Lone walker on the lake

A shot from the lake shortly before I left Michigan.

I had thought all these shots got lost from my card; I was so delighted to find it was hiding out somewhere in the recesses.

Laura and I took Mancho out to Point Isabel today. It wasn't quite as stunning as usual given the overcast weather and the narrow path flanked by a chain-link fence protecting the newly seeded grass on one side and the caution tape preventing access to the polluted water on the other, due to the recent oil spill. It was the regular dog-fest, though, and we were particularly struck by a trio of incredibly massive dogs that probably came up to our bustlines, or perhaps just our waists. But anyway, they were the kind of dogs that sort of take your breath away. Two were silver-gray, one was brown. I don't know my breeds well enough to say what they were.

We talked about going dancing at Cocomo tonight, and I was planning on joining Brian in The City first and meeting his girlfriend Alison and joining them for a learning with the Mission Minion, but I think I'm in for the night. I picked up a bit of a cold in the chaos of the end of the semester and the travel and debauchery here, and now I just need to rest to get over my sore throat.

Family readers, I have posted new Christmas photos on Flickr. If you don't have an account, it's free and easy to create one so you can view them. Just write me a note so I know who you are :)

I'm dreaming of a California Christmas . . . but it sure is white outside.

It is so incredibly snowy here, you would hardly believe it. But we're expecting up to 8 inches in Southeastern Michigan. And it looks like there already nearly that much piled up on the whole world around the cottage. It feels a little like being in a gingerbread house with icing piled up around it.

I've added some posts over the past couple of days to Our Lady of the Woods, a place I envision for environmentally-oriented posts, links to media reports, information about consumption, and so on. It may be artificially segmenting my life to section those things off, but I envision this spot as a little more personal -- not in the sense of more important to me, necessarily, but just more chatty, more about my quotidian life, and far less likely to be of general interest to someone who doesn't know me. Also, I know Mom is deeply disturbed by my Keeper, so this way she doesn't need to hear all about things like that if she doesn't want to. :)

I am sitting here hidden away in my winter wonderland, reading my field notes from Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, in 2006, trying to make sense of everything, and thinking about bonds, partnerships, "sweat equity," and participation in housing programs in Central and Eastern Europe. I love the idea of this paper, but it's going to be hard to pull it together in the next day. I seem to be headed in the direction of thinking about global housing builds as a simulated religious experience for international volunteers, drawing on Victor Turner as well as an outstanding book called Participation: The New Tyranny? edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. I'm also going to be drawing on the readings for a course I took with Julia Paley last spring, on Democracy: Ethnography and Social Theory. Great class, great readings.

Now I just need to pull it all together . . . . and keep my mind calm while knowing that I still need to grade 15 more undergraduate papers, all (75) of the last quizzes, and check off the museum assignments of my students, and issue their final grades by the 20th, as well as writing my evaluation report for AFG and finishing up 22 more hours of field placement work. Luckily I can be writing my report in those hours. But still. That's all I have to do by the 21st. That, and work out the details of my academic planning with my advisor, and meet a professor to talk about prelims and hopefully manage to convince him that it's worth it to work with me even though he's about to leave the University of Michigan.

And my family wonders why I can't fathom talking about when I'm coming home for Christmas. Well . . . Mom, that's why! :( I miss you guys . .

Turn bleak December once more into May . . .

(Snow like stars over the lake's edge. The surface started freezing over last night.)

We had ample warning for the storm, so I canceled my plans to go dancing at Papi O's with Alice tonight, and my meeting with my undergraduate honors mentee to talk about her thesis, and instead spent the day getting everything set up for me to hide away until Monday (or longer!) if need be. There's something about living in such a quiet spot in the country that makes you feel in tune with (and at the mercy of) nature in ways I just don't in the city. Since the summer storm that knocked out my power and thus my water supply (since I'm on a well) for three days running, I have not taken the weather lightly.



My tree looks rather different in this light. It reminds me of my brother's college class in which he had a journal he maintained for a tree for a period of a semester.

So, this morning, I got showered and made my way down to Ann Arbor right after waking to take care of errands so I would be sure to be back in the country by late afternoon. I picked up my students' essays, then bought an ungodly amount of groceries at Trader Joe's, which was filled almost to capacity, with cars struggling to move in the parking lot, and grocery carts getting caught in gridlock in the aisles. I stopped at Busch's too, when I got back to the country, so I could get rid of more of my recycling, and get even more groceries.

By the time the snow started falling, I was tucked away in my cozy cottage, with a huge pot full of sumptuously delicious grown-up macaroni and cheese I couldn't help but eat out of the pot with a wooden spoon, and my absolutely massive enamel stock pot bubbling away with fresh stock in the works. In fact, I didn't even realize the storm had finally arrived, until I went out with my flashlight and kitchen shears to clip some fresh thyme and sage from the garden plot, and I saw everything covered with white.

My little path to the water has all but disappeared in just an hour's snowfall.

The house smells heavenly, of herbs and vegetables, and is toasty warm. I am drinking O'Douls and feel a little like a child in a playhouse. A Californian in the snow. I don't think I'll ever get over the magic of it, the mystical quiet that settles in all around when the ground is padded with tiny crystals everywhere.

Naturally I couldn't resist taking some photos. Tomorrow I'll see if I can get out to explore the villages, if the conditions aren't too rough for driving a few miles.

For those of you wondering about the title of this post, it is from the ever-so-beautiful song Trees on the Mountains from the opera Susannah by Carlisle Floyd (libretto also by the same):

The trees on the mountain are cold and bare
The summer just vanished and left them there
like a false-hearted lover just like my own
who made me love him, then left me alone
Come back, young lover
Come back, blue flame
My heart wants warming, my baby a name
Come back young lover, if just for a day
Turn bleak December once more into May

If you're interested, here's an interview of Floyd. The opera isn't popular with everybody. I've never seen it live. But I still get the songs in my head, especially this one and Ain't It a Pretty Night, which I heard my fellow singers working on in vocal repertory classes back in Santa Cruz. And yes, Miss Robin, that means you. :)

It's quite a spectacular morning out here on the lake, the day after our first proper snow storm in Southeastern Michigan. (When it started the night before last, I was completely convinced the rustling sound was my mischievous possum friend in the leaves outside my office again, and it took my slipping on my shoes and taking my massive flashlight out to look at the icy pieces collecting on the empty ground before I was satisfied in the knowledge that I was alone with the snow.) I'm sitting here with a leftover slice of pumpkin pie and a milky coffee, enjoying the contrast of the clear blue sky with the bright bright white of the snow lit all up with sunlight, watching the occasional flashes of bluejays and cardinals darting through the trees in the garden plot across the way. I get up periodically to dance to a particularly inspiring bit of Regina Spektor or Aimee Mann and then rub orange-scented oil into my rather neglected vintage wood furniture.

My God, vacation is a delight. I've been making my way through the house with cleansers and cloths that had been hiding in the cupboard nearly since I purchased them. This is the kind of chore I dread when I come home from Southwest Detroit twelve hours after I left the house, when it's already dark outside, or from Ann Arbor after teaching my 75 students, with a stack of all their papers to grade . . . but on a day of quiet solitude with the autumn leaves floating by on the breeze, when I've made my way in my pajamas and slippers to the desk to turn on favorite music, to the stove to prepare a coffee, with a quick sneak outside to take a few adoring photos, it's a sweet joy. Attending the spiritual house.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day hiding away in the kitchen, baking pumpkin pie and apple cobbler and enjoying the sweet spicy scents of autumn specialities merging with the warmth of vanilla and aromatherapy candles. (More on that in Kitchen Empress!)

I then made the trek down to Ann Arbor to spend a beautiful Thanksgiving evening with Alice and her family: her brother and sister-in-law, their darling child, all the adoring grandparents,and a lovely German neighbor family, with two angelic children whom I teased with little songs I dusted off from my high school German classes. The food was delicious, the company even more of a treat. I would have loved to have seen my own family, but I'm just too tired and broke and behind in my work to travel anywhere right now. Lucky that I have an adopted family through my dear friend :) In the end, we had FOUR DESSERTS to go with the feast, because Alice's sister-in-law AND her mother both also baked pies. Apple cobbler, and pies from pumpkin, rhubarb, and Concord grape. A true autumn bounty.

Here, some of the sneaky photos. . .

My view of the neighbors' lots filled with snow.


The boats and docks stacked for the winter and gathering snow.



And a glance across the lake on the near side, with the shore dusted with white.


And this one's for Mom, finally -- a glimpse of the humble exterior of my little cottage, from the gravel road. Behind, you can spy the lake around on the other side of the tiny house. In the foreground, you can see my little herb garden that I planted shortly after I moved here in June, with rosemary, sage in a pot, savory, and two varieties of lavender that seem to be thriving since the weather has cooled a bit. (We'll see how they do with the freezing temperatures.) And through the window there, if you were looking right now, you'd see me here at my computer on my massive L-shaped IKEA desk, in my PJs, shuffling papers, pulling some fresh clothes out of the dryer, listening to the Decemberists, finishing my coffee, and contemplating starting some writing. If I have my way, depending on how things go in the next few years, this may be the window I look from when I'm writing up my dissertation one day. . .