Christmas
Letter 2013
Greetings from Kent and Linnea
Dear
Fiends and Family,
Kent
and I continue our honeymoon despite the creeping depredations of age, both in
ourselves and in this old house. It
is hard to believe that it has been four years since our very first meeting on
Christmas Eve 2009. We remain
grateful for our totally unexpected and unlooked for happiness together. We have done a lot of traveling this
year, mostly in the U.S., while the big project at home was remodeling the tiny
bathroom off the master bedroom. We
were predicting a simple job, until Kent found rotting joists beneath the
beautiful old tiled shower. Everything
had to go, including lots of tough steel mesh, rock-hard cement, and 1940s tile. Kent spent several days crouching in
the crawl space, putting in new joists.
The next project will probably be our kitchen, which now looks old and
shabby in comparison with the new bathrooms.
We
sailed in the Virgin Islands, backpacked in the Grand Canyon, celebrated
Psyche’s graduation from Yale Nursing School, and sailed on Lake Superior with
Kent’s sons Jake and Andy and the three granddaughters. We enjoyed opera in Santa Fe and the
Ring Cycle in Seattle, as well as many visits with friends and relatives both
at home and during our travels.
Psyche and Linnea had fun on a mother-daughter road trip from Boston to
Reno, Psyche’s Corolla packed with costumes for Burning Man, and essentials for
her and Saad’s move to San Francisco.
In
September we went sailing again, from Scotland to London with Lew and Ann
Tucker on their
boat Serannity. We connected with
several delightful and warmly hospitable English sailing friends from Kent’s
past, and completed our travels with a five-day backpack along the Southwest
Coast Path in Cornwall.
It
has been good to be home for most of the last quarter of the year. We cut our television cable and our
Turner Classic Movie habit, and invested in a Roku box and an antenna, and have
so far been happy with our choice.
Michael Mosley’s PBS program “Eat, Fast, and Live Longer” (http://vimeo.com/54089463) last spring, inspired us to try fasting two
consecutive days a week. We’ve
done pretty well with this, except when we have been traveling and
walking. Maybe we’ll have some
positive results to report by next year.
We
have lost several dear family members and friends this year, while others have
faced difficult illnesses. How
important it is to celebrate each day, to cherish our friends and family, to be
present in the moment, and to value what we have and what we can do. In that spirit, we are grateful for the
presence of each of you, and we wish you health, peace, and joy during this
holiday season and during the coming year.
Linnea and Kent
