Here It Comes: 2014

Christmas Day ~ Sauce for Sweet and Sour Pork

New Year's Eve Music ~ Enjoy!

Five Crowns

Pot Stickers

 http://www.food.com/recipe/chinese-pot-stickers-13320?oc=linkback%3C/a

Christmas Past - A Memory



  Aunt Lois's Steamed Cranberry Pudding

 2 C. Cranberries, fresh or frozen
1 1/2 C. Sifted All Purpose Flour
1/3 C. Boiling Water
1/2 t. Salt
2 t. Soda
1/2 C. Molasses
Wash and drain berries.  Sift flour, salt and soda into bowl.  Add berries and dredge with flour mixture.  Mix with remaining ingredients and mix well.  Pour into a buttered double boiler and steam with cover on tightly for 1 1/2 hours.  Serve warm with the following sauce.

Vanilla Sauce:
1 C sugar
1/2 C light cream
1 C butter
1 t. vanilla
Cook sugar, butter and cream in double boiler for about 30 minutes; stir occassionally.  Just before serving, add vanilla.

Snack Tray Gift 

Ho-hum.  Just another Wyoming Sunset

 "We Had Seasons In The Sun."

And so another year ends, old and decrepit if we visualize the elderly gentleman with the overgrown white beard and sickle in hand. Three hundred sixty five days used up,  miserable, and on the verge of death by inevitability: the March of Time.  Twenty-thirteen, you were a learning experience in many ways, and for that we thank you. 

My holiday card included a one paragraph reference to the death of a young friend of our son.  In so many ways it deserved much more than that.  One event defined our year.  While not the conscious reality of every moment, one event more than any other pervasively and persistently shadows us.

One Saturday morning in September the sun rose as usual.  While most of us snuggled in for a few more hours of sleep,  two friends stood together quietly chatting and watched the day dawn.  It wasn't the first crisp and cool Arizona morning they had enjoyed together, but it was the last.  We were changed more than we can grasp over the course of that day, overwhelmed as we were.  One event, the unexpected death of a young man, a friend, a child, a brother, cousin and nephew is the wrapping on the package of our year.  It is not everything about our year but it does perfectly encase and represent  practically everything about it. 

It defines not only our year but also our future.  It shook our foundations.  We view and judge the importance of everything else past and present from a new perspective.   The hold we have on life seems more than a little tenuous.  Utterly conscious of a new level of reality, at unexpected moments we have grappled and gasped with the pain of loss, remembering.  And then, like the sun rises, we are left pondering again how very precious life is.  That knowledge makes all moments more poignant.

We grieve with our son.  We don’t push ourselves or him to get over it, but to get through.  We are aware that sorrow's work takes time.  We feel bereft but press on as usual, filling in the gaps.  We have grown up.   We feel responsible.  We live more consciously and hopefully less selfishly.  Moments pass heavily by virtue of something difficult to define.  

We carry a sense of responsibility.  Life, days, surviving - matters.  We carry the burden of reality, too.  The place they should be, now empty. We carry the burden of our grief and our friend's family's loss - if somehow our appreciation and respect for their beloved will help, perhaps miserable comfort.  We share the moments with them when we are beyond words - alive and lost.  Through that understanding we are sustained.

And that, my friends, is not a bad way to face a new year.  Sober and sensible.   Life marches up to greet us.  For better or worse we have awoken each morning to the light of another day. How precious, if painful, life is.  Each moment, really, has value and each day is a gift.  Even though we have spent so many moments mindlessly tending to our own desires, we know better.   We know that Twenty-Fourteen, while filled today with possibility and wishes for happiness, may hold sorrow for some.  We know because it happened to us.

Life then is a mixture of sorrow, hope, friendship, love, work and play.  Life is decorated by being kind and tender, by laughing and understanding, sharing and teaching – the moments we reached out, listened, helped, watched and felt.  Those moments of shared humanity and connection will be the moments that will have the greatest value a year from now. 

If granted life for another year of days by virtue of Celestial Decree, I want to fill them with friendship, gentleness, understanding, patience and strength - to have moments less defined by what I want, even with what I think I need – and more with sharing things like sunrises.