It is a quiet night; the creek is crystal clear and a squirrel has just paraded down the deck, padding along, obviously unafraid of me.
This morning I did coffee hour at church, bringing, as I frequently do, too much food though everyone was appreciative and there should be almost enough for coffee hour next week, when I am in Minneapolis.
Returning home, I put the extra food I had in the refrigerator and then returned to have a late lunch with my friends, Larry and Alicia. Arriving early, I wrote a poem while waiting.
Sun and shadow dapple road,
curving toward town where
friends await.
A different life now,
slow, time for noticing
the dappled road;
for clasping close
all kind of friends.
To stretch my brain a bit, I am working to write a poem a day. Most days I do, not always, but most days.
Looking up, there is a canopy of green above me and nature is humming around me. It’s amazing that in the peace of my deck there is so much noise. Insects and birds, soft sound of water, far off the sound of trucks now and again, traversing the highway almost half a mile away.
It’s been a day when I have not listened to news or read anything until just a bit ago. There is, you know, only so much one can take.
It is interesting that Vice President Pence is going to great lengths to deny he is making “campaign style” visits to places. Governor Kasich is, I think. However, it is not possible to deny that even at this early stage Republicans are beginning to look to take the place of The Donald on the stage he now holds.
The Donald is in New Jersey at one of his golf clubs in a retreat from the White House will three million dollars plus in renovations are being made. It was just last week that President Trump is reputed to have said the place was “a dump.”
Really, I hope not too much gold is being added.
Venezuela is tottering toward dictatorship and economic collapse which will not be good for gas prices, I keep reading.
Tuesday, I am heading to Minnesota where, to my dismay, a mosque was bombed in Bloomington, the suburb in which my brother lives. That was not “Minnesota nice.”
The world is a very strange place. I mean really, really, strange and, you know, this has gone on forever but it just seems like somehow we should have moved beyond so many of these things and, hopefully, we will in generations to come.
It is there I must place hope.
In this time of my life, I am being as active as I can and, at the same time, treasuring more than I ever have the wonders of my life: an interesting life now and in my past, a creek that flows quietly by a home I think I imagined once and made reality, good friends, good dinners, times of good conversation, some travel for good reasons, a sense I have been luckier than most in keeping alive friendships from my past and carrying than into my present.
There is a tree along the creek that is always the first harbinger of fall and it is beginning to tell me fall is coming.
I’m not ready for it. Though I will accept it as one must.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 11 27 2018 Thanksgiving thoughts…
November 27, 2017This year I took on the responsibility for preparing Thanksgiving dinner, to be served at the home of my friends, Larry and Alicia, with six other guests. After cooking for two days, I loaded all the food into the Prius and followed the most level roads from my house to Alicia’s and Larry’s home. My menu, which I printed, is below:
Thanksgiving Dinner
November 23, 2017
Hors D’oeuvres
With cocktails, champagne and wine
Selection of cheeses & crackers
Pate
Radishes with butter and kosher salt
Soup
Pumpkin Soup a la Jacques Pepin
Main Course
Turkey
Rubbed in spices
Dressings
Brown bread dressing
Rice and Mushroom Dressing
Traditional Bread Dressing
Potatoes
Sweet Potatoes
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Mashed White Potatoes
Smashed Russet Potatoes with skins
Vegetables
Honey Glazed Carrots
Haricot Vert with sage butter sauce
Freshly baked multigrain bread
Salad
Desserts
Digestifs
With musical merry making in the parlor
Led by
Lionel J White
As I was very carefully driving, with pots, pans and containers rattling in the back of my car, I was listening to NEPR, New England Public Radio, and they switched to a story of a town just outside of Damascus, under siege by Assad’s forces for two years. Children were eating garbage and there wasn’t even much of that.
So, I drove to my friends’ home, thinking of the bounty in my car and the stark contrast there was to the scene being described in Syria. It is days later and I am still processing that story and the contrasts in the world and, as my friend, Medora, said this morning, you probably will be until you die.
We live in a world of contrasts and contradictions.
Yesterday, as I usually do on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, I set up my Christmas tree, while listening to Christmas Carols ordered up from my Amazon Echo. Alexa, play holiday music!
It is a world of wonder and a world of hard contrasts, of political acrimony and discord and it is just less than a month to Christmas and I am heading into this most wonderful of seasons [for me], determined to enjoy the bounty I have been given and to seriously think of how I can address the inequities that exist in my world, knowing I will be confounded by them until I die.
Tags:Alicia Vergara, Jacques Pepin, Larry Divney, Lionel White, Mathew Tombers, Matthew Tombers, Pierre Font, Thanksgiving
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