Merry Christmas!

December 23rd, 2014

Tonight my Santa paid me a visit.  Though he still believes, I think Tristan is beginning to understand the broader concept of Santa Claus.  I hope that in carrying on this tradition with him I've fostered a life-long belief in magic and altruism.  And I hope that that's why he's dressed in his Santa pajamas and filling my stocking this night before Christmas eve.  It's about selflessness and anonymous giving, not just milk and cookies.  And carrots.  I hope.   

We are spending this Christmas in Iowa because I'm not ready to disrupt the intrinsic naivete that I've nurtured in Tristan all these long years.  I feel obliged to protect this inherent hopefulness and blind faith in magic and goodness and infinite youth and a life without loss.   I want to keep him innocent forever.  Or at least for just one more Christmas.

In January we're leaving.  Not forever; the logistics are chaos and explanations too tedious but suffice to say we'll be back to this house, though it will no longer be our home.  We'll be slowly displacing the earth from our deep roots here over the coming year, eventually tucking them into the still foreign soils of the Hudson Valley. 

Tristan is eight years old.  And I can't help but think back to the Christmas when I was eight, when everything was a shambles.  My dad had been killed in a car accident a month before, and my mom still lay broken, in body and in soul, in a hospital bed in his den.  My mom's eldest son (from a previous marriage) had left his family to care for her and play Santa for me.  Why his own family and children didn't deserve the same I'll never know.  And I'll never know how to feel about it.  It was a miserable, muddled, confusing end to a childhood that had been until then idyllic.  Everything was suddenly in such sharp focus, and no child should have to see life and its inevitabilities so clearly. 

I tell myself that it's only a coincidence that I'm about to drag my son away from the only life he's known, just now, when he's eight, but it probably isn't.  Not entirely.  Our traumas mark us for life.  That which we were subjected to becomes instinctive, reflexive, and maybe we're all designed to subject our children to the same.  But this unbelievably clear recollection of Christmas when I was eight also gives me solace and strength, because I know what Tristan can take.  He's not going to break. 

[no appropriate segue available]

Also here are some photos from Christmases past!  Be merry!  Think positive!!  TAWNY PORT! 

Merry Christmas!!  HO!

Basilica's Buddha Booth

Basilica Hudson Farm & Flea

In the shadow of Christmas and impending real estate transactions I'm finding it hard to calm my mind enough to sit down and write.  But I did finally get around to unpacking the bags from our Thanksgiving trip to New York (yes, ten days is pretty much standard for me) and rediscovered a few of the tasty purchases I made at Basilica Hudson's Farm & Flea!

my festive kitchen

The Hudson Standard concocts syrups and bitters using ingredients procured from the Hudson Valley and everything I tasted at Farm & Flea was amazing.  We brought home the Pear Honey Ginger shrub (I've used it in a salad dressing that I'm eating right now!) and I so wish I'd picked up their Spruce Shoot Bitters as well.  Even though shrubs and bitters are easy to make at home, the prices of Hudson Standard's products aren't by any means exorbitant, so I'd err on the side of laziness and buy everything. 

Lady Jayne's Alchemy is apparently a one [awesome] woman operation housed "in a barn in the woods" in Old Chatham, NY.  Her Worcestershire Sauce is phenomenal but she also makes things like perfumes and cold remedies from plants on her property.  Eau de Creeping Charlie.  I am not kidding.  She is nothing if not resourceful, this lady.  I love her.

Flowering Heart Farm had myriad felted toys very carefully and cleverly made and displayed at Farm & Flea.  All hand-made and plant-dyed, Tristan and I really fell hard for everything but came home with just one wee bunny.  He'll be lost in Tristan's bedclothes in no time but isn't that what happens to us all when we're loved? 

And then there's this…

…which I almost certainly paid a hugely inflated price for and which will pretty much definitely mark the beginning of a stupid crazy collecting frenzy.  Being unfamiliar with these charming little Armed Services Editions I was rather intrigued, and whilst being enlightened by a thorough explanation from the bookseller (whose name I have forgotten) I was overcome with the feeling that this book was a personal welcome to New York from my beloved Walt Whitman.  So I bought it.  I am such a sucker. 

reflection is everything

Pool House Chronicles

I hate driving.  The only thing that I hate more than driving is flying.  Sure, one is active, one is passive (unless you're a pilot, I guess), but both modes of transport are just the worst.  Why everyone was looking forward to flying cars in the 80s I'll never know. 

I did a lot of driving and a little flying last week.  I am exhausted.  In homeschooling these past few days I've been especially encouraging of my son in mathematics so that he might work on future advancements in teleportation.  I'm ready to be molecularly deconstructed if it means I'll never have to get on a plane or the New Jersey Turnpike again.

In this haze of exhaustion and home-buying that I'm currently mired in, I keep forgetting that we had an amazing time in New York over Thanksgiving.  Our first destination after the Newark Liberty Airport was Manhattan Saugerties.  Saugerties is a gorgeous little village with this beautiful historic lighthouse on the Hudson River.  After stuffing our tummies to capacity with everything but turkey and napping contentedly we attempted to walk (which is the only way to get there) to the lighthouse at dusk on Thanksgiving. 

Did I forget to mention the snow?  There was snow.

It was unbelievably picturesque and eerily quiet and just sublime...

Holy crap, right?!

Which is saying a lot considering that WE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE IT TO THE LIGHTHOUSE!!  Either the tide or recent precipitation or both had flooded the trail just before we could reach it.

But it's just there, in the upper right corner!

There's a metaphor here about some mysterious obscured beacon guiding us toward our new home, but I can't quite find the words.  I'm having a hard time thinking of anything besides the possibility that I might be spending more than I'd like on this gorgeous property with a barn and a pool house and fallow land on which I'd like to establish a little biodynamic farm run by a cooperative of ladies that doesn't exist…yet.  Am I crazy?  I feel like I might be crazy.  Does anyone want to rent a pool house?