We greeted the new year with quiet festivity. We ate the treats we had prepared – pot stickers, egg rolls, barbequed little wieners, a cheese ball and crackers, seven layer dip and chips, cream puffs, and sherbet punch. We made too much food just for the four of us, so we had leftovers to eat on New Years Day. We watched a movie, one of our favorite musicals, Show Boat, which has a great New Years scene in it. It was just 10:30 when we finished, so we went to bed and slept the new year in.
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| Our New Years Eve celebration. |
New Years Day was very cold. It was -13 with a wind chill of -25 when I got up in the morning. It wasn’t a very happy way to start the year. Later in the day we ate our traditional dinner of pork and sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, and rolls. Stacey had to work, so we didn’t eat until 4:00 when she got home. The rest of the day was quiet.
The arrival of a new year is always a time of introspection and planning for me. I’m not one to make big new years resolutions. I just make plans, which are pretty fluid, rather practical, and mostly involve the gardens I will plant and books I will read. Most of the rest of my life is regulated by necessity and routine – pretty boring stuff – and I like it that way. I pause to look back at the past year and review my successes and failures – again mostly related to the garden – and then decide what I can do better this time. These cold, dark days are brightened by dreaming of the gardens that lie ahead. My dreams are fueled by all the seed catalogs that conveniently arrive at this time of year. I keep a pile of them by my bed and I carry a few with me to school to peruse during free moments.
This year my introspection seems to be a bit deeper than usual. In a few weeks I will turn 60. I don’t usually pay much attention to birthdays, but for some reason arriving at this age seems significant to me. I find myself looking back over the years, remembering things I haven’t thought about for a long time, analyzing the phases and eras of my life. I did a bit of research and found that over the last four generations, the average life span of the men in my family is 76 years. Among my recent direct male ancestors, one lived to be 90, two of them died in their mid 50's, and the rest were somewhere in between. I think I’m in pretty good health (I’ll know better when I have a checkup in February), and I plan to surpass the average, but even so, 76 is just 16 years away for me and that is a sobering thought. Many men, when they reach this age, have a mid-life crisis. I’m not a mid-life crisis sort of person, just an introspective one.
I’ve heard it said that you are as young as you think and I think that is true to some extent. In my mind I think of myself as being a young man – sometimes juvenile, maybe even infantile. But my body doesn’t pay much attention to my mind’s age anymore. I read an article not long ago where a psychiatrist theorized that we tend to define ourselves, our “essential personality,” by a specific age in our lives when we felt powerful and in control. It’s what we consider a sort of personal Golden Age. The average person sees that time as being around the age of 25. When I thought about it, I realized the age I’d choose might be more like 10. At 10 I lived in a world that seemed stable and secure. I knew my place in it. I lived in a home I loved surrounded by family, immediate and extended. By that age I had already been introduced to some of the things I would love all my life – music, books, gardens. I was ignorant and innocent and happy. Then everything changed. We moved away to a new place and would continue to move every few years for a long while after that. The world never seemed as secure after that. Then to muddle things further, I entered my teenage years and everything got complicated. Gone was my innocence, although a fair amount of ignorance remained and yet remains. I’ve felt a bit at sea ever since. Don’t misunderstand me, wonderful things have happened in my life since I was 10, but when I retreat into my innermost self, I think I’m still basically that boy who lived in the house on Bridge Street. So much for introspection.
On Thursday Hannah left to go back to college. She’ll be gone until July. I will miss her so much. I’d say the house is quieter without her, but that isn’t the case yet. Hazel and June are here. Rachel and Tabor flew to San Diego so Tabor could attend a business meeting. They took Mabel with them, but Hazel and June are spending the weekend with us. This is the first time the girls have stayed at grandma and grandpa’s house without a parent here. It has been fun. They are pretty entertaining.
The arrival of a new year is always a time of introspection and planning for me. I’m not one to make big new years resolutions. I just make plans, which are pretty fluid, rather practical, and mostly involve the gardens I will plant and books I will read. Most of the rest of my life is regulated by necessity and routine – pretty boring stuff – and I like it that way. I pause to look back at the past year and review my successes and failures – again mostly related to the garden – and then decide what I can do better this time. These cold, dark days are brightened by dreaming of the gardens that lie ahead. My dreams are fueled by all the seed catalogs that conveniently arrive at this time of year. I keep a pile of them by my bed and I carry a few with me to school to peruse during free moments.
This year my introspection seems to be a bit deeper than usual. In a few weeks I will turn 60. I don’t usually pay much attention to birthdays, but for some reason arriving at this age seems significant to me. I find myself looking back over the years, remembering things I haven’t thought about for a long time, analyzing the phases and eras of my life. I did a bit of research and found that over the last four generations, the average life span of the men in my family is 76 years. Among my recent direct male ancestors, one lived to be 90, two of them died in their mid 50's, and the rest were somewhere in between. I think I’m in pretty good health (I’ll know better when I have a checkup in February), and I plan to surpass the average, but even so, 76 is just 16 years away for me and that is a sobering thought. Many men, when they reach this age, have a mid-life crisis. I’m not a mid-life crisis sort of person, just an introspective one.
I’ve heard it said that you are as young as you think and I think that is true to some extent. In my mind I think of myself as being a young man – sometimes juvenile, maybe even infantile. But my body doesn’t pay much attention to my mind’s age anymore. I read an article not long ago where a psychiatrist theorized that we tend to define ourselves, our “essential personality,” by a specific age in our lives when we felt powerful and in control. It’s what we consider a sort of personal Golden Age. The average person sees that time as being around the age of 25. When I thought about it, I realized the age I’d choose might be more like 10. At 10 I lived in a world that seemed stable and secure. I knew my place in it. I lived in a home I loved surrounded by family, immediate and extended. By that age I had already been introduced to some of the things I would love all my life – music, books, gardens. I was ignorant and innocent and happy. Then everything changed. We moved away to a new place and would continue to move every few years for a long while after that. The world never seemed as secure after that. Then to muddle things further, I entered my teenage years and everything got complicated. Gone was my innocence, although a fair amount of ignorance remained and yet remains. I’ve felt a bit at sea ever since. Don’t misunderstand me, wonderful things have happened in my life since I was 10, but when I retreat into my innermost self, I think I’m still basically that boy who lived in the house on Bridge Street. So much for introspection.
On Thursday Hannah left to go back to college. She’ll be gone until July. I will miss her so much. I’d say the house is quieter without her, but that isn’t the case yet. Hazel and June are here. Rachel and Tabor flew to San Diego so Tabor could attend a business meeting. They took Mabel with them, but Hazel and June are spending the weekend with us. This is the first time the girls have stayed at grandma and grandpa’s house without a parent here. It has been fun. They are pretty entertaining.
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| Good-bye to Hannah until July. |
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| Playing games with Hazel and June. |
The weather continues to be bitterly cold. The cold is part of that big winter storm system that brought snow and a hard freeze to the deep south and the whole East Coast. We didn’t get much in the way of snow here, just the cold. On Friday it was so cold (-3 with a wind chill of -30) that they cancelled school. When we woke up that morning and turned on a tap, no water came out. We thought the pipes were frozen. Frozen pipes are the worst. There’s no easy way to thaw them out when it’s so cold and if they burst, it’s horrible – and expensive. But the pipes weren’t frozen. It was the well pump. Our well pump is very old – maybe 30 or 40 years old. Lately it has been locking up now and then. I went down in the cellar that morning hoping that was the problem. I gave the pump a few sharp blows with a wrench and it turned on and the water flowed once again. We were relieved that it wasn’t frozen pipes. Now we’re hoping the pump lasts until our tax refund comes. Fingers crossed.
It was nice to have Friday off so I could be home with Hazel and June. It was June’s birthday. She turned 3. Miriam baked her a cake. She opened gifts. There was a lot of excitement. Her parents Skyped from San Diego to say happy birthday to her.
It was nice to have Friday off so I could be home with Hazel and June. It was June’s birthday. She turned 3. Miriam baked her a cake. She opened gifts. There was a lot of excitement. Her parents Skyped from San Diego to say happy birthday to her.
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| June's birthday cake. |
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| Blowing out the candles. |
On Saturday we went out and about despite the cold. Stacey and I drove up to Bingham Township to do some shopping at the Amish store. The drive was beautiful – from the inside of a warm car. The Amish are cutting ice from their ponds and filling their ice houses. We stopped a moment to watch them work. In the afternoon we all went up to Wellsville to the library. June and Hazel loved the children’s book wing. Then we went to the church to do the cleaning and get things ready for the Sabbath.
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| Up in Bingham Township. |
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| Bingham Township. |
We’re home from church now. We had to leave a little early because June has a bad cough. The wind chill is still well below zero today. Tomorrow it’s supposed to start warming up. They’re saying we might hit 32°, which is still technically freezing, but after all this sub-zero weather, it will seem warm. By Thursday we expected to almost hit 50°, which will seem downright balmy. In the meantime, I’m sitting here in multiple layers of clothing with an electric heater running beside me. Soon I will have to don yet another layer or two of clothing and head down to the barn to do the chores. It has been so cold that the chickens haven’t ventured outside of the barn all week and, even though I have an electric heated waterer for them, the top of the reservoir, the part furthest from the heating element, has frozen up several times. It is January after all, so this cold weather isn’t all that unusual. I just keep reminding myself that every day brings us closer to spring. Winter won’t last forever. At least it hasn’t so far.
