Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

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1. Since we don’t put up a Yule tree and decorate it until Christmas Eve, ours stays on display longer than any of our neighbors’. The lights make January a less forbidding stretch. Make it more festive and relaxing. So what do you do special this otherwise cold, dark month?
2. She’s really at home in a grocery store. Knows all the comparative prices, what’s a bargain, what’s special. Not so in other retail settings. Still, you should see our pantry. Or the two big freezers in the barn.
3. Swami had long ago said I didn’t need a job (I’m an old soul) because that’s not the work I should be offering. That was long, long ago.
4. How often does it seem: Fashion = Money … along with the race for something better?
5. Would I be satisfied with a single-line poem that said everything? Stake my reputation on it?
6. Considering all the hours I put in on my “personal writing” over the years – the poetry and fiction, especially, or genealogy and Quaker fare – it would have added up to a lot of overtime pay. Even at 10 hours a week, though I suspect with vacations and holidays thrown in, the average would have been closer to 20. I’d really have to land a bestseller to come anywhere close to recouping that investment.
7. The frustration of my twilight years in journalism, seeing us increasingly pander to stupidity, ignorance, and hatred rather than trying to lead and enlighten.
8. As the funeral director told me, “We hate holidays. Holidays suck.”
9. Fortune cookie: You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.
10. Can this really be happening to America? Or the world?

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The mind dances here and there, rarely in a linear fashion. So what’s on my mind these days? How about counting on these fingers?

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1. This month’s annual perusal of seed catalogs leads to opening our shoeboxes of seeds themselves – counting and inspecting all the packets remaining from previous seasons. Makes for quite an impressive array, even if I’m not the principal gardener. Just listen to all that considered discussion and dreaming on the part of the actual planters, the mother and daughter and their friends.
2. Even in retirement, I require a timetable – a to-do list – some sense of priorities and direction, in addition to routine. What does that say about me?
3. From spam email: “Man Snake Enlargement.” Also, “Man Pole.” (Um, like a May Pole?) English terms pale by comparison.
4. My Motets move in poetic processes that largely lack images. It’s a curious twist for me.
5. At a holiday gathering with friends and family, one of the tots picks up my Peterson bird guide. Claudia intercepts it, opens it, and, as if it’s an illustrated children’s text, begins inventing a story. “This is Emily. And what’s this duck doing? It’s FLYING! And this one …” Anyone else think there’s another book waiting to take off there?
6. Taking a few risks, looking at the proposal and rules. If I fail, it’s more on my own terms.
7. Memory, as counterpoint and harmony for the present. Or maybe dissonance and discord.
8. Still can’t take in the news.
9. Parasite: a freeloader, usually fatal. Lives off the work of others. Seldom demonstrates gratitude or other qualities of good upbringing.
10. What happens when we lose our sense of mission?

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