My dearests, up in the aerie wheezing, coughing, sneezing, and blowing my nose. At least the thing broke, no more wondering if I'm suddenly allergic to cat hair. So I stayed in all day, no walk - good timing for a cold, since we were hit with another snowstorm, and another on the way for tomorrow. So I've been pretty aimless today, floating around the house in a spacey way. Maybe I have a slight temperature, who knows. Turkey soup at lunch, homemade with noodles, carrots, and celery was especially restorative.

Where is everyone today? No page hits all day, unusually (not that I get many) until one just now. Missing you, hope all is well.

Thinking about my weekend visit with family, and some very pleasant impressions. The little get-together at their house was charming, they have lovely friends, and the friends (and my cousin and his wife) have lovely children. At a certain point came the musical portion of the evening, and I sat at the piano and played a few carols that everyone sang to in different languages - including a lovely version of Jingle Bells - in Arabic! All full of melodious la-la-la sounds. My relatives are Catholic, and they met their friends through church, so while religiously homogenous the group was ethnically quite diverse. A boy played a carol on trumpet, then a little girl very capably led us through "Joy to the World" on violin, and afterward her little sister, a teeny sprite of a thing, couldn't have been more than seven I don't imagine, strummed on guitar the simple chords to "Silent Night." She played them absolutely simply and perfectly - it was like angelic harp.

Next morning my cousin's wife and I were the first ones up, as it turned out, and we had a very animated, interesting chat as she, still in her nightgown (I'd thrown on the previous evening's clothes) fixed us coffee. Over the years I've met her probably no more than once a year, and haven't really ever talked to her enough to get to know her. The two of us are very different, I think, and yet have a few things in common - both have professional degrees and backgrounds in urban planning, for example. She's very Catholic, and while I nominally count myself as Christian (combined, in my mind, with a form of Emersonian/Dickinsonian American Transcendentalism), I am not of the Catholic persuasion. Yet she and I (while talking, at times, slightly gingerly around each other because we realize there are some formal differences in our beliefs) found an awful lot in common, shared points of view it seemed to me, on many things, in a nutshell, a deep distrust of (as I put it) corporatist consumerist culture. To make a long story short, and this term resonates with us since we're both first generation Polish-American, she and I in our own ways view ourselves as part of a Resistance movement, to claim and reclaim values and ways of life and ways to raise children, etc., etc., that are so under siege. She expressed to me that she feels quite alone, on the outside a bit, keeping her kids and their lifestyle "unplugged" as much as possible. I mentioned to her that I feel very grateful to live in the region that I do that has so much going for it in terms of the river, light, landscape, farmland, and many, many people, who care. It surprised me, that she seemed genuinely surprised when I told her, you're not alone, not at all, very very many people in our region feel just as you do and are trying to do something about it - shop local, grow their own food, cook their dinners, and the like. Whatever one's religious affiliation, so many of us want the same things, for ourselves, for our children, for the world. As we sat around the living room noshing on party food there was discussion of events unfolding in Egypt, and it seemed quite universal in that cozy living room, of a feeling of "solidarnosc" with the trod-upon Egyptian people. They're not Polish - but indeed, indeed, they are the people, the resistance, against the totalitarian regime. As Polish-Americans, our parents' war has been settled, it's over. But we're alive now, and those of us who have children - this is all our time on this planet, as the same old forces that simply take on different forms over the course of human history, take on new forms now. A challenge is to see clearly through it, not easy. But if you let your heart and soul guide you, in a genuine way I mean... really there's a lot of commonality.

She and I managed to get through a lot of discussion without any serious stepping on landmines. I even told her about the McGilchrist tome, the whole left brain/right brain divide, that's inherent in each of us, and should work together, but somehow the balance gets out of whack in a destructive way, and she came back with a comment about the dichotomy between Faith and Reason in the Reformation. And I said, OMG, he has a whole chapter about that! And she mentioned Descartes, and I got excited and said (and mind you, here we are at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, two middle-aged women, everyone else in the house asleep, animatedly talking!) - yeah, McGilchrist's a psychiatrist and says - cogito ergo sum, a world so decontextualized - that's how schizophrenics see things! Anyway, it turns out we woke up, one by one, the household with our spirited talk, just as well since everyone had to get ready for church at 10. I went along too, happy to, didn't take communion - though in other ways I did.

Love you, dearests, XOXO. Hope all's well. Missing you, and loving you. Posting without proofing, just not up for it at the moment. (Sorry, South Korea.)

More kisses.