—From EF—

I don’t have any new resolutions for 2022. My imagination is not teeming with new frontiers to conquer, I’m OK with just trying to get more crap off my desk. I don’t have a new show to write and rehearse and perform, because we’re not doing that any more. One of my favorite singer-songwriters, John McCutcheon, was booked for his Left Coast tour and we had a ticket for January 8. He very sensibly canceled his tour and hopes to stop by in June. He’s just shy of 70 and has had a few health issues, as have we all, and I’m glad he’s doing his best to stay alive. We are in our 80’s and are also interested in staying alive, so we’re staying home too. But why?

For me, a starter would be the sunrises. Now that my biorhythms have a standing date with dawn, I get to see them, and sometimes I have to clap my hand over my mouth to avoid yipping loud enough to wake CB. And then I pad downstairs barefoot, loving the animal sense of my skin moving silently over the tiles.

Another perk is having a skilled and attentive lover. We had our own fireworks by the bedroom hearth for New Year’s Eve, and we won’t wait a year for the next.

Likewise, I am a skilled and attentive cook. The downside is that it’s necessary to limit quantity, because otherwise both of us would blow up like blimps.

I have very generous cats. Thirty seconds after lying down on the little couch for a nap, I have one cat on my legs and another on my stomach. I have learned how to stop worrying about the time and just bliss out with the warm purring softness.

We live where we live, in Sebastopol, and after having been out of California for 33 years I make the most of every new day that finds me here. It allows us to have a yard made of wild things: all moss and ferns to the right, creeping jenny and wild violets to the left.

The ocean is only a half-hour’s drive, and our Sundays are a combination of a battery charge for the coming week and a swamp clean-out from the last one. I try to limit my on-line time, but FB is my link to many distant friends. The news? I think I just have to be up front and call it an addiction, but at least we make a lot of very funny crude jokes about it. And the ease and frequency with which we make each other laugh is a plus.

We’re losing friends, and eventually the remaining friends will lose us. But hey, what a journey. On my last visit to Europe, I spent the final days in a tiny town in southern France. It was the last stop on the train, and there was something wonderful about getting to the station, picking up my bag, looking down the corridor and realizing I was the only passenger. That whole train was mine, and I felt like royalty.  

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