Good morning and Happy New Year!

I hope you had a peaceful New Year’s Eve. We did. We didn’t make it to midnight, nor did I expect to. But we made it until 11 pm. Yesterday, we took it easy. We’ll most likely do the same today. We’re going to have a FaceTime call with Rick and Doug later this morning.

The paperwhites in the den are in full bloom, so I get a lovely whiff of their scent as I sit here and blog. The tree is still up. It will most likely stay up until the end of the week. We take it on a day by day basis, but so far, 30 days after we brought it home, there has been no needles dropping and it’s doing very well. I can’t dispose of something that is still thriving. It’s not in my DNA.

Not to mention the fact that we love seeing it every day.

Tomorrow? Snow. 1 -3 inches during the day and another 1-3 inches overnight. We had rain and sleet last night but it’s going to warm up to 40 degrees today, so all that will be gone.

Still waiting on Don’s package. The good news is that it finally showed up in Springfield MA and stayed there for a few days. Then it moved to a neighboring town. It’s still not at our local post office, but I suspect it will be there by Monday.

We watched Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom  last night (on Netflix) and I must say it is the best movie I have seen in a very long time. Incredible ensemble work by the whole cast, including my friend Michael Potts as the bass player. Viola Davis is amazing. But the actor who took my breath away was the late Chadwick Boseman. Stunning, brave, layered, complex, luminous, heartbreaking – my heavens, that man could act. He transformed; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. It’s clear he was very ill when he was filming. He had lost a lot of weight and was gaunt. But, somehow, he drew on some extraordinary power within and pulled off one of the most emotionally complex and brilliant performances I have ever seen. All Don and I could say afterward was the obvious; he was taken from us much, much too soon. His legacy is large, but if it was only this performance, this one piece of film, that legacy would be astounding. If you haven’t seen it, please watch. August Wilson, who wrote the play, was a masterly and much awarded playwright. He is no longer with us. I hope that somehow, somewhere, he saw Chadwick Bozeman’s performance.

18 days until sanity and honor and compassion and competence come back to the White House.

Stay safe.

We were in the kitchen this morning and Don looked at these masks that just happened to be drying on the kitchen table:

He said, “If that doesn’t sum up 2020, I don’t know what does.”

What a year. Mostly horrendous, heartbreaking, enraging, maddening, lonely, bewildering – I could go on but you get the picture. It’s been like nothing we’ve ever been through before.

In the midst of it, however, was goodness and kindness and heroism. Front line workers risking their lives to help others. Good deeds. People reaching out to each other in new ways. People standing in long lines and risking their health in the time of COVID in order to vote. We turned out in record numbers in order to vote a monster out of office.

Too many lives lost and many of those deaths never had to happen. Willful ignorance and selfishness on display as people refused to wear masks, stay isolated, or take one moment to think about someone other than themselves.

This has been a terrible year, one I  cannot wait to say goodbye to.

I could spend paragraphs speaking to the nightmare that is the Orange Man and his administration but I’ve done that. You know how I feel.

But we’re getting through it, thank goodness.

I thank you all so much for your daily presence here. You’ve made an enormous difference in my life, especially this year. More than ever, our little community has been a source of solace and commiseration, of joy and laughter.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

May we move forward into 2021, knowing that change is coming, knowing that at some point we will all be vaccinated, that goodness will triumph. I only wish January 1st was also Inauguration Day.

Stay safe. Stay vigilant. Don’t relax your guard, my friends, as the next few months will be hard.

But do celebrate the end of this year and a better year ahead.

I may or may not post tomorrow. We’ll see.

Happy Thursday.

Still up! And, in spite of getting it on December 2nd, it’s still very moist with no discernible dryness. So it will stay up into the New Year. That’s the way my parents did it and it’s a tradition I gladly continue.

I finished Moonflower Murders  last night, staying up a bit later than usual in order to find out who the murderer was. Anthony Horowitz, the incredibly skilled author, has once again used the device of writing a book within a book. By the end of this novel, you will have read two books. He is so good at playing with the genre. I’m a big fan.

Next up: one of my Christmas presents, The Law of Innocence  by Michael Connelly. I’ve been reading at a slower pace lately. I’ve been distracted by other things. So last night’s big chunk of reading was extremely satisfying.

I haven’t read as many books this year as in years past. I was consumed by the election and by text banking for Biden and by lots of outdoor projects. But I did read a lot of great books, starting the year off with Jane Eyre. I was about to work on my one and only job of the year, coaching a production of Jane Eyre  at Hartford Stage. I’ll be ending it with The Law of Innocence.

My favorite book of the year was, without a doubt, Hamnet  by Maggie O’Farrell. I’ve never read anything like it. Profound, heartbreaking, glorious, and lyrical. I could come up with 20 more adjectives for it. Don read it, as well, and we spent large chunks of time talking about it. It got me in my very core.

It’s time to share what you are reading at the moment with the addition of your favorite book of the year (if you can pick one.) Feel free to share your thoughts.

Stay safe.

Happy Tuesday.