Family Gatherings

A few months back, after Thanksgiving, I posted the picture above of the Hochheimer clan (my grandparents' family) gathering at my brother Eric's house. My confession is this: I have always preferred the pictures like the version below:

I like the pictures that show the real people coming through, almost from behind the photograph. The traditional family portrait has everyone on their best behavior (and sometimes we take the pictures over and over until everyone has their eyes open and no one is talking and everyone looks just right). But often it's the "imperfect" pictures that more candidly show who we really are. The next picture was taken by a professional photographer in Provincetown (Cape Cod, Massachusetts) in 2001; my brothers and I had organized family pictures in honor of our parents' 45th wedding anniversary. This is the "official" picture:

I have that picture hanging in my office -- but framed with it is this one, taken just before the "official" portrait. I love the way in which we are all interacting, being ourselves, before we straighten up and put on our "smile!" faces.

I thought of all this because last weekend I had the honor of being at Coby Goodhart's Bar Mitzvah and celebration in Wilmington, Delaware. I took a lot of posed pictures at the party (and the official photographer took even more). But before all the guests arrived, I asked Coby if I could take his picture; he knew that soon he would be posing over and over again for family pictures. Very handsome, with tolerance and humor, he stopped and struck a pose that was completely himself.

My favorite photograph of the gathering: Claire and her grandmother only had eyes for the mirror and the reflection they were playing with. I came up behind them unobserved. "She lives in D.C. and I live in Cleveland," Claire's grandmother told me later. "I wish I could see her more often."

Silhouettes

I drive past this tree every day, and it catches my eye almost every time. Curling, intricate, lacy, the branches etch a beautiful and complex pattern against the sky.

Cave drawings may have been the earliest silhouettes created by people, but the word itself wasn't coined until the 18th century. There is general agreement that Étienne de Silhouette gave his name to the stark outline art form, originally thought of as a cut-out representation of people's heads and now given the broader sense of a black shape against a light background. Silhouette was a French finance minister who, to cope with a budget imbalance, implemented austerity measures that history records as "unpopular" (which means that the people who wrote history didn't like these measures): he taxed the rich to pay for the government's debt. It is unclear if the silhouette was named after Étienne because it was an austere or inexpensive portrait, or if he was in fact a practitioner of the art form.

There is something eye-catching about silhouettes. I took the picture above of Amy and Rebecca through a tent at the Guilford Fair a couple years ago.

Words, too, are a kind of silhouette. The letters are dark marks on a light surface, and they quite literally "speak to us." And the words they form provide us an outline of the writer's thoughts, leaving it up to us, the readers, to fill in the meaning.

Ice

After a lot of snow, we have had a lot of ice in Connecticut. The driving has been, periodically, rather alarming, in part because as it rained and froze it was often hard to know if the road was wet or covered in black ice. The thawing and freezing forced ice up under our eaves, which became water dripping into our living room. It made me think of Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

But our fear of icy roads and Frost's analogies don't account for the incredibly beauty of the layers of thick ice covering the bushes and trees, and glazing the tops of the rounded piles of snow.

Day after day, everything glistened. Our normally beautiful neighborhood was transformed into an alien and magical place.

In time, even I became a little tired of the extra scraping and sanding and chiseling involved in trying to take the ice off driveway and roof. The cold nagged at us. But always, beneath the layer of ice, we know that there is the promise of a spring that approaches, day by day.

Winter Sustenance

With all the snow we've had, the creatures outside still need to eat. Amy has been filling our bird feeders almost daily, which is not an easy task when the snow is up to her hip. Even in the middle of the snowstorms the chickadees, nuthatches and other birds have been swarming to the seed feeders, and the juncos and other ground-feeding birds have been picking up what falls to the ground. After our last snowfall the squirrels had a feast -- the snow was up to the bottom of the bird feeder outside my window, and squirrels could sit and happily scoop seed out to their heart's contentment.

Sarah spotted this rabbit out my window at about 11:00 at night. We had turned out the outside floodlight to watch the snow start, and as we watched the flakes come down she noticed the bunny grabbing a quick bite before the ground-cover disappeared under another snow.

Many of the birds have, like this flicker, been frequenting the suet feeder, which provides particularly high-energy food. I even saw two crows struggling to eat from the suet feeder, even though they are really too big to perch on the little suet cage. I watched one crow try to fly away, but unable to get its big wings beating fast enough, it flopped onto the snow before it could get itself organized.

We have been responding to the weather as well in our cuisine at home. For Sarah's birthday, I made bread (with butter, one of my preferred "high energy foods"), and roasted vegetable soup garnished with parmesan, condimento balsamic vinegar, and gougères (I use the recipe from the New Basics cookbook, although I substitute cheddar for most of the other cheese). As I write this, I am making my fourth (fifth?) batch of roasted vegetable soup of the winter. Yum.

Other desires emerge in the winter as well, including a longing for the colors of spring. I am finding it hard to walk by the spring flowers in the grocery store without bringing them home to brighten our winter table!

Almost black and white

This is a color photograph taken during the big snowstorm that hit Connecticut last week. (It was pretty big for us - over a foot of snow! although I know those of you in Norway or upstate New York are not impressed.) During the storm, all color seemed to vanish. Everything outside seemed to be black and white.

The snow sat on the lilac branches outside my desk window.

When the sun came out, snow melted off the roof and then refroze before it hit the ground. We have had three- and four-foot long icicles hanging from the rain gutters. The icicles are a different kind of contrast, between opacity and clarity.

The day after the snow stopped, I went out skiing in the early morning. Even without much color, the snow seemed to glow in the slanted light.

The young trees, lit from the side by the dawn, cast long straight shadows across the snow.

Finally, when the sun struck the tops of the trees, some gold and brown appeared - a dramatic hint of the return of the full palette some months from now when the snows have melted and spring returns.

St. Lucia

On Thursday we returned from an amazing week in St. Lucia. We were there to celebrate the 80th birthday of Amy's mother Joyce. Joyce has a great talent for joy and delight. She reminded us all periodically (and appropriately) how lucky we were to be there and be together.

Amy and her sister Karen had prepared a number of personalized gifts, including beach tote bags customized for each of us.

We walked the beach, looking at shells and coral and the sea. We swam in the hotel swimming pool, and climbed hills for the views.

St. Lucia's big industry is tourism, but there is still a lot of fishing going on, which resulted in some great meals.

Our hotel was on Reduit Beach, the longest beach on the island (about 1/2 mile long). The surf was pretty wild at times, but the Caribbean water temperature was delightful and we swam every day in the sea.

Sarah spotted this humming bird.

It was, for all of us, a wonderful respite from cold and blizzards, and from the pressures of school and work and normal everyday life. Many virgin piña coladas were drunk; many hands of dominos were played; we slept deeply every night.

We certainly wouldn't complain about our lives at home; 24 hours after swimming in the Caribbean, Amy and I were cross-country skiing in the woods behind our house. But the feel of the buoyant embrace of warm salt water lingers ...

Millie

At 5:00 in the evening on Sunday two weeks ago, my phone rang. It was Maria next door, distraught. She and Brad had been walking the dogs in the woods near the middle school when the smallest and most fearless of them, Millie, had been grabbed by a coyote and taken off into the woods. Maria had hurriedly brought the other dogs home; could I drive her back to the middle school where it had happened and where Brad was still searching the woods?

It was dark when we got there. Brad said that he had seen the shadows of the coyotes, heard Millie scream, then silence. We blundered around in the woods, shining our flashlights around us and calling into the night. Taken by a pack of coyotes, there was no way she was alive, no chance that we could even find her body. Every now and then we sat down and wept. Finally I drove Brad and Maria home. Their house was heavy with grief. I made them some dinner, fed the other dogs, told Brad and Maria I'd call later, and went home. Amy and I both woke at 5:00 the next morning, thinking of Millie and feeling sad.

Around noon that next day, my cell phone rang. "Millie's alive," Maria said. "A guy found her in the woods, all ripped up, when he was walking his dog. He took her to the vet hospital; they don't know if she'll live or not." But Millie has a strong spirit (Amy calls her "intrepid"). The vet sewed Millie up, gave her painkillers and antibiotics, and a few days later she went home.

Much of Millie's fur was shaved off so the vet could treat the puncture wounds on her back. Amy made Millie a fleece coat to keep her warm.

The picture above is of Michael, one of the other three dogs. Mike was bothered by all the changes involved in Millie's drama, but his main concern has remained whether he's going to get his evening bone.

Sometimes things work out better than we have any right to expect. A couple years ago, my car was hit almost head-on by a driver coming the other way; I was shaken but unhurt. A year or two before that, Amy had a tumor removed that was declared non-malignant. Two months ago a friend went into cardiac arrest; "I was dead for two minutes," he told me, "but I didn't suffer any permanent damage."

These "survivings" are gifts in more ways than one. They are pointed reminders of our fragility, of the reality of mortality, of the importance of paying attention to the loved ones and beauty around us.