It’s one of the most basic elements of skiing or snowboarding.  It’s assumed that every mountain will have one.  It’s also assumed that there is no other way to the top, so no avoiding this demon.  The first time I went up the chairlift I was naive and innocent.  I thought the worst part would be getting used to the height.  How wrong I was.  The worst part of the chairlift comes at the end, so that you have all the time in the world to contemplate the inevitable on the way up.  As we approached the top, I realized what I was going to have to do to get off this thing.  It was a complicated combination of maneuvers and balancing acts performed simultaneously while being pushed down a steep, slippery decline, failure at which meant either crashing in a painful heap of flying limbs and boards, or being clobbered from behind by the next oncoming chair.  Foreseeing all of this in a matter of milliseconds, I did what any rationally sane person would have done in my snow boots: I bailed.

Panicking, I threw myself off to the side of the platform before the chair could push me down the ramp.  But  before I could breath any sigh of relief, I looked down to find that before me lay something much worse than a slippery, sloping ramp.  To my complete horror I saw…stairs.  Abandoning all hope of getting out of this unharmed and un-humiliated, I closed my eyes and plunged down to the bottom, landing right on top of an orange traffic cone.  By this time two more chairs had unloaded their passengers (with much less drama) and I was lying in the midst of the gawking, snickering crowd.  I can only hope that some of them were sympathetic.

That was last season, and I feel I have come a long way since then.  I still get nervous on the chairlift, but nothing that catastrophic has happened since.  This past weekend we went and I did 9 runs up and down the mountain, which shatters my previous record of only 4 runs.  I think I’ve hit that turning point where the whole concept of snowboarding starts to make sense and you lose a certain amount of fear of falling down or getting hurt.  Once that fear is gone, you start enjoying it, thinking less and feeling it more.  You work less at making the board go one way or the other and you tire less easily.  Good company helps too, and when you can laugh and look out for each other, it’s all the better.  Nine runs, by the way, means nine successful trips up and off the chairlift.  Turns out the devil chairlift isn’t so much a devil after all.  Still an adversary, but more like an annoying little minion that I can kick when it tries to intimidate me.

We’re seeing not only my parents on this visit, but also siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts and great uncles.  So far we’ve had a lovely sushi dinner and taken my cousin’s dog, Gracie, to the dog park where she met a friend.  We spent some time relaxing on the beach, shopping at an outlet mall, and enjoying several very fun and delicious dinners with family. We have one more full day before we head back to the cold….which I don’t really want to think about right now.  So I won’t.  :  )  Tomorrow we will go to the Farmer’s Market and visit my great aunt and uncle for lunch.  Should be a great time!

I recently recommended this book to a friend and in doing so was reminded of what a rare gem it is.  I don’t think I had read even a paragraph in before I was struck dumb by the smoothness of Diamant’s writing.  I don’t know how else to explain it.  It was like poetry, if prose could be poetry.  It was like floating ribbons of words carrying you effortlessly along the rolls and swells of an engrossing story.  I often found myself stopping to read a sentence two or three times over, just to enjoy the sound of it in my ear, the feel of it in my mouth.

The story is a fictional expansion on the Biblical account of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah found in Genesis 34.  In this novel, Dinah tells of her upbringing with her mother and the other three wives of Jacob, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah.  The red tent is historically where women in Jacob’s tribe stayed during their time of the month, during illness and also during childbirth.  For Dinah, the tent became a place of rest and a safe harbor where the women found strength and comfort in each other, a reprieve from the demands of daily life.  From these unique women, each of whom embody a different feminine characteristic, Dinah learns the secrets of sisterhood.  Inevitably, Dinah begins her own journey into the treacherous realms of love, betrayal, grief, motherhood and her life’s call to midwifery.  Her later life is a testament to feminine strength and fortitude in a time when it was often not recognized or welcomed.

I think this is a novel written mostly for women, about women and to which most women will be able to easily relate.  It is about remembering the earthly lives of women with all their passion, tragedy, and heroic courage.  The voice of Dinah tells their stories. “They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember.”

We had a wonderful time with both families, Ben’s and mine, and both were full of nonstop activity.  Christmas morning was relaxed and we had fun opening presents at my parent’s house.  Then we enjoyed a winter walk through the woods near my house.  We got to see lots of friends and family at our Christmas party a few days after Christmas.  We went to see Wicked, the musical, and Avatar in iMax 3D.  In Syracuse we made homemade sushi, celebrated New Year’s Eve and had a wonderful dinner party with Ben’s brother, his girlfriend, Ben’s best friend and his date.  It was a blast.  We made prime rib, asiago whipped potatoes and asparagus.   Here’s a few pictures…

My Gramma was born Florence Agnes Gianuzzi on October 15, 1915 in Jersey City.  After her Father’s death when she was only 2 years old, her mother remarried Pat Bonsignore, who also died only a few years later.  When she was a teenager, Florrie’s Uncle died and left his four young children in the care of Florrie’s household.  I think most of this responsibility fell to her since her mother worked all day in the millinery business in New York City.  She married my grandfather, Eddy, in June of 1939 after a long romance and courtship.  Not long after their first son was born in 1943, Eddy enlisted and went to the Pacific with the Army during WWII.  He was gone for 3 years, leaving Florrie to live with her mother and young son.  Their second son, my dad, was born in 1947 after Eddie returned from the Philippines.

Florrie loved to cook and Eddy loved to play the piano and the organ, so large family gatherings and dinner parties were, I have heard, quite a thing to behold.  One thing they knew how to do well was to bring people together around good food, music, and a lot of laughter.  Eddy died in 1984 at 73 from a heart attack, when I was only 2 years old.   I never got to know him, and this is something I sincerely regret because I’m sure I would have adored him.  I have heard endless stories about his infamous practical jokes, such as the pair of blow-up lady’s legs he’d leave stuck under the hood of the car in plain sight in the driveway.  If you weren’t paying attention at dinner, he’d sneak several linked straws into your drink from across the table and it would be gone before you knew it.  He loved puns and slap stick humor, a trait which I can easily see in my father and my brother.  I truly wish I could have known him.

Above all else, my Gramma loved her family.  She adored her children and she poured love on her grandchildren like it would never run out, and indeed it didn’t.  For this we  loved her deeply and will miss her so much.  I know that she lived a long life, and faced her trials with fortitude and courage.  Still, the sadness of death from a human point of view can be overwhelming.  Death is always a loss, and so we grieve no matter what the other circumstances may be, no matter how full the life that was lived.  My hope and comfort is that she is in Heaven, perhaps with Eddy.  I know that death is not nearly as scary for God as it is for us, because He is on both sides of it.

My Dad read this excerpt from the author Willa Cather at my Gramma’s memorial.  He also read it at Eddy’s.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.  There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along furrows, full of fruit.   I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few.  All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.  The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.  There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.  The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.  Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.  Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots.  I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen.  I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy.  Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.  At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

From My Antonia by Willa Carther

I am so enjoying this Season, even though I think I have run into every hum-bug moment associated with the Holidays: chaotic malls, angry drivers, long lines, no parking spots, “sorry, we’re all out of that,” and overpriced shipping to get it here by Christmas.  But none of this really bothered me this year.  I think because I’ve had so much fun enjoying our lovely tree and looking forward to spending some time with family.  We pack up tomorrow afternoon and head to my parent’s house for six days!  This year the annual Christmas party promises to bring more than the usual number of friends and relatives to the house to enjoy food and wine, a warm fire and mostly each other.  Christmas seems to be the time when friends from high school and college who have moved to different parts of the country all converge in once place and that in itself is cause for celebration.  Somehow, these friendships are so easily rekindled, as if the months or years that spanned the distance between our last visit were as nothing at all. It makes me feel like a very rich person.

We’ll spend some time in Syracuse with Ben’s family after that, which will only mean more eating, drinking and celebrating.  I’m so fortunate to have such great in-laws!  I always told Ben that if he married me he would luck out because I came with such a wonderful family.   Turns out, I did pretty well too!

I know that the next two weeks will fly by, as they always do.  But I think I’ll choose to ignore that little piece of foresight at the moment, and just revel in what’s to come!

From somewhere deep inside the recesses of REM, I suddenly heard something very loud.  My eyes shot open and all I saw was the pitch-black room with one brightly glowing orange rectangle flickering on the other side of the room.  The bedroom window.  Or rather, outside the bedroom window.  But no, that’s not real.  “You’re lying,” my groggy mind said to my eyes, still wide open and taking in the flickering blaze outside.  I blinked, as if to hit a reset button in my brain.  Still, the entire window glowed with that unmistakable dancing orange light.  Was that an explosion I had heard?  Finally my conscious brain kicked in and registered that we were no longer asleep.  This was not a dream.

I flung off the covers and woke Ben.  He seemed to go through the same second-long process I had to comprehend the situation.  We both jumped up and ran to the window.  My neighbor’s garage had burst suddenly into flames, right next to our house.

In all honesty, the rest of the story is pretty much what you’d expect when your neighbor’s garage spontaneously catches on fire.  Ben got him out of his house, I called 911 and before we knew it the firemen had arrived, red and yellow lights flashing, with axes and hoses.  People from nearby houses gathered on the sidewalk to watch despite the fact that it was 32 degrees and lightly snowing at 6:30am.

The thing I can’t get over is the surreal experience of half-consciousness, when one second seems to stretch on and on while my brain sputtered between stalled and overdrive.  I can still see vividly in my mind that bright orange window with the flickering light, as if the image was burned there in a moment of unguarded impressionability.  This much I can say, it was the strangest way I have ever been woken up out of a dream in my life.

Last year we started a tradition of cutting our own Christmas tree.   We had so much fun that I could hardly wait for this year’s hunt for the perfect tree.

Just like last year we hiked across three fields to get to the Fraser Furs, which I had my heart set on.  They are soft and look so beautiful, plus they smell amazing.  It took us a long time to find our tree – the first one was too small, the next one too skinny, the next one not symmetrical enough.  Finally we both agreed upon a rotund, tear-drop shaped tree.  It looked perfect!  Once in our living room, though it appeared to be about three times bigger than it did in the field!  Funny how that happens – must remember that for next year.  We made it work and now we are sitting on the couch enjoying its golden glow!