Fragments of a week

Re-immersion in family Stayed one night with my sister and brother-in-law in Seattle. (My sister used to stay overnight with me in Seattle.) The rest of the time I was with my parents' in the house that used to be my grandparents'. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and the cousins' babies. Visiting my mother's aunt—snow and evergreen trees. Reading my grandfather's travel diaries. Grandmother's and great aunt's stories of simple Christmases in the past where the children each received a pair of mittens as a gift. Occasionally someone might get a doll. I won the Scrabble game we played huddled around the wood stove in the kitchen.

Washington Rain. Always rain. But sun, too. Outside my mother's kitchen window, the neighbor's newly painted barn perched on the edge of the hill. The annual pilgrimage to Easton's Books. In Seattle, we stopped by Chubby & Tubby's for some last minute gifts, a store that, sadly, is going out of business.

Traveling Celebrity sighting: one of the actors from Gilmore Girls, the man who plays Jackson, was on my flight from Seattle to Burbank, where it was unexpectedly and dangerously windy, so we were diverted to LAX until the wind died down and then flown back to Burbank. Rough landing. A fellow passenger in the shuttle on the way home—a float plane pilot in Alaska—said we should complain to the airline and get a partial refund because that sort of landing was inexcusable. Almost finished reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which I want to finish before seeing The Hours.

Home again Raining last night but clear and rather cool today. Two long services at church. Much music; today is the fifth day of Christmas. Listening to a Christmas gift, Songcatcher.

From today's paper An article about a naturalist, Craig Childs, who walks the Southwest. His most recent book, for my "To Read" list, is Soul of Nowhere: Traversing Grace in a Rugged Land. At the end of the article, Childs muses about his desire to be in the wilderness:

"What I want to know...is why am I so hungry for this?"