Sam's music books

Zara's sweater, voila!

Here's her last year's Christmas gift I made from Simply Shetland patterns. Eureka!

Merry Christmas!

Here's a rehearsal of some youth who will sing Peter's arrangement of Brightest and Best on Christmas Eve at our midnight service. Merry Christmas!

winter scenes

Views while skiing on Mt. Wanstiquet,Brattleboro, Vt and hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Mass.

My new hat

thanks, Sue!

snowhill on Willow St.

My neighbor Bob Henry does this every year in his backyard:

icy fetters

Our friend Chip Greenberg discribed this very aptly:

The countryside was gorgeous all weekend after a night of freezing rain and then a cold morning. All the branches and twigs of the trees, and every stalk of grass, was encapsulated by a tube of ice. In the mornings, the low sun glimmered and sparkled off everything. As the sun rose and the ice began to melt off the trees, tinkling breakage was everywhere and the ground littered with half-tubes of “glass” of many diameters. The gound crunched wherever you walked adding sound to the beauty.

His hoary frost, his fleecy snow, Descend and clothe the ground,

The liquid streams forbear to flow, In icy fetters bound.

("Winter", from the Sacred Harp)

Our weekend in the Berskshires was a wonderland.

Louise Lindsay Read

We celebrated the life and mourned the death and wept for the love for our dear Louise yesterday in Warren, CT in a packed church. Sam sang All is Well; Colin Lindsay played concertina (Fredric Paris tune) and Hallowell was sung by Colin and Rachel, Mary and Julia. The website Caringbridge.com kept hundreds of people informed and able to write in letters of love and concern; four readers read excerpts from the letters. And Wordsworth's poem about daffodils (which folks have planted for Louise) was read. The photos of the lakes are taken by my sister Annie just by Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District.

"Daffodils" (1804)

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

Sam in Copenhagen

Rlke's Book of Hours

I live my life in growing rings
which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I'll never complete the last,
but that's what I mean to try.

I'm circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I've been circling thousands years;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

Praying

Thanks to my neighbors for this gift of a poem for my "space":

thanksgiving

(pilgrims feasting made by students at Beekman Elementary School)
We had a beautiful day in Monterey, (Mass.) with the Amidon clan and phone calls from Sam in London and Stefan in Paris.