(before everything got a little bit tense and argumentative and sad, which is a story I might or might not blog about.)

Last year, Becky sent this picture to me on Christmas Eve day:

It made me tear up. That is Christmas 1972, when I was 8 months old, the five of us at my grandma's house. It’s one of those awful 1970’s photos, but I love it so much. Look at that big camera my dad is holding, with the flash—the kind that had to have the bulb replaced with each picture—and my mom’s beehive hairdo! Look at how Michelle is loving her new baby doll! And Suzette’s pinafore dress, no doubt crocheted by my mother. There are shadows of the future there: Suzette looks so much like her first daughter, Kayci, would look fifteen years later, and there is something about Michelle kissing her doll that reminds me of her daughter, Lindsay, holding her own daughter Josie. The mountain behind me is the one that I loved my whole life (although I have only ever looked at it, as there are no trails there), which would become a sort of protector to me, a solace from looking. There is still a Becky-shaped gap. There is my grandma Elsie’s handwriting, and the picture itself which she took; she always made sure to take pictures and in doing so left pieces of herself behind, so she is there taking the picture, and I am there, taking pictures in the future because she (and my dad) took pictures.

Just a bad 70’s snapshot. But so much more than a bad 70’s snapshot.

I thought about this picture on Christmas Eve, when it was still peaceful. All four of my kids were downstairs by the tree, watching Christmas movies and waiting for me to finish up some of my baking. I was doing all of the prep work: I made crust for a raspberry pie, and started the berries macerating; I baked the chocolate cake for the next day while I made double-chocolate cookie dough. I browned the sausage for the morning’s casserole and made sure I had all of the ingredients for wassail. As I cooked, I remembered. The Christmases when they were all still little. The Christmas when Nathan was a baby, and they’d all had the chicken pox sequentially so I didn’t do any shopping until December 20. The Christmas when I was pregnant with Jake (he was born five days later) and Haley and I made cookies on Christmas-Eve afternoon to leave out for Santa that night. Her baby Christmas, which was the first year we had a tree. Kaleb’s baby Christmas, when he was sick with an ear infection and so always covered in green boogers no matter how many times I cleaned his nose.  The first Christmas Haley knew about the Santa gig. Even last year, when she helped me set out all of the gifts.

Also back further, to my own childhood Christmases. I’m not sure why, but that photo made me remember one Christmas, I must’ve been 16, when my favorite present was a pair of black skinny jeans. They had big, faded flowers on them and made me feel like a seriously bad-ass punk rocker. I loved those pants and I loved my mom for getting me those pants even though she didn’t want me to dress like I dressed or act like I acted.

For me, Christmas isn’t just about this Christmas. Christmas is memory, too. It is the ghosts of all Christmases, past, present, and future, lingering in the periphery. It’s why we moms work so hard to make Christmas magical. Well, we do it for the magic itself. But we also do it to give our children the memory of magic, so that when the magic itself has been revealed, the memory of it comforts and sustains.

Here is our family Christmas picture from 2014:

I look at it and I wonder: what shadows of the future are here? Which memories of this holiday will linger and cheer and make me nostalgic, or make my kids feel that sad/sweet Christmas-Eve memory feeling? Will it be enough to sustain them? Or the me I become in the future?

This, friends, this complicated layering and folding of time with images full of people we love who won’t always be here—this is why I take pictures, even though they are imperfect, and this is why I scrapbook, because then the stories are not only in my memory. It is a way of creating future ghosts that might return to the people we will be the love of who we are right now.

Last week, Ragnar announced some fairly drastic changes to next year’s Wasatch Back. Becky and I had already decided that we won’t be running Ragnar in 2015, but the changes—literally every leg I usually run is different—make it a little bit tempting.  Especially the last leg: instead of running up the infamous “Ragnar Leg” (nearly five miles of grueling uphill on a winding mountain road), that runner would go down. Which means the leg I usually run last has become the new “Ragnar Leg.” I’ve run it four times now, and I can honestly say: running it uphill will be rough, harder than the other side was even though it’s not as steep. The new uphill leg is pretty, but not wild like the old leg. It’s wealthy-ski-area pretty instead of natural-mountain pretty.

I confess: I almost wish I had joined a Ragnar team just so I could run down the old Ragnar Leg.

Only almost, though, because my 2014 Ragnar was so…I can’t exactly use the word “traumatic” because that definitely applies to 2013, when I sprained my ankle with 13 or so miles left to go. In fact, that Ragnar was so traumatic that I almost didn’t run the race this year. (Now that I know the route has changed, and the Runner Eleven legs are different, I’m doubly glad I did it.) Two things made me sign up once more: 1. The lure of Old Snow Basin Road. This is the first leg I usually run and it is so gorgeous. I feel like it’s a privilege to run there, especially with all of the traffic blocked out, even though that’s a dramatic thing to say. It’s a hard run and requires a lot of uphill training, but that also means I am required to train on Squaw Peak Road, which has become as essential to spring as daffodils and Easter. 2: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. If I ever get a tattoo, it will be this bit of faux Latin that means “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” It’s sort of become my life’s motto; it applies to so many different situations. There weren’t any bastards on any Ragnar team I’ve ever been on. Instead, it was really Ragnar itself—the course and that sprained ankle—that became the bastard in my head. I didn’t want to feel like it had beaten me. I wanted to run the leg that damaged me and to finish, undamaged. I wanted to run my legs one more time to prove to myself that I am strong enough.

So I trained. Not as well as I should have, between two colds that spring, babying my ankle, and my trip to Mexico. (Actually, I ran every single day but one when I was in Mexico.) I didn’t accomplish all of my training goals: I ran to the top of Squaw Peak Road only once (instead of twice), and my longest run was only 8.5 miles (instead of eleven), and my weekly mileage was lower than I wanted. I was still doing my run-three-songs, walk-two-minutes thing even though I wanted to run without walking during the race. But I had run this course before; I was ready but not exactly ready, saving up my strength and hoping my muscle memory would carry me through, and then I ran Ragnar.

(Ragnar 2014 team, the rastafarians. We had tie-died Ts but not for this picture.)

My first leg—the one on Old Snow Basin Road—was practically perfect. I had worried that it would be too hot (as the race itself was a week later than normal), but it was cloudy and just a little bit windy, just enough to keep the edge off of heat and humidity. I didn’t worry about anything during that run, not my time (which ended up being three minutes faster than last year), not my ankle, not counting kills. I just ran, happy, on a road I love, on a mountain with aspens and wildflowers and pine trees and ragged peaks. About half way up the first long stretch, I started talking to another runner, who asked me if I knew the course at all. So I described it to her, how the section we were on winds up and up and up, and how at the ridge you come around a curve and can see the road winding down in front of you, and how that might be the best part. I passed her, but I thought of her, too, when I got there, and the clouds were thin enough for some watery, silver sunlight but heavy enough to spatter rain for a few minutes. That moment on the first peak was worth everything else, the training and the uncertainty and the upcoming misery.

(Almost off of Old Snow Basin Road. I'm the dot wearing a blue running skirt.)

Something odd happened during our night legs: I slept. It was that edge, dry kind of sleep when you can almost hear what is going on around you and it starts infiltrating your dreams, but you can’t actually wake up. I feel bad about this, as I didn’t go out and support all of my van-mates as they started and finished their night legs. I think I did wake up a few times to say something like “Happy running!” or “I’m glad you made it back ok!” and then I’d fall right back to sleep. On the other hand, I was fairly well rested when it was time to start getting ready for my night leg—the leg where I sprained my ankle last year.

This was my fourth time running leg 23 (the one that went along Rockport reservoir) but I’d never actually been able to get a sense of what the exchange looked like, because I’ve always run this leg at night. But this year, due to a whole bunch of other complications, our team was running behind our projected time, and I got to start my “night” run in the very-early-morning sunlight. This made my tension entirely dissipate; I was instead just excited to run by the reservoir in the light. When I got to the spot where I’d fallen last year, I stopped for a minute, just to mark it and then to let it go. Then I just ran, early morning, sun almost up, water starting to mist just a bit. I could feel I was still tired from my first leg, but I felt good and happy and, most importantly, not afraid.

It didn’t grind me down after all.

(My Ragnar legs...)

The last song that was playing in my headphones as I came to the exchange was the Depeche Mode version of “So Cruel,” a song that has a myriad of emotional ties and sensory memories. It ended just as I got to the finish line—running, like last year, but not nearly crying, not in pain, not afraid. Just finishing strong. I thought it boded well for my last leg.

And I couldn’t have been more wrong.

(Me and Becky just before she started her last run.)

Despite the actual sleep I got during the night, I was pretty tired when I started my last Ragnar leg, #35. Like, immediately, from the very first step, deep-down tired. This put me on edge because I’m convinced that being sleepy is what made me fall the year before. It wasn’t just sleepiness, though. It was exhaustion of the mitochondria. And I was just starting what would be my longest leg. Ten miles. I kept encouraging myself that it would be OK because it was mostly downhill. But it starts with almost a mile of uphill, an uphill I stubbornly insisted on running. An uphill that took every last remaining bit of energy from my legs. And sure: slogging downhill is better than slogging uphill. But the relief with downhill is on your lungs, not on your legs. You just use different leg muscles. And mine were empty. Call it the wall, maybe. The wall with ten miles left to go.

So I just kept going, because what else could I do? I kept going until I got to one of the three other uphills. And then, I confess: I hardly even tried to run. I walked up all of the other uphills on the course. I ate every single Cliff Blok I had with me. I stopped at every water table and drank a cup of water, poured a cup on my wrists, and dunked my headband in a third. I couldn’t even try to hustle through the water stops. Instead I just made brief, intense, 2-minute friendships with the volunteers. I talked to myself a lot. I sang out loud. I encouraged my ankle to stay strong. I hoped for a friendly face to talk me through my agony but didn’t find one at the beginning.

I’ve run this course three other times, so I thought I knew what to expect, and the first six and a half miles were exactly what I remembered. Mostly downhill past Deer Valley ski resort, with a few steep but short uphills. The first two times I ran it, it ended at the Deer Valley parking lot. Last year, it detoured and ended near the school by the finish line. This year, it did both. The course went right past the old finish line—the spot my muscle memory already knew as “make it to there and you can stop”—and there were still 3+ miles left to get to that school. When I ran past the old exchange, I had to slow way down because I almost started crying. My body thought it was time to stop. And if I had thought I’d been empty before, on the downhill? Well. The last three flat miles were like running through mud in concrete shoes. Despite how hard I willed, I could not make my body keep running. So I ran a little. Walked a little. Ran a little bit less. Walked more. I talked to someone from New Jersey who was really very kind and encouraging, but she wasn’t walking, so I lost her.

I guess all I can say for myself is that, running and walking, at least I managed to keep moving, instead of just lying down on a stranger’s grass and weeping, which is what I wanted to do. Flat, flat running through Park City, all big wood houses and forested lots until, did I say the flat was bad? Because then it was uphill, and then, at the top, there was a water table. As my mouth was sandpaper at this point, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so grateful to see a water table. It was set up in a field at the end of an unfinished cul-de-sac, and after I drank some water and doused my wrists and dunked my headband, I was like, “Ummm, where do I go now?” because after the field was a slope.

The volunteer pointed over her shoulder at the slope. “There’s a trail there,” she said. “You go that way.”

And that was when I totally lost it. Because it wasn’t just a “trail.” It was a little slope through a meadow and then a freaking steep downhill trail. A steep dirt trail. And by losing it, I don’t mean what I said about lying down on someone’s manicured lawn to bawl. I mean full-on, Amy-style sailor swearing. The kind that used to make my uncle, who served a tour in Vietnam in the navy, blush.

I was so mad.

Mad at myself for not training better. Mad at Ragnar for not explaining this ridiculous leg better, so I could be emotionally prepared for the rocky, sliding-dirt death portion of the route. Mad at Ragnar for even thinking this could be an option. Mad at my legs for being exhausted. Mad at my thirst. Just entirely, thoroughly angry.

I did not run down that trail. I picked my way gingerly because it was steep and slippery and I was tired. I wasn’t even sure I was going the right way until I came upon another runner, who was thankfully picking slower than me, and I swore at him. Well, not really at him, but in a way I hoped he’d swear with me, but he didn’t. He actually said, “young lady, don’t use that sort of language with me” and then I had to pick even faster to get away from him. It was probably only a half of a mile, but it felt like eternity until it finally ended in another cul-de-sac, which I did manage to run out of.

Except at this point it was only “running” as I think I was doing about a 12.5-minute-mile. More neighborhoods, a little bit of the rail trail, and then we were finally closer to the finish line. I at least knew where I was from last year. We ran past a park and there was a sign pointing towards a possible drinking fountain. I followed it because even though I knew I had less than a mile, I felt like all my teeth would fall out if I didn’t get some water. Luckily the fountain was right next to the route and it was working. That last drink was just enough to push me to the finish line. I didn’t walk again, just kept on with my running shuffle, and when I finally, finally got to the exchange, I burst into angry, hysterical tears: my teammate wasn’t there.

(This is the race photo that Ragnar sent me, taken about 1/4 mile away from my last exchange. I'm pretty sure it relates exactly how I felt.)

So I just stood there, bawling like a giant baby and pissed off and trying not to hyperventilate, until Becky finally found me. The last runner had gotten tired of waiting for me and so had just started before I got there. Becky was pretty pissed about that, so she was storming and I was swearing and we had to rush back to the finish line which was this dumb little stretch of dirt. The last runner was waiting at the finish line for me, along with the entire team (no small amount of salt tossed into my I’m-such-a-lame-runner wounds), so we all went across the “finish line” (really, it was ridiculously stupid), got our medals, and went back to the car.

Sigh.

Five months later, even with the temptation of all-new legs, I’m still pretty sure about my decision to not run Ragnar next year. Even though that last leg beat the crap out of me and left me feeling defeated, I also don’t feel like it defeated me. Only because I kept going, but still: I kept going. It didn’t grind me down, so I don’t feel like I’m retiring from Ragnar as a failure. Toss in the issues I’ve been having with my hamstring and the fact that my ankle is still giving me trouble and yeah: right now a 5k feels like it would be a challenge. So I’m mostly OK with thinking of myself as finished with Ragnar.

Of course, who am I kidding? If a runner friend called me up tomorrow and asked me to be on her Ragnar team, I’d probably say yes—but only if I got the leg that went down the old Ragnar Hill. Because I don’t let bastards grind me down—and that last leg? It was totally, completely a bastard.

And I survived.

(Every year, I have topics that I totally meant to blog about, but then time passes and I don't, and then it feels like too much time has passed​, so then I don't blog about them. Even though they were important. So I made up an acronym and this year, I'm going to finish out December with some DBAY posts for 2014, so I get everything together at least in the year when it belongs.)

Today I've spent a ton of time processing many of my Yosemite photos, for a Christmas project.

As I've revisited those images, I've been amazed at how they've reminded me of how those few days felt, specifically the mountains' spirit. The atmosphere is different there, in the Sierra Nevada, and that made it both like coming home (because mountains are my favorite place to be) and discovering something nearly-entirely new.

I loved that feeling.

Our trip to Yosemite felt to me like it was sort of magical. Too good to be true, really. (I was almost afraid to go home, because I worried that everything would completely fall apart after such a perfectly-timed experience.) Just winning the lottery spot for the Half Dome hike was amazing, because seriously: I never win anything. I enter contests and raffles just to make sure someone else wins. I almost didn’t even put my name in for the lottery, on the day I decided to do it which was the very last day you could enter, but there was something in me that said I needed to take that trip this summer. So I registered—and got in.

But the good luck didn’t stop there. First off was the traffic on the drive. Many people had warned us that the route I had planned—State Route 6—was problematic because if there was any construction, the traffic would back up for miles. But aside from one tiny little delay (like…maybe three minutes) right when we got off the Interstate, there was zero construction and, in fact, that road was one of the highlights of the trip for me. (Hopefully it will be another DBAY post.)

I had reserved us some tents at Curry Village, but when we went to register, the guy at the desk upgraded us to a cabin. No, seriously: I haven’t ever been upgraded to anything, ever, not even once, and as I was worried about the tent (I don’t do well in tents at all), this really was like magic. The cabin was pretty small, and it had double sized beds instead of queens, but who cares. It had four solid walls, carpet, a toilet, and a shower. So perfect.

I still don’t entirely understand why, but Yosemite in the summer of 2014 was a trip I needed to take.

But despite all of this planet-aligning magic, all did not go entirely smooth. Because the day before we left, I started getting sick: a sore throat. And I decided that I just didn’t care. I was just going to ignore my cold and go anyway. And the ignore-the-cold tactic worked pretty well. I drank a lot of water during our drive to keep my cells hydrated, and loaded up on the vitamin C, and just kept thinking positive, healing thoughts. When I woke up on the morning of our Half Dome hike*, I didn’t feel 100% my normal, energetic self. But it wasn’t too bad—until we were about half way down. When we got off the wooded slope that is behind Half Dome, just as we entered the Little Yosemite Valley, those healing, positive energies just vanished and I started feeling fairly tired. It was hot, and my burning throat was doing that thing where even though you’re swallowing water it feels like the liquid doesn’t touch it, and I was starting to have that all-over body ache, and my voice started going out. But of course I had no choice but to continue hiking!

The Little Yosemite Valley is the flattest part of the entire trail, and the Merced River runs right next to the trail. One of the guide books I’d read insisted I must stop and wade in the river. So, while Kendell and Jeff were talking to a trail guide, Lenna and I took off our hiking boots and waded into the water. I was expecting it to be fairly tepid, as the current was barely moving, but it was cold. Part of me wanted to just dive in, but I also know how grumpy wet clothes make me, so I just went in to the very bottoms of my shorts. Lenna was dying for the bathroom, which was about a mile down the trail, so she left. I confess: I was so glad I was alone for a few minutes. I stayed as long as I could in the water, just taking in the beauty. There is walking next to water…but there is also being in the water, and stepping into the river was a way of fully immersing myself in the Yosemite experience, even if I didn’t get entirely wet.

It was one of my favorite moments of my life.

Not too long later, Kendell came and found me. I waded over to a rock near the bank and took my shirt off. Then I sat on that stone, in just my sports bra, and used my shirt to dry my feet. Kendell handed me my socks and then my boots, one at a time, and then I stood up on the rock, already dry—but completely, entirely refreshed. My tired feet were made deliriously happy by their cold soak. It renewed my flagging energy and let some of the healing thoughts flow back in—at least until we reached the bridge over Nevada Fall, when my fever hit me. (The last three miles down the John Muir trail were pretty brutal for me.)

But that isn’t this story. This story is the one about the day I stood in the Merced River in the Sierra Nevada. It’s the story about how happiness finds you in unexpected ways. It is, really, about what happiness itself is, those numinous moments when things larger than yourself bring you to a place you couldn’t have imagined and then give you exactly what you didn’t know you needed.

Teaching high school English changed how I read books. I often (still, a decade later) find myself thinking this would be fun to discuss in the classroom or what a great example of _____________ [insert literary device, term, structure, etc] to share with my students, and then I remember I don’t have any students anymore.

I also like books with teachers in them, much more than I did before, and books set mostly in school tend to make me fairly happy. So Elizabeth Laban’s YA novel, The Tragedy Paper, had a pretty good chance of being one I’d like. Toss in that a major plot point is an English assignment and yeah: I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It weaves together four stories. Tim is an albino student who is going to the Irving School (a boarding school in New England) just for the last semester of his senior year. On his flight there, he meets Vanessa, also an Irving student. There are sparks, but it’s complicated, as Tim is, you know, an albino, and how complicated is being different when you’re in high school? Plus, she already has a boyfriend. Duncan is a senior at Irving the year after Tim, and he ends up being assigned to the room Tim had. Daisy is perhaps Duncan’s girlfriend.

Written out that way, it sounds a little bit soap-opera-ish, but it couldn’t be further from that. It is, instead, a moving examination of what makes a tragedy. That is the senior English assignment: every student must write a tragedy paper, exploring what the literary idea of “tragedy” is and how it proves true or not true in their lives. They explore this topic throughout the entirety of English that year. So along with all the teenage angsty stuff, they are thinking about deeper ideas. (Yes, if you thought I bet Amy would like to give this as an assignment, you were right. I think it is a great assignment.)

The structure of this book is interesting. Tim tells his story directly to Duncan, in a series of recorded audio files he left for him in their dorm room. At first I wasn’t sure about this idea—because I wasn’t sure the writing could hold true, that it would read like someone was talking into a computer microphone, and still be enjoyable to read. Sometimes it moved into no-one-talks-like-this writing, but usually the writer brought it back. Daisy’s and Vanessa’s stories are told through the male character’s perspectives, so you don’t ever see their side of things.

It creates a great mix. The structure and the topics make you consider: what is a tragedy? No, really: what is truly a tragedy? Tim’s albinoism? The fact that Vanessa’s boyfriend’s mom died? The thwarted-lovers story, or what happens to Tim and Vanessa, or what happens to Duncan as he tries to sort out what happened to Tim and Vanessa? Is everyone always part of an ongoing tragedy, or is there ever really The End of a Tragedy, the cathartic resolution of the final catastrophe? How do you know when you’ve reached it?

The Tragedy Paper is, in other words, totally an Amy-style book. Another one to add to my books-set-in-boarding-schools list!

Last Thanksgiving, when I made the meal on my own, I wanted something pecan-pie-ish, because Kendell loves it and my mom normally makes one. But as I was planning on an apple pie, a pumpkin pie, and a berry pie, I didn't think we needed another pie.

(Plus I think pecan pie is sort of gross. The filling under the pecans is too Jello-esque to me. Yes, a caramel-flavored Jello texture, but still.)

So I did something novel and amazing: I made something with a recipe I had pinned!

Actually, I started with a recipe I had pinned, and then I tweaked it a bit, and I then I made pecan bars.

And, you know...everyone loved them. Even Mr. Picky Himself! (OK, take your pick, I'm not sure which boy of mine is officially Mr. Picky, although Kaleb is the closest.) It makes a pretty big batch and we snacked from the pan the entire weekend, and then I decided that I will always make pecan bars for Thanksgiving. I made them this year and took them to my sister's, with similar results: most everyone loved them. (Except for my niece, who doesn't like nuts, and when she told me that her husband piped in with a nut-related joke and then it went downhill from there!)

Then this week I had to bring a dish to share for our library Christmas party. Last year I won the cookie contest, and I sort of have a reputation for making good treats, a reputation I had to uphold. So I made the pecan bars again.

There wasn't a contest this year, but I think I would've won again if there had been. I'm not saying that because of my skills but because of the prodigious amazingness of the recipe.

Seriously. These are good pecan bars!

Here's the process with some photos, but if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll find a printable PDF.

1. Cream the butter, brown sugar, salt, and vanilla.

2. Add the flour. WARNING: It will puff up everywhere if you add it too quickly. Basically, you are cutting the flour into the butter/sugar mix. It will look like sand when you're finished (buttery, delicious sand.)

3. Press it into a 9x11 glass dish (which you've prepared by lining with tinfoil and spraying with Pam) and put it into the oven at 350 for 20 minutes.

While it is baking, make the filling. The strange thing about this is it takes almost exactly twenty minutes to make the filling. Unless you're not a ridiculously slow nut chopper. (No! I'm not afraid of kitchen knives now!*)

4. Chop the nuts. You want to measure them after they are chopped, which requires some guess work as to how many to pour onto the cutting board. That is OK.
I chop the first batch pretty fine, and then I toss them in the measuring bowl and chop a second batch to bring it to 3 cups, only I leave the second batch a little chunkier. Chopping nuts always makes me think about baking cookies with my mom when she was a kid. She always put walnuts in the cookies, and I remember one time trying to grab one while she was chopping. She pushed my hand away and said "that's a little girl who's going to get her finger cut if she's not careful" and then she gave me a walnut. I bet she doesn't remember that but for some reason I always remember it when I chop any kind of nuts.

Anyway.

5. Make the filling by first melting the butter and then pouring in everything else. Isn't it pretty?

6. Here's a tip. Use the little bit of left over butter on the wrapper to grease the cup you measure the honey with. It will slide right out of a greased cup!

7. Stir and mix and gently boil. When the crust is finished, pour the mixture onto the crust. Make sure you put the oven mitt back on before you pick the pan up. Seriously.

8. Bake for twenty minutes.

Another ideal thing about this: it takes about twenty minutes to wash all the mixer parts and the pans, put away all the ingredients, and wipe off the counters.

9. Cut into whatever sized squares you want. Or just leave a knife in the pan so your family can cut off nibbles and bites and pieces. Whatever works for you!

Here is the printable PDF:  Download Pecan bars

Hello! Welcome to day six of our Online Christmas Advent!

  

This is a daily link that will bring you some fun ideas for Christmas. Yesterday's post included an awesome give away, and you can also click HERE for the seventh day, where there will be a lovely printable on Sunday. Or, click HERE to start at the beginning. For my day, I'm starting with a photo:
This is me on Christmas day of what I think is 1976. I love many things about it, but these 9 things especially:

1. I got a new baby doll! I loved playing with dolls when I was little. This one would've had that plastic baby-doll scent, which is one of the two smells I most closely associate with Christmas.

2. I got some Play-Doh! That is my second Christmas scent...the sort-of salty smell of it takes me right back to how it felt to be me in that picture.

3. I got some books! My mom was always very careful to include books under the tree. It wouldn't feel like Christmas to me without a new book or two. (That is still true, even though now I buy and wrap them for myself!) I'm not sure what this one is...I'm tempted to say it is All-of-a-Kind Family, but I don't think that's right as A--I was probably 4 or, at the very oldest, 5 in that picture, and I wouldn't be able to read such a hard book yet and B--that is not the cover I remember.

4. Barrettes! I bet I got those in my stocking. I loved clicking them off of their packaging.

5. My blue dress. I didn't realize until I looked really, really closely that there was a picture of this dress. My mom made it and I loved it because it made me feel like a pioneer girl. I hadn't read Little House in the Big Woods yet, but we did watch Little House on the Prarie every week.

6. My Holly Hobby dress. Again...made by my mom. It had a lace apron, and, well...Holly Hobby!

7. More books!

8. The gold sectional couch. When we were kids, we'd pick a spot to put our Christmas presents as we opened them.I guess this year, that part of the couch was mine. Years later (and one re-upholstery job also done by my crafty mother) I had the same couch in my newlywed apartment.

9. The hair! Evidence of curlers. I HATED MY RINGLETS. But my mom loved them, so on special occassions, I'd sleep in those pink foam curlers and then have ringlets the next day.

I'm sharing that photo and those memories because right now in the scrapbooking world, the cool thing everyone's doing is December Daily, a little scrapbook album with photos and journaling for each day in December. I admire the people who do this...but I cannot do this. I can't scrapbook every day during my regular life, and December is so NOT my regular life that I just can't fit it in. (You can see my December scrapbooking project HERE.)

But it's made me think about all of the Christmas stuff I've never written down. Christmas stuff from my childhood. So! That's what I'm sharing with you today: A PDF with 31 Christmas journaling prompts to help you get down the details of your childhood holiday memories. It is Christmas-centric because Christmas makes up my December memories.

You could use the prompts in a bunch of different ways. Spend some time each day in December (with a little catch up!) just writing your responses on your computer or in a journal. That's all—just write down the memories. You could blog about them. Or you could get more complicated and make a little scrapbook. It doesn't matter. Just get your memories down!

You can download it right here: Download 31 Childhood Christmas Journaling Prompts.

So tell me: what is one of YOUR favorite childhood Christmas memories?

I love going to poetry readings. It was one of my favorite things about being an English major, and the thing is, there were always poetry readings to be found. I don't go to them as often now, but I don't think there are any fewer. I just don't know about as many.

One of my favorite readings was the one Mark Strand did at the University of Utah. I think this was in 1996, or maybe in early 1997—when I was a student at UVU. I went with one of my university friends, Dawn.

I was a big reader of The New Yorker in the 90s, mostly for the poems, and I had been struck by a poem about dogs. I read it so often I had it memorized, but I had forgotten who wrote it. So when I was sitting in that auditorium, waiting for Mark Strand to read "Eating Poetry," I was startled to hear the first lines of the dog poem. "Now that the great dog I worshipped for years/Has become none other than myself, I can look within//And bark."

I started reciting it quietly to myself, a sort of voicy whisper that blended right with Strand's voice in the little quiet pocket between me and Dawn. She was a little astounded, I think, that I knew it. I didn't just know it, though. I loved it, even though I couldn't really say I understood it very well. It was just so...sad but beautiful, all at once.

Even though I don't really like dogs very much.

And it isn't even really about dogs. It's about growing old, and finding oneself less than expected, but still acceptable.

The poet Mark Strand passed away last week. I hadn't heard until my friend Wendy text to ask me if I knew him. "Not in a biblical sense," I couldn't resist responding, because he was sort of known as (in addition to being, you know, a really good poet) fairly sexy. I didn't really know him, even though I shook his hand once and told him how glad I was he'd read the dog poems. (And, yes. "Eating Poetry.")

But I did know him, at least in the way any admirer of someone's writing "knows" someone. I taught "Eating Poetry" to my poetry classes. I wrote an essay about his work. I carried "Great Dog Poem no2" with me for all of these years, and as I have grown older, too, I understand it better. I haven't yet become the great dog I worship. I'm fairly far from it, in fact. (And it's not even a dog.) But I understand. I understand barking within myself.

There isn't comfort in being who I am, either.

But there is a solace in knowing someone else said something beautiful about something sad. Something sad that I felt creeping up to me, so long ago when I was in my twenties, that is no longer creeping but crawling pretty quickly toward me now, something I couldn't describe like he did but recognized immediately.

"Great Dog Poem no2" by Mark Strand, from The New Yorker, January 15, 1996

Now that the great dog I worshipped for years
Has become none other than myself, I can look within

And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street
And bark at them as well. I am an eye that sees itself

Look back, a nose that tracks the scent of shadows
As they fall, an ear that picks up sounds

Before they are born. I am the last of the platinum
Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.

But there's no comfort being who I am. I roam around
And ponder fate's abolishments until my eyes

Are filled with tears and I say to myself, "Oh, Rex,
Forget. Forget. The stars are out. The marble moon slides by."

I’m not entirely sure what fascinates us with end-of-the-world scenarios, but they are so popular right now. The post-apocalyptic world draws the imagination because it is rife with imaginative possibilities—what happens in a contemporary world that is nearly void of people? But it is that combined with the simultaneous possibility of threat, terror, sorrow, fear, loneliness…

It is one of my favorite genres.

Last week I finished the book Station Eleven, which is post-apocalyptic near genius. It opens at the very beginning of the pandemic that will kill 99% of the world’s population, in a theater in Toronto where Arthur Leander, a famous actor, is performing as King Lear. It is his last performance, as he has a heart attack. Jeevan Chaudhury, an EMT in the audience, rushes up on stage to try and save him, and Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress playing the part of a young Cordelia in Lear’s mad vision, watches in horror as her grandfatherly friend dies. The plague starts to break that night.

The death of Arthur at the start of the novel is a sort of framing device, as many of the characters in the novel are either present at his death (Jeevan and Kirsten) or part of his story and thus part of the novel. It is a non-linear plot line, moving back and forth between Arthur’s story (how he found both success and emptiness through acting) and Kirsten’s (set fifteen years after the Georgia Flu epidemic). Kirsten is part of a traveling theater troupe, which moves between the small villages near where people have started trying to live together again, and it is her story in the post-apocalyptic world that carries the most drama.

This might just be my favorite 2014 novel. I loved nearly everything about it, which is saying quite a bit as I generally avoid books about famous actors, real or otherwise. I am not enamored with Hollywood and I don’t think very highly of most actors (not because of their creative abilities but because of the obscene amounts of money they make). But this wasn’t a Judith-Krantz-style Hollywood novel. Arthur himself seems to grapple a bit with his reality of having achieved so much fame and wealth, along with the conundrum of finding himself lonely anyway. Part of the story is his first wife’s, Miranda. Not needing to work after she marries him, she keeps herself busy by working on her graphic novel, Station Eleven, which is a sort of sci-fi, end-of-the-world, alien-large seahorse mashup that she only eventually self-publishes. Kirsten ties them together because she has one of the self-published copies. It is one of her greatest treasures, even though in all of her travels she hasn’t found anyone else who has heard of it.

I love it when books have that many layers. True, it makes it harder to gain a deep affection for the characters, as really, you’re getting less story overall. But what the author does here, how she ties things together and how each character’s story influences the others in way none of them can see, makes the characters deeper anyway.

It is a book that imagines the post-apocalyptic world in precise ways, how things are repurposed and the way the survivors come to making attempts at a “normal” life. It questions the purpose of art and creativity. It asks if the contemporary world is one that deserves being remade or if something different might be better. It makes you wonder about how your present has been influenced by your past, how the seeming-small choices changed everything, how we connect. I will be thinking about this for a good, long while.

But, in the way of all personally-influential books, it held an idea I did not expect. (I don’t usually share such long quotes, but stay with me as it is worth it.) One of the characters, a man named Clark who had been the closest thing to Arthur’s best friend and a confidant to Miranda after he cheated on her, has become a sort of curator of things from before the plague. He lives in an airport, and is looking out the window at all of the grounded planes (which have since been made into houses), thinking about his luck:

…not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life.

This idea hasn’t let me go. Think about it: in all of the history of humanity, there was an unending amount of suffering. Hunger, cold, heat, discomfort. Thousands and thousands of years of the primary concerns being food, shelter, warmth. Then we, this contemporary version of “people” we’ve invented, discovered all we have, and changed the world. Changed the world in harmful ways, but also changed ourselves. Everything, nearly, that has been hard for humanity has been solved, or at least the big stuff. We have light and warmth in winter, cool air in summer. If we want to travel to Italy it takes half a day of uncomfortable airplane hours. If we want to talk to someone, it doesn’t matter how far away they are. If we are hungry there is food everywhere.

And we just, you know, live here. In this miraculous time without really paying attention to any of the miracles.

So my gratitude today is twofold. One, I’m grateful for books. Reading and those moments when you read something that utterly changes how you think about the world, books in that sense. But also books in their entirety of creation—the writers’ energy, the agent’s dedication, the publisher’s willingness to take a risk. The printing press. Paper. Artwork for covers. Ink. Fonts. Think of all of the technology it takes to make our modern books! I’m grateful for all of it.

Second, I’m glad to be alive right now. And I’m going to pay attention to the miracles I might otherwise overlook. So even though Thanksgiving and November are past, and I failed fairly miserably at my gratitude countdown, tonight I want to write down just a handful of contemporary wonders I am especially grateful for and would miss desperately:

1. Hot water. And all it entails: a clean body. Clean, fresh-smelling hair. No dirt under my fingernails. Also, the relaxing warmth of soaking my back in the tub. And the rejuvenation that comes when you sit in the tub until the water goes cold, reading a good book. Plus, have you ever seen what happens to me if we run out of hot water and I have to take a cold shower? The billowing anger that erupts out of me startles myself. I love, love, love hot water.

2. Toilet paper. I mean, really. Maybe it is the most significant invention of contemporary times. What does one do without it?

3.  Air conditioning. Being hot makes me grumpy. If I had to live through summers without air conditioning I would be a lonely, lonely woman. Lonely and hot with no one left to complain to about how hot I was.

4. Heat.Being able to say I love winter is sort of a luxury. You can only love winter if you always know you have a warm place to retreat from winter. I love winter because I love watching it snow, because of coziness and the slower days, because of hot chocolate and scarves. But, you know: I hate being cold. I can’t even deal with cold. I shiver and I get cold so easily. Having a house and a heater makes loving winter possible, and it really is miraculous if you didn’t understand how a person could flip a switch and make hot air come out of vents.

5. Costco. Think about it. Think about all of the work and technology and transportation that has to happen for a functional Costco. (Or any grocery store, really.) (I’ve had conversations with my kids about how, if the zombie apocalypse happened right now, we’d be glad we were at a Costco.) If we need anything—milk, eggs, butter, cheese, bread, those delicious lemon almonds they sold last December that I still can’t stop checking for every time I go—we just, you know, go to the store. We don’t have to hunt, butcher, pluck, wring necks. We don’t have to plant seeds, wait for them to grow, harvest, and store. We just drive to Costco and put stuff in our carts, and complain if they line’s too long. (It’s really pretty ridiculously wondrous, isn’t it?)

Near the end of the novel, Kirsten has an experience that makes her think, “it is possible to survive this but not unaltered.” That’s sort of how I felt about Station Eleven. I survived it, grinding through the tense moments with the fear that someone would die—but it altered me. I have felt especially grateful, after reading it, to be alive right now, in our age of wonders that are so marvelous we can’t even see the magic anymore—we take it for granted. The book has made me remember to stop and notice and fully appreciate them.

One Monday at the beginning of November, I spent the afternoon outside with Kaleb, raking leaves. We cleaned up the entire front yard in a lovely, warm light. Every. Single. Leaf.

The next morning, all of the warm light was gone…it was cold, and the leaves were falling. They fell gently and consistently, like a misty rain, except leaves. They must’ve fallen for hours, and then it started snowing. Not a lot—only enough to cover the leaves covering the entire front yard.

It was a lovely November. I did a lot of gardening: pruned the rosebushes, weeded for the last time, planted 200 new bulbs. I felt like I was having a sort of conversation with Future Amy, the person I’ll be in the spring, who will be relieved I put the garden to bed properly,  happy when the new daffodils and tulips start poking up in March and glad to greet my healthy rosebuds as they start to redden.

On the first day of November, Kaleb was at his cousin’s house and Jake and Nathan both had to work, so Kendell and I cleaned up the back yard together. All of the leaves on our catalpa tree had fallen in that night’s wind storm, so the yard was full of enormous leaves. It reminded me of how the yard feels after a good, heavy snow storm...totally transformed.

Nathan’s big thing for November (aside from turning fifteen!) was making the basketball team. He was soooo nervous about the try outs and sooooo excited and proud that he made it. To celebrate, I let him skip first period the next day, and we went to breakfast and then got a haircut. We celebrated his birthday on the Sunday before, with dinner and new basketball shoes.
His actual birthday was not his favorite day, as his coach told him he wouldn’t be playing during the first game, but he stepped up and dealt with it, and was the best damn bench warmer you ever saw! J He did get to play in the second game, so things are looking up.

Jake’s November was so-so. We had to go to his parent-teacher conference together, as he’d let some things slide and then got in that cycle of being so stressed out by procrastination that more procrastination seemed like the only option. His teachers were all really good to work with him, and hopefully things are turning around. It’s always odd for me, being the parent in a parent-teacher conference. It makes me question some of the choices I made when I was teaching and hope that I was compassionate enough.

Last week, Jake went to the gym with Kendell and Kaleb. While he was there, he smashed his finger between two weights. It immediately bloomed into a fat, hard swelling, split right down the middle. He ended up having to get three stitches, which ups his total to forty. The funny thing was…that same morning, he’d gone into the dermatologist to have stitches taken out! Because, yes, it was a dermatologist-filled month for Jake. He has a whole bunch of skin issues right now (but zero acne!), one that required a biopsy and stitches and further watching.

So maybe it just wasn’t an awesome month for Jake. Poor kid. (I am counting down the weeks until his junior year is over. We’ll make it…right?) I am proud of him for continuing to work and to try to make things better, and just to hang on. Sometimes that is all you can do. Just hang on, and he’s doing it.

Haley came to visit twice this month. Once because her cousin Madi got married. Haley’s now the only girl cousin on my side of the family who isn’t married. (Mostly because after Madi, we didn’t have any more girls!) I’ve joked with her that she’s our old maid, a joke I can make because she’s only 19 and has zero interest in getting married. It was a sweet wedding. My sister asked me to take some of the photos, which I wasn’t thrilled to do as weddings are not my thing. I don’t trust my photography skills enough and only agreed to do it because I wasn’t the only photographer. I love this photo of the bride and all of the boys we could round up:

(The dads were trying to make duck faces and it made all the boys laugh.)

And this one is pretty good too:

I made some chocolate fudge sauce for the ice cream table at the wedding. Way too much chocolate fudge. We had two of those big Ziplock bowls full of left overs. The boys and Kendell were happy to work on the “chocolate mud” as they started calling it, nearly all month.

I love it when Haley is home. Even though it is different than before, it still makes me feel a very specific sort of peace, having all of my birds in the nest for a night or two. In the morning before the wedding, she and I laid in my bed for a while, just talking about stuff. I feel so grateful I get to be her mom, and the place we have come to in our relationship is a good one. It gives me strength to help Jake because it has taught me that things really do change. High school doesn’t last forever and our relationship is so much better now. She is so much better (not that she was ever a problem)—happier and more confident and just finding her way. I am glad to watch her progress.

The fourth graders at Kaleb’s school participate in NaNoWriMo. When you do it as a student, your word-count goal is 1,000 words. Kaleb wrote a story about the weeping angels from Dr. Who. He kept adding and adding to the story and in the end wrote almost 3,000. The days when he was working on his story were some of his happiest this month, because of course writing is good for your soul. He has discovered online video games and wants to play them all the time, and I am not going down that road with him. We’ve had a few hard times when he was pretty mad at me. But I’m sticking to my guns on this one.

(I wanted a good photo of the kids together, for a Christmas project. This was not it, and as I won't see Haley again until just before Christmas, I'll have to figure something else out!)

I ran exactly zero miles this month. My hamstring is still bothering me, although it is starting to finally feel better I think. I was really, really good all month at avoiding sugar and eating fewer carbs…until I got sick. Then all I’ve wanted to do is drink hot chocolate and/or orange juice. This cold is proving to be as hard to get over as my last on in July. More than a week later, I am still coughing. Kendell and Jake have had it too, but somehow I just can’t seem to get over mine.

One of my favorite November days happened on the very last Saturday. Kendell has a small Christmas lights business, and his partner went out of town unexpectedly, so I went out to help him. We did an entire, enormous house together. Sometimes Kendell gets a little bit gruff and annoyed during projects, but he was great this day. He taught me what to do and how to help him, and we worked well together. It’s strange, sometimes, where you find your bits and pieces of happiness, but I found it there, standing on a stranger’s roof with my husband.

How was your November?