The writer is a public person, in many ways, but one who works alone. His workplace is his or her head, none of us are any better than our own lives and experiences and joys and sorrows. Genet said if you are a writer, you will sooner or later betray everyone you know, your very existence depends on it.

I know what he means. A person I thought of as a good friend told me recently that she was afraid to speak to me on the phone – she only would message me on Facebook – because she was afraid she would end up on the blog, or even in a book. I was surprised, but not really. I don’t put private conversations with people on my blog, especially if they ask me not to,  but one way or the other, and sooner or later, the things I encounter make their way there, or into my memoirs, which are only incidentally about dogs.

Writers understand this, it isn’t so much that they betray the people around them as it is that they devour the life around them, if they are any good they are ravenous and insatiable and predatory sometimes. It is easy enough for people to understand this, my daughter has often been irritated by things I’ve written on my blog or in my books.

Someone who loves a writer needs to love the Piranha inside of them, or life with them is not possible. There is something ruthless and relentless about authentic writing, I understand this and have experienced it. I just don’t know a lot of writers that a lot of people like or can stand to be around. This is my place in the world, I think, I love writing more than anything, except perhaps Maria.

Maria is an intensely private person, she hated being photographed or written about or observed. I wondered if we could survive life with me. She was traumatized by the idea of writing about herself on her blog. But I always saw the writer and artist in her, what are artists of not exhibitions and predators, just like writers? They eat up the very soil and life around them and, that’s where their art comes from, just like that’s where my words and ideas come from.

People often ask her if she is uncomfortable being written about. I smile, to myself.

The writer in her has emerged along with the artist – people love her writing and she loves the dialogue about her art with her customers and readers.m I can barely step outside without her reaching for her Iphone for a photo or video of me. Photos of  you with the animals get a lot of shares on Facebook, she jokes. I know, I know. Nobody asks me if I mind being photographed or filmed.

That’s how we are. Things that might have divided us – pictures, images, bankruptcy, fighting for our house – just seem to bring us closer together. That’s  how I know she is a writer as well as an artist. Who else could love me that way?

My writers friends would never express concern that I might write about them, they consider it an inevitability, like the passage of time. Writers are solitary by work and nature, and they need to be, because if you seek to tell the truth, a lot of people won’t like you, because a lot of people don’t care to hear the truth, they are just trying to survive and get by. “I don’t like being analyzed,” another friend told me, and of course, she was really telling me our friendship was over, because I am all about being analyzed and analyzing others, it is what I do, it is what the people around me do.

Where does she think I get my ideas from?

My long spiritual tangle with Christmas is underway again, and has taken a dramatic turn. Maria is allergic to Christmas, her family always treated it like the Coronation of The Queen, she just dislikes the ritual and pressure and excessive cost and gift-giving of it. There is something wrong with holidays that make so many people miserable.

So we have agreed to have a simple Christmas, to remake it in our own image, and let other people celebrate it in theirs.

Last night, I was lost in Patti Smith’s wonderful new memoir, “The M Train,” and I didn’t notice that Maria was scurrying around like a border collie dragging armfuls of colored lights. When I woke up from my trance, the house was awash in lights, lights on the front porch, on the back, in the dining room, in the living room, in the upstairs hallway. Lights of all colors,  green and blue and red, small and large, white lights, blinking lights.  I had no idea we had so many lights, I didn’t even know where she got them or had stashed them.

(Reader, make no mistake about it, this is Maria’s  house, and I love this house, but I have no illusions about whose house it is. I have to ask her where the dog food is.)

I was mesmerized and startled by this turn, we had spent a lot of time moving away from Christmas trimmings, yet the lights looked a lot like Christmas to me. When I took the dogs out for their last walk, I didn’t even need to turn on the back porch light, the house was lit up like a Mississippi Riverboat picking up some gamblers. She said, oh, we talked about it, this is in honor of the Solstice, she said, which is also in part what Christmas is about. The Undefeated Sun, she said, the Coming Of The Light.

The donkeys and sheep and pony had all gathered at the back gate, staring at the house as if it were a spaceship that had just descended.

The thing is, Maria had to climb up on chairs or ladders to hang all of these lights while I was oblivious, stuck in my book. The living room looks like a classy Manhattan pinball machine. It is wild and beautiful, it is perfect. The lights are a work of art all in themselves, they are perfectly placed and hung. The barn cats were all over the place, trying to sort out the new landscape. Am I manic, she sometimes asks? Sometimes, I sometimes answer.

Maria has, in fact, re-cast Christmas and the Solstice into a piece of folk art, her own Gee’s Bend kind of Christmas. I am happy to tag alone on this one, the best I can hope for is to be able to write about it, I am no artist.

What amazed me is that she did all of this in about five minutes, she didn’t need help or asked for it.  She didn’t even mention it to me. Sometimes I think she is dervish or Tasmanian Devil, she moves in a cartoon kind of blur. I am all about color and light, I am surprised but happy,  were it up to me, I’d keep these lights on all year. They are a perfect manifestation of the Solstice, and will brighten up the farm for Christmas as well.  They are a tribute to the Undefeated Sun. They are us.

Do you mind?, she asked about the lights, hours after she had hung them up, as I kept mumbling in wonder about what they meant. . No, I said, I’m just trying to figure it out. I keep telling Maria that she is just like a border collie, but she doesn’t get it. This morning, she jumped out of bed at 3 a.m. and she and Fate rushed downstairs, she had something to write, she said. She wrote a piece called Comfort And Joy. It was on her blog.

It is about understanding Christmas in a new way. It is very good. And you can see the difference between us. I am up to my neck in Jesus books, irritating people who just want to buy stuff and make nice dinners. She has turned the holidays in a work of art. Works for me.