December 27, 2008 – It was a bleak, cold and foggy day, but this Warnick Road farm looked beautiful
to me in the fog, not desolate. I loved Christmas Day. My daughter Emma came up from New York with Pearl, the yellow Lab who used to live with me. I visited Warren, I made dinner for family and friends, I took photos, I took Winston, my dead rooster out into the woods. This morning, he was gone without a trace, a feast for the coyotes, I suspect.
  I will miss Winston, but that is life on the farm, a ballet of life and death, mystery and crisis.
 I look forward to this week. I will tear into my novel, and then wait for the New Year, a time of reflection, for me. My e-mail suggests that many people believe 2009 will be a better year than 2008, an idea that is, like a panic, infectious. I think we should spread it, and then, like a panic, it will become true.
  Tomorrow I have some photographic ambitions for black and white photos. Going to church in the morning, visiting Marion in the afternoon at the Alzheimer’s/Dementia unit.