Happy New Year

View of NYC from top of Frick Library

In autumn we took some great short trips, really enjoyed Open House New York with tours of the Frick Library and City Center. A short visit to Drew Farm with its fall colors as we attended the burial of our friend Heather. We heard Fretwork perform at Corpus Christi Church on the upper West side in November. We went up to Buffalo for Thanksgiving, just enough snow there to make it pretty, made sentimental stops at Spot Coffee and Betty’s for lunch. Phil’s parents and most of his sisters and their families were able to come to Thanksgiving dinner at their house. And we were joined by Chris as well, who drove all the way down from Gilmanton to drive us to Buffalo!

In December we went up to Guilford to see friends at the Guilford Poets Guild reading and the Guilford Preservation Alliance Christmas party. On the way home we stopped in NYC to hear Dark Horse Consort at the Park Avenue Christian Church. Bill thought the duo of Robert Mealy and Julie Andrijeski (violins) playing Schmelzer’s “Pastorella” was an exquisite experience. A little snow before Christmas was just the beginning of winter…

Ah, then on Christmas we got on the train for DC to join Karen and her family for a few days. Family included new members Biscuit and Jazz (their new cats). On New Year’s Eve we attended the Lawrenceville annual bonfire, and threw lists of all the bad things that had happened in 2013 into the fire! A few days later it snowed in earnest. Followed by some low temperatures that seemed a little excessive. Time for our annual winter break in California.

In front of Batchelder House in Pasadena

And California was all we expected, lovely weather in Laguna Beach with my sister, and at the track (Santa Anita) with Mimi, touring the Arroyo with Fran and Roger. The only low point...was the level of the pond at the Arboretum in Arcadia, more pond scum than water. California is in a terrible drought. But onward, Melinda cooked us a lovely dinner, with salmon en croute (and S ♥ B on top!). One day Bill played bridge and I hung out at  the Los Angeles County Art Museum. At the end of our trip we went to San Diego and attended the 98th birthday party of our friend Janet Richards. Her three children were there, so it was nice to catch up with old friends. We especially liked visiting the new Central Library in downtown San Diego, a marvelous building, 8 stories high, with state-of-the-art features.

We came home via Baltimore (our original flight to Newark had been cancelled) and were greeted with lots more snow, then ice, then a power failure (mercifully only one full day). But the year has begun with some lovely surprises. A publication of my poem "Caryatids"online in Cider Press Review, two poems in California Quarterly, and then in the mail arrived the new issue of Off the Coast with three of my poems (two of them can be read using the link). A nice surprise was the title of the issue, “Ice Fishing,” which when I turned to the back cover I realized came from a line in one of my poems--and there was the quoted line and my name right there on the back!