Wednesday:

Been a quiet afternoon. I'm sitting in the spare bedroom now of Grandma's house. Got here all right; we all met in the waiting lounge of the airport here in Iowa. Des Moines airport is really small compared to Kennedy. And best of all, we have snow here! So...Saturday night...we all meet and exchange hugs and some tears (mostly Grandma and me with the tears). Once we got back to her place it was getting dark and I gasped in delight to see that she had a huge menorah by her living room window. It's so gorgeous, journal! Looking at it from the door of the living room, it reflects on the windowsill, which in turn bounces off the snow. There are few sights more beautiful than holiday decorations among a snowy backdrop. So Saturday night, being the third night of Hanukkah, Grandma lit the third candle at dinner, the smaller menorah at the kitchen table. Funny, none of us are really religious, but we celebrate the secular aspects of the holidays...we mix some Christmas in there, since Grandpa Bill used to be part Lutheran. Grandma grew up observing mostly the Jewish holidays, even though her folks weren't exactly religious. We had a special meal that night, then exchanged small treats. Later, we went into the living room and sat by a lit fire and talked and ate Christmas AND Hanukkah treats. They were fantastic. So, it's Grandma, Dawn, Jeff, Sharon, Dad, and me here. It's sooo good seeing Dawn again! And Jeff, my folks, and Grandma! We were up late, just enjoying the fire. I watched the flames a while and thought of how scary, yet beautiful fire is. I thought of the fire that burned down the old farmhouse back in Stoneybrook the summer after my tenth grade year and how upset we'd all been. Oddly, it was that fire, however, that brought us closer together, esp. Dad and Grandma. Grandma had helped us replace some of our lost mementos. We'd rented a house on Bradford Court, right near Mona and Claudia for a year after that. Dawn moved back to Stoneybrook for our junior and senior year of high school. Then the summer after our junior year we'd had the farmhouse rebuilt and moved back in. I smiled softly as I thought about our family now sitting in front of a fire here at Grandma's. Iowa is soooo quiet, at least this part of the state and especially compared to New York City. Strange seeing so much open space. I guess because I'm a city person, I'm so used to seeing busy streets and all these people rushing around and all. Grandma often jokes that if you blink while passing this tiny town, you'd miss the town altogether. It's one of these quaint towns where everyone knows everybody and there's just one main street, one school district, one library, etc. So that made up our Saturday night.
Sunday, Dawn, Jeff, and I slept late, then woke up slowly and had potato pancakes and tea. It was a bright, snowy day and later on the three of us went up to the nearby hill to sled for a while. It was almost like back home where we'd sled through the hills of Central Park. Then we took a walk around town. Dawn and Jeff picked up a few last-minute gifts. The whole town had Christmas decorations all over. It was a wonderful sight, kind of like a postcard. I was also reminded of the trip to Germany our family took the holidays of our first year in college. Sharon had won the trip for all of us, Grandma included. So we went and stayed at a medium-sized village in Bavaria and it was beautiful and quaint with snow and all. In Germany, there were mountains in the background, but Iowa's mostly flat. "Sooo, you're Verna Baker's grandkids?" one clerk asked. We nodded and introduced ourselves. "Heyyy, yes, Mary Anne, I remember when you was a baby here?" I blushed and thanked the clerk as we left the store. Another clerk asked who we were visiting or if we were new in town. Soo, that's what small town life is like. I know, I've been here numerous occasions and a lot of people here know me as Verna Baker's granddaughter. We then headed back to Grandma's and had dinner. It must have been around after dinner that I noticed that Grandma has a cough. I hope she isn't coming down with a cold. She says she isn't and has had the cough for a few days. So far she doesn't sound stopped up or anything. I just hope with flu season here and all, she'll be all right.
E-mailed my friends on Tuesday night. Yes, Grandma does have one small, old computer in her basement. I actually taught her how to use e-mail and surf the net. She still doesn't use it much, just for keeping track of her crops and animals and all. By the way, one of her goats is pregnant and is due any day. We went out to see her and she's HUGE around the middle and rests a lot. I guess being pregnant does that to you.


Saturday, a little after mightnight:

Well, my watch bleeped a little, so it's officially X-mas day! We did our gift exchange Friday night in front of the fire. Had a great time, stayed up as late as shit, even our parents and Grandma. Grandma gave each of us a Hanukkah gelt, which is holiday money. Thursday was the last night of Hanukkah, so we just put our big celebration in between. Also had a huge dinner with a ton of food. All of us gathered into the kitchen and spent an afternoon preparing it; it was duck (precooked) and all sorts of other things. Normally, I don't like cooking, but this time was fun, since we were all laughing and joking around and fooling with things, tossing berries and all. Grandma's kitchen really isn't that big, so we kept bumping into each other. By the time we sat down, the counter and sink were covered with junk. We cracked up at the sight, then dug in. I must have stuffed myself for three days. We then did a huge cleanup once we ate, talking away. Grandma says that they've finally renovated the old synagogue across town and she and her friend Janet went there to a bazaar last month. There're actually quite a few Jewish people in Maynard, not necessarily practicing ones, but still with some Jewish in them. She says when she was younger and my mother, Alma was young, they just had one Lutheran church and a Methodist church in the town and that was it. They were also one of only two Jewish families here at the time. Back then, there was much more religious intolerance as well. Made me think of Stoneybrook and growing up there. Stoneybrook's of course much bigger than Maynard and more diverse, always has been I guess. I think of how fortunate I am to be living now, where for the most part, people are more enlightened and freer. Grandma says how lucky Dawn and I were not to be around in the fifties when she was young because women had so few options. We then went on to the living room for our gift exchange. Had a nice, sleepy peaceful feeling by the end of the night. Drank a ton of tea and some cocoa too. Right now in fact, I have to go pee, so talk later!

Monday:

Been quiet. Waiting for the year 2005 to start. God, hard to believe it's the mid-double oh's! Unfortunately, Grandma still has the cough, but thank the stars she doesn't seem to be coming down with anything else. Her coughing is a dry cough and mostly comes in periodic spurts. I hope it's better soon. Got a couple of ee's, one from Abby and Anna and one from Mona.

Wednesday:

Ran called. She says they have a lot of snow where she is with her mom in Minnesota and they're calling for more snow there tonight. Talked for a while. We wonder if New York's gotten any snow yet. Nice talking to her. This morning as I woke up, I heard Grandma coughing again and she didn't sound very good, so I went over to see if she was all right. She seems to be other than that cough and told me not to worry. For some reason, this coughing spell lasted a bit longer and I guess it made me nervous. She says it's not bothering her, but I think it is some. She smiled then, stroking my cheek and told me that my mother used to worry like me too. I couldn't help but smile at that too.


Saturday, January 1st, 2005!

It's the New Year! 2005 at last! We of course, had a wake and played Uno until midnight. Had some light flurries yesterday. Slept late as shit today and just got up; it's about noon. We leave to head back home tomorrow, all of us...taking our flights the same way we came in. Of course, New Year's Eve here is much quieter than in NYC. I've seen the Times Square Ball drop several times on New Year's and it's neat sight...the ball is HUGE! It just glitters too and reminds me of a huge disco ball that was popular back in the seventies when our folks were growing up. Speaking of seventies and all...I saw the feminist classic The Feminine Mystique on Grandma's bookcase yesterday! I read the book a long time ago on a high school English assignment. Even though it was written way back in 1963, a lot of it is relevant to women even today. I didn't know Grandma had a copy. It's a really good book. I asked Grandma when she'd gotten it and she said back in 1965. She and Grandpa had both read it and had been shocked that so many women even in larger towns and cities were still limited in their lives. I mean, she herself was in a small town and jobs for women had been limited then. She'd always handled heavy work herself, being a farmer and was telling me that back then, people considered it "unfeminine" or something for a woman to lift hay, shovel snow or take care of animal stalls. She kind of smiled ironically remembering that also people had called her a "farmer's wife" but never a "real" farmer; they just assumed that Grandpa Bill did the "real" farm work. We were in the kitchen and Grandma was putting away dishes; I was putting things in containers to put in the freezer as we talked about this. I then asked her if she'd read Backlash and she said she had. She doesn't own a copy, but managed to get one from the library. I say managed because even then, in this town, the library didn't have a copy and she had to get an interlibrary loan to get one from another town almost across the state. She says in her area, political books and books like Backlash are very hard to find. Wow, God I'm lucky. I have a copy of that one and that book is also very powerful. It was written in the early nineties and was a kind of wake-up call that feminism's work is still not complete and to alert us to the insurgency of the conservative right-wing groups hiding behind "Christianity" and "pro family" stances to advance their own hidden agenda and to try to erode women's and gays' hard-won freedoms. There are some real stories of people who'd been victimized by these right-wing fanatics and some of those stories moved me to tears. It's a sacrilige, really what some of these right-ring groups do, basically hi-jacking "Christianity" and "family values" to force their beliefs on others. My friends and I often talk about where our generation is headed and what will life be like for our daughters. I just hope our daughters can be secure in rights that we've had to fight to keep. I'm thinking of how in our folks' generation and Grandma's generation, they had to fight for what we take for granted today. So, with this New Year, I still am optimistic that our world's moving forward. Now, if we just have a woman President soon, we'll really have made progress. Hey, I'm about to start packing, so talk later!

Sunday, January 2:

Back home again! Home again at the Big Apple! So are Mona and Kristy! And so are all the others, except Ran, who's staying until the 7. Good seeing everyone again, even though I had a swell time in Iowa too. Still no snow here at home, but at least it's cold and wintry. Oh, well, I think the snow will come soon. A couple of more days to rest, then it's back to work again. Am kind of looking forward to it. Have three more weeks of school break to go before classes start again.



More later!