his mother, and his sister is one of Margaret’s best friends, and Tom taught him in school. There is something about the small Middle and Senior High School which all the young men, but one, attended that is very, very special. The kids were close, and they remain close. And many, many of them stay in the area. They love this place with the same passion that we have. Some move further away, but they they come back home and get together with all the friends they’ve known most of their lives. It is an amazing school and area that brings them all together for a lifetime.
After about nine days of dark, cloudy weather we have sun today. The blog header picture was taken yesterday, and here is the same view today.
