Christmas morning, I woke up early and lay in bed for a long time, wondering if Wendy and Sue were ever going to stir. Sue and I had gotten a bit shirty (defined as throwing your toys out of the pram) about when we would do gifts. Just a bit. I come from a tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve because that was what my father’s family had done, a legacy of my Swedish great-grandmother. When Sue was growing up, presents were opened first things Christmas morning. Wendy was running Christmas, though, and she made us wait until afternoon after dinner for the big unwrapping, can you believe it?

As it turned out, Wendy orchestrated the loveliest Christmases I’ve had in a long time. We all had our various breakfasts with our various milks in our various tea. (Wendy, decafe with semi-skimmed milk; Sue, decafe tea with lactose free milk; Elena, caffeinated tea with oat milk). Then we dove into the stockings for the small gifts.

Dinner (actually lunch) was early afternoon. Wendy set a lovely table with placemats on a red polka-dotted tablecloth; candles, and crackers by each plate. We had turkey crown, sausage stuffing balls, pigs-in-blankets, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes rubbed in goose fat and roasted, parsnips in a honey glaze, boiled carrots, sprouts, broccoli and peas; and elderberry cordial.

We pulled our crackers. Let me enlighten the Americans who don’t know what a cracker is.  Basically, it’s like an empty toilet paper roll with three little items inside: a paper crown, a small toy and a piece a paper (called a motto) with an unfunny joke or silly riddle. (Mine was What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.) But I did get an interesting little toy called a mystery calculator, the mystery and the calculations I’ve yet to figure out. I meant to do it on the airplane home.

Anyway, the toilet paper roll is wrapped in Christmas paper with ties on the end into which are embedded dots of gunpowder like we used to have in cap guns. You pull one side of your cracker and your neighbor at the table pulls the other and bang! Joy, Wendy’s sister who had arrived with piles of gifts and a vicious cough, pulled a cracker with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we raced reindeer. Many years ago the Christmas crackers had contained wind-up reindeer and they had become part of the festivities ever since. We all took reindeers, wound them up and raced them to the middle of the table. No one won.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joy had made a gluten-free Christmas cake for me to have all to myself. She had made one for me several years ago but the postage to Seattle had been prohibitive so they saved it for when I came to visit nine months later. You can do that with a Christmas cake because it’s preserved with brandy. It’s a fruitcake with a topping of marzipan. Then the whole thing is encased in an almond paste fondant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By now it was nearly 3:00 and I wondering (child that I am) if we were ever getting to the gifts.

“Do we have to listen to the King’s speech first?” I asked.

“Certainly not, “said Sue with a withering look.

At 3:00, every Christmas Day for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth had addressed the nation. This was to be the first King’s speech. We were well into our gifts when he came on the television and I looked up from all the wrappings. It was short. And it was very sweet. I looked at Wendy, the monarchist in the family. “I’m going to cry,” I said. And I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We piled all the (mostly) chocolate that we had amassed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went for a walk as it was getting dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We all watched the second Fishermen’s Friends movie, had a cup of tea and went to bed.

The next morning, Boxing Day, I asked, “How are you two feeling?”

Wendy: “Oh not too bad.” She looked exhausted.

Sue: “I feel rough.” But she was dressed up to go out.

I left the two of them to hold up the empire and went for a walk on the Compton Road loop again, finishing up at the farm shop for another chat with Lucy.

Sue and I follow a thing on social media called Very British Problems. A posting on Boxing Day read, “Right. What’s the cheese situation?” One of the comments was “A modest surfeit lurks in the fridge.” That was our situation, too.  Cheese and chocolate are a feature of the holiday. Another is The Panto (short for pantomime.)

We went to a panto in Yeoville, about 40 minutes south of Butleigh. I’ll start by saying I had never seen anything like it. We don’t have anything remotely like it in America. It’s not mime and it’s certainly not silent. It’s a fairy tale (we saw Dick Whittington) acted by men playing women and women playing men, audience participation, slapstick comedy, outrageous puns (but much better than the ones in the crackers) and the audience “always gets wet,” said Sue.

There’s always a villain (Sue had played a villainous Rat in a panto earlier in December, a performance I would have loved to see and she got rave reviews.)  There’s always a dame played by a man. Our Dame Dolly was big and round and had enormous pink cupcakes boobs, an image I will never, ever get out of my head.

The audience participation was fun. Booing at the villain, screaming at the sailor to look behind him, singing along on some of the songs. Gas bubbles and streamers were ejected into the audience several times. The actors ran down the aisles with super-soakers and sprayed everyone. I adored it.

However, it was loud. Way too loud for me so I again put in ear-plugs and that helped. At the interval, I left Sue and Wendy to get ice cream—that’s another feature of the panto—and went for a walk to calm my ears. I meant to go around the block and I thought I had but in no time, I was lost and had to ask for directions of a couple who walked me back to the theater.

In the second act, Sue on my right, asked me to ask Wendy for one of her throat sweets. I leaned over to Joy on my left.

“Sue needs one of Wendy’s throat sweets.”

One was passed to me and I promptly dropped it by Joy’s leg. I leaned down to get it. It seemed to move left and I kept reaching until I had pushed Joy into Wendy.

“What are you doing?” Sue asked.

“Trying to get you your bloody sweet,” I said. “I need another,” I whispered to Joy.

“Here,” said Wendy holding out a second one, which she then dropped.

The third one made it to Sue about the time the super-soakers came down the aisle.

It could have been part of the show.

 

More images from Christmas Day

 

 

 

 

Two days before Christmas began the long slide into what would be Christmas Day. I again went for a long walk in the morning. This time I took the long way to the Farm Shop. I started at Wendy and Sue’s house on Chapel Lane, walked to the top of the High St, crossed the sub road to Compton Road and carried on around a big field that I could have cut through (public footpath) if it hadn’t been so mucky.  I came back to the sub road on Wood Lane and turned up the hill to the Farm Shop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Farm Shop I met Lucy who was replenishing everything for the Christmas rush. I introduced myself and we chatted. I find that mentioning Sue-at-the-Village-Shop is my entrée into polite society because everyone knows her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy and I went for The Big Shop at Morrisons. The big grocery stores are Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Waitrose, the latter being the most upmarket. There are smaller cash and carry shops, Lidl and Aldi, where you can find things not in the big chain stores, like Anya’s chocolate covered candied plums.

The most intriguing thing Wendy bought were the goose fat roast potatoes. I get that the potatoes are prepared and ready to roast but I had never heard of rubbing them with goose fat or any kind of fat, really. I just throw them in the oven and bake as is, then pile on the butter. But Wendy said this was the best way to do potatoes and I find, after an internet search, that I am apparently the last person on earth to know this. She got sausage ball stuffing, bacon, a turkey crown, sprouts (I’d finished off my branch from the farm shop), parsnips, carrots, peas and more cakes, mince pies and selection boxes. The Selection Box is a thing. It’s a nicely presented box of chocolates. If I read my cousins correctly, their preferred selection boxes are Quality Street, Cadbury Milk Tray or Cadbury Roses. Wendy also likes Lindor truffles of which you can get about 25 different flavors in the U.K. I mean, really the U.S. is a chocolate desert by comparison. Other selections boxes are Galaxy, Maltesers and Celebrations.

 

 

 

 

Back home, I wrapped gifts in my little cottage and with Coope, Boyes and Simpson going all afternoon. Sue introduced me to this rich vein of carols from the midlands where she grew up and I was enchanted. Then I fell asleep again.

 

In the evening we set off for Stourhead to the festival of lights. Stourhead is a National Trust property of house and gardens. A path had been established in a long loop. Every turn brought us to another illumination of trees and plants with amplified music so loud, I put in my ear-plugs and then could just barely tolerate it. Dotted along the trail were little refreshment huts, one of which featured marshmallows with an open fire pit on which to roast them. Wendy zoomed in like an English pointer. She and I are especially fond of marshmallows.

My favorite display was one of actual fire-lit torches with Auld Lang Syne on the speakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the drive home I heard Once in Royal David’s City on the radio and asked Wendy to turn it up. I wanted to hear my line: “when our eyes at last shall see him.’ We ended up listening to a lessons and carols service broadcast from St Paul’s in London in aid of seeing-eye guide dogs. All was right with the world, listening to carols in the dark on the long drive home, safe and warm and looking forward to Christmas.

The morning of Christmas Eve I again walked the Compton loop. Wendy and Sue were up when I returned.

“How are you two feeling?’

“Poorly,” said Sue

“About the same,” said Wendy and then, in Sue’s words, barked like a stricken sea lion.

I was still well.

More wrapping and napping and in the evening, caroling on the village green. Sue and I went, leaving the barking sea lion at home.

Thirty or forty people came, all with torches or phones with lights. I recognized David, the choirmaster from the earlier caroling and the woman with all the descants in her memory. She was clustered with others of her species and the descants were glorious.

There was mulled wine, compliments of the owner of the village shop, and when we finished singing, a snow machine!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back home, Wendy and Sue broke out three pair of matching Christmas pajamas and we watched A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart and ate chocolate.

 

The morning of the Solstice I combined a walk with a quest to find the farm shop, which Wendy and Sue had been telling me about for years and which I couldn’t wait to see.

As I was leaving, Wendy said to me, “Now do you have a picture in your mind of how to get there?”

I could have kissed her, she is so dear. Wendy is an educator and she thinks like one, as do I, when I’m not behaving like I know my way around a place simply because I want to know my way around. As it turned out, the picture in my mind would not have gotten me anywhere near the farm shop so I was glad she checked.

I walked to the bottom of the High Street –we must talk later about what constitutes the top and the bottom of a street– across a field via one of those public footpaths that are everywhere in England and oh my goodness, I want to walk them all, and to what’s called the sub-road, a narrow two-lane highway that people drive like it’s the autobahn.

The Sour Down Farm Shop is a bustling little Honesty Shop. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can pick up what you want and leave your money in the box: eggs, bread, milk, cheese, farm vegetables, cakes, biscuits and also things like Sue’s photography cards, Prosecco lip balm and goats milk hand cream; and loads of chocolate. I walked home with a long, crooked Brussel sprouts branch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 11:00, we all three went down the drain and around the corner to Alison’s house at Hadley Cottage. We were to fetch the key to her guest cottage for when Wendy’s sister Joy came for Christmas. I had an inkling that Fetching the Key from Alison involved a bit more than just popping in. I was right. There was tea, mince pies, baklava, and the omnipresent chocolate. After an hour of munching and chatting, Sue had to leave for work; Wendy and I stayed on for another hour.

I enjoyed everything: scooping the mince out of the crust to avoid the gluten, hearing Alison say things like “he’s quite camp, is our Alan,” and hearing her story of a patient who died on the stairs as she was helping him up to his room. She and I talked a bit of theology—she had been a Baptist pastor’s wife for 40 years, a very independent one, maintaining her own career as an occupational therapist.

And then her workshop where she sews and hold classes and allows other crafters to hold classes and to sell their art. Sue’s cards, for example. There had clearly been a sale of items for Christmas, a number of which I was to receive in my Christmas stocking but I didn’t know that then.

Wendy and I had lunch and talked for a long time about teaching. Currently Wendy lectures at Strode College in Street. She prepares young people for careers in early childhood education.

We carried on to the oldest town in Somerset, Frome, to deliver Christmas gifts to her friends, Lucy and Debby. Both of them had the same cough that Wendy and Sue had.

“All of Frome is down with something,” Debby said cheerfully.

No one masks and by then I had pretty much just given up, resigning myself to catching someone’s germs.

We all walked into the town, full of hills and “quainty” cobblestone streets. We had tea at the Strada Café. I had a piece of magnificent lemon poppy seed polenta cake. It was getting dark as we left the café and the twinkly lights were coming out on the quainty streets as we began walking back.

We passed what used to be a church but had been turned into a bakery called “Rise.” I mused on the name for a few moments before I said, “You know that’s brilliant. It’s ‘rise’ like bread rises but there’s also the sense of ‘arise, shine, for thy light is come,’ you know?”

They looked at me. “Yeah, we got that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sue had made leek and potato soup for tea (supper). Then, tired as we all were, we decided to skip Lessons and Carols at St Leonard’s and watched “A Muppet’s Christmas Carol” instead.

The next day we were back in Street. I splurged on a Radley bag for myself in Clark’s Village. I went into Mundy’s flower shop to introduce myself as someone who had ordered their flowers several times from Seattle. I told them how glad I was they had survived the pandemic when so many shops had gone out of business. I went into Burns the Bread (the baker’s name is Burns, clever, no?)to just make sure they had really stopped baking gluten free bread as I had been told. It had been fantastic bread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home again, I began wrapping gifts and very soon crawled into bed and fell asleep. Beans on jacket potato for tea. That means canned baked beans on a baked potato.

In the evening we went next door for an evening with Anya and John, and Anya’s brother Michael’s family. Anya and Michael are Polish. Michael’s family (wife and two children who spoke no English and disappeared soon after introductions) had been living in Norway for a year. I said “Jag förstår lite svenska”(I understand a little Swedish.) Michael replied in a torrent of Norwegian and that was the end of the language portion of the evening.

Anya was bubbly, she obviously loves being with people. Her effervescence and that of her brother were infectious. John was a bit more professorial but a good sport.

The table was set with olives, cheese, crackers, satsumas, nuts, a box of chocolates and Nosecco (non alcoholic Prosecco, get it?) When Anya learned that I drank alcohol, she hauled out her Polish liqueurs for me to try. Let’s see if I can read my notes and get this correct: Soplica wiśniowa (cherry), Zolądkowa Gorzka(herbal), Tradycyjna (traditional, spicy) and Miętą (mint.) I liked them all.

We arranged for John to have a voice lesson with me in exchange for Michael seeing if he could do something about a piece of laminate in Sue and Wendy’s kitchen that an electrician had inadvertently snapped in two and that was going to cost 600 GBP to be replaced—this was a story I had already heard several times, the indignant tone rising each time.

Anya volunteered her brother to fix the board and Michael said sure, he’d come over and have a look at it.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t know if you coming over and just looking at it is worth a whole voice lesson!”

Michael burst out laughing.  Our eyes met, both of us laughing. There’s a magic when something funny can be shared across cultures and threaded through languages. I felt myself drawn to this family.

After looking at the chocolates all evening, I stage whispered to Wendy, “Are you curious about those?”

The chocolates were another Polish treat: Ptasie mleczko or Bird’s milk. It is a sort of marshmallow covered in chocolate. Only marshmallows as I know them are crude compared to this delicate white interior. But the real prize were the Śliwka Nałęczowska: candied plums in dark chocolate. Feeling disloyal to Cadbury, I liked these best of all the chocolate I had in the U.K.

We had our nightly cup of tea with Anya, John and Michael, and went straight home to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

From the Castle Cary train station, we “did a shop” in Street (that’s a town.) It seems to me that we “did a shop” almost every other day. And the washing machine was going 24/7—more about that later. On that first day, Sue took me around Clark’s Village, an outlet mall built on the site of the first Clark’s shoe factory. Jet-lagged and fuzzy-headed, I stumbled like a hypnotized person into Radley London, Weird Fish, White Stuff, Fatface (look them up) AND the Cadbury Shop where I bought bags of Cadbury chocolates.

I bought Christmas cards in a charity shop. All the charity shops (thrift stores)–British Heart Foundation, Sue Ryder, Cancer Research, Oxfam—sell Christmas cards, the proceeds of which go to the charity. Touching, clever, pretty, Sue and Wendy do a massive business in sending and receiving cards.

Earlier in the month, in Seattle, I had ignored everything I could with the excuse, “Oh, I’m sorry, I am getting ready to go overseas” but I did want to send some cards and not just to gloat that I was in England for Christmas.

At last we were in Butleigh, a village of about 900 people in Somerset, three miles from Glastonbury and nine from Wells –if that helps you. Wendy turned onto Chapel Lane and into the drive of the stone house with the rabbit hutch to one side. There are no longer rabbits in the hutch. Firewood, gardening supplies and other things are stored inside and it serves as a place to hang the washing and as a roof for Izzy the cat to sit on as her sister Lizzy used to do.

One of my first actions was to pay homage to the cats and we began as we meant to go along: Tabsy crawled on my lap and dug his claws into me to knead and purr. Izzy allowed me to pet her and fuss over her but would not sit on my lap. Seamus leapt up in alarm and hid whenever he sensed me near.

During the pandemic Wendy and Sue turned a mother-in-law apartment, heretofore called The Cottage, into an Airbnb. It was beautifully appointed (they are Super Hosts—that’s the industry term) and scrupulously clean. Though connected to their part of the house, it had its own entrance and it was to be my home for the next two weeks.

We ate cheese and biscuits and salad, salad being defined as lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes arranged artfully on a plate, and talked. Then we had tea and cake and talked. Both Wendy and Sue were sick with appalling coughs, congestion and sore throats – and the most they would ever say about being ill was that they were doing poorly–and I resigned myself to becoming sick before too long. But that first night I was merely jet-lagged.

In the evening, I joined a group of villagers to carol around the village. I went down the drain (the drain is a passageway resembling a tunnel that was at one time an actual drain but now functions as a foot path. I never like to miss a chance to say I am going down the drain), outfitted with a torch (flashlight.) It was pitch black except for a few street lights around the shop and the glow from cottage windows.

At the village shop I met up with a small group of glorious voices, led by David the choirmaster at St Leonard’s parish church.  Latching onto a wonderful bass named Brian, I sang along side him, eventually gushing all over him about his voice for which he seemed both pleased and bemused. One woman had descants stored in her head from her school years. On the last verse of every carol, she let another one rip. It was thrilling.

We sang songs I knew but that we rarely hear in the states. “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Christians Awake,” “Infant Lowly,” “As With Gladness.” I had first heard “Christians Awake” when I stood next to Hazel (the oldest generation I have met of my family) on Christmas Day in 1991 in Metherell Baptist Church, Cornwall. She was planted on the floor like Birgit Nilsson in Die Walküre and held forth with “Rise to adore the mystery of love” with its beautiful melodic swoop.

We sang “Ding Dong, Merrily on High” several times –merrily, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” English tune; and the odious “Away in a Manger,” the only thing making it bearable was the English tune.

I was my usual American-on-holiday self, chatting up people I might have walked down the far aisle to avoid if I’d been home. I can imagine them complaining over breakfast the next morning about the brash American with the crude speech patterns.

We sang for Wendy and Sue after which I cut out and followed them inside where Christmas music accompanied a small cottage industry of wrapping paper and gifts boxes, scissors, cello tape, gift cards and a mile high stack of Cadbury chocolate boxes and other delectables.  So industrious were they that I was inspired to sit down with my ten Christmas cards and write them all. (If you didn’t get one, it’s the fault of the Royal Mail; it was on strike. What mail didn’t go out late probably got lost and that’s where your card is.)

My first morning in Butleigh, I lay in bed until I felt the heat come on. Running through my head was the wonderful line from Once in Royal David’s City: “When our eyes at last shall see him.”

Before Sue and Wendy were up, I was out the door for a walk around the village. I wanted to re-visit the field where I had watched the sheep at the same time that the church bells were ringing and had thought, “Could anything be more English?” I found the field but the sheep had moved. Funny how that works. Then I found the sheep and there were week-old lambs. I waved at the farmer—Keith– and asked if I could come in and look at them.

Back home, Sue was up and ironing.

“Is it “Once in David’s Royal City or “Once in Royal David’s City,” I asked. It was reminiscent of Ruth’s Kris Steakhouse.

“Once in Royal David’s City.”

“Thank you. How are you feeling?”

“About the same.”  Violent coughing ensued.

Sue had to work at the village shop in the afternoon. Wendy proposed that she and I walk “up the tor.”

“Are you sure you’re up for that?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m all right.” Violent coughing ensued.

I follow a woman on social media, Michelle Cowbourne, who walks up the tor every morning before dawn and takes the most glorious photographs. Earlier I told Wendy that I wanted to walk up the tor before dawn.

“Well, you can do that,” Wendy said. But there was no offer to take me at that hour or show me how to get started. We set off at a more convenient time.

The tor is a dizzying climb and I was still quite jet lagged. The wind was fierce and I thought several times I was going to topple down the hill. We walked up the steep backside and came down the gentler grade in the front.

The Glastonbury tor is a 518 feet hill that used to be surrounded by water. At its top is St Michael’s tower.  Looking over the Somerset levels it’s easy to imagine Avalon rising out of the water and the mist. The atmosphere is otherworldly –or at least it is when you’re jet-lagged and have vertigo. I can see why people come to commune with the ancients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy and I carried on to Arthur’s Court in Street, the care home where her mother Pam now lives. Pam has shrunk to her bones since the last time I saw her and she can’t form words that are understandable but she is still vocal and babbles on either in pleasure or irritation. I was so pleased that she recognized me. We looked at photos from her and Mervyn’s trips to Seattle and I fed her Cadbury Dairy Milk buttons.

My favorite part of this visit, however, was watching Wendy’s face as she helped her mother eat. The love in her eyes. The patience, the sadness, the acceptance. The love.

 

When I told people I was spending Christmas with my cousins in an English village, I heard a fair amount of “that sounds magical.” I don’t think my cousins think of themselves as magical even if they do live in a place with things like fairy soap, fairy lights and fairy cakes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that I am home after three weeks in England, it does feel like I went through a bit of magic although the beginning of the trip did not suggest such an outcome. It began when my cousin Sue texted me to say that there was a train strike beginning the day I flew into London. I’d best book two nights in the city because there would be no way to get to the village. It took me half a morning but I found myself a cheap little place near Paddington for two nights.

Then my cat sitter got sick and I had to scramble to line up another one. One of my former students, Julia, had told me she would stay with the cat if I needed back-up and this she graciously did. The cat rewarded her with not coming out in the open for two weeks but I am eternally grateful to Julia.

On the day of my departure, the plane was four hours late. It was fortunate for me that by then, I had gone Zen because when I got to Paddington station after dark, I was fine with dragging my suitcase up and down Sussex Gardens looking for the Royal Cambridge Hotel. In the photo it was a clean white building that looked to be on a corner. In reality it was a dark and dirty little place in the middle of some brighter hotels and I passed it three times before I finally saw it. The nicest things I can say is that it was over-heated so at least it wasn’t cold, and reasonaly clean.

At reception I learned that a main pipe had burst in Belsize Park, a neighborhood to the north and water had been turned off over a considerable area, including the hotels along Sussex Gardens.

“Are you saying there’s no running water?” I asked Ziyad at the desk.

“It’s been off for a few hours but we expect it to come back on soon.”

I checked in and found the shoe box I had booked. My bathroom was across the hall, accessible with a skeleton key. It was all mine, a moot point since there was no running water. I was grimy and sweaty and wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower.

I went back to Paddington station to wash my face and brush the mold off my teeth. Then I slept for 12 hours.

The next morning there was still no running water and it continued to be expected to come on soon. I used my private toilet but didn’t flush. I knew I had one flush from the water in the tank and I saved it for when it mattered. Enough said.

Ziyad was gone and reception was full of unhappy looking people; the exodus was beginning, not just from the Royal Cambridge but from all the little hotels along the road.

I walked to Paddington and got a coffee and porridge (oatmeal) at Pret a Manger and tried to think what to do. Connected to Paddington station is what use to be the Great Western Railway hotel but is now a Hilton. I decided to see if the Paddington Hilton could accommodate me—at any price.

“Does your hotel have running water?” I asked at reception

The clerk looked at me with the same astonishment a waiter once had at the Land’s End café when I asked if there was salad with my soup. (There wasn’t, there never is, it’s not a thing in the U.K.)

“Of course we have running water.”

“Could you accommodate me for tonight?”

“Yes, we have a standard room.”

“How much?”

“219 GBP.”

“OK,” I said.

“It will be all right?” she asked

“Does it have running water?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then it will be all right.”

I checked out of the Royal Cambridge (such a promising name) and dragged my suitcase to the Hilton.  I took a long hot shower, during which, due to a wonky shower head, I flooded the bathroom floor without noticing until I stepped out and into an inch of water.

After mopping that up, I set out for a walk across Hyde Park, stopping to watch a crowd of happy dachshunds all decked out in Santa outfits for their annual Christmas walk. The rain began as a drizzle but was in full flow by the time I got to Kensington Road which turns into Knightsbridge and from there to Harrods. I wanted to see it decked out for Christmas. When I turned the corner onto Brompton Road, I saw a display that looked a cross between an amusement park and oh, maybe Prince Albert’s exhibition palace.

The crowd carried me like the tide into the store. I knew within 30 seconds I couldn’t stay: thick with people, no masks and too much noise. I had to fight the current to get to one of the green-coated doormen who called me “dear lady” and told me it would be difficult to get a taxi because everyone wanted a taxi on a day like today.

He was correct. I decided I would start walking back and try to get a taxi along the way. I found one but the driver, Bashir, called through his window that he couldn’t pick me up right there. “Down there, down there” he pointed. I stalked him all the way “down there” and collapsed inside his taxi. When we got to Paddington, I gave him a whacking great tip.

I had an overpriced lunch in the hotel. Something had been bothering ever since I left the Royal Cambridge. It came to me with the last chip I put in my mouth: I think I left behind my charger and adaptor.

In my room I took everything out of my bags and rifled every pocket. No charger. I trudged back to the Royal Cambridge where Ziyad was again presiding. His hair was piled with curls that hung down into his face. The day before his hair had been flat against his head.

“You’ve changed your hair,” I said.

“This is how it usually looks,” he said. “But I couldn’t wash it yesterday because there was no water.”

He couldn’t find my charger. It hadn’t been reported. As I was leaving, I just thought to say, “If it shows up, could you call me? I’m over at the Paddington Hilton.”

I would say that by then I was only half Zen.

I texted Gwen in Seattle who knows something about just about everything and Nancy, a world traveller. The consensus seemed to be that I could easily buy another one but I wasn’t so sure. It used to be that you had to get those things before you came to the U.K. Brit-rail passes and electricity adaptors. I was operating on old information.

I went to the concierge desk to see if any help was available. James hauled out a box full of chargers and adaptors left behind by guests and together we pawed through it. No U.S. to U.K. James said he would loan me his –he just happened to have one—and in the morning I could buy one at Boots.

“You sure?”

“Oh, yes, sure.”

I accepted his charger but went down that very night to the Boots in Paddington station and bought the last one they had. Then I was able to charge both phone and tablet at the same time.

That night the phone rang at 10:30 just as I was drifting to sleep. It was the front desk saying that Ziyad had brought my charger and adaptor and I could pick them up in the morning. It was raining more than water, it seemed.

The next morning I deposited myself in the Great Western Railway first class lounge. I swear this lounge at Paddington is one of the big reasons to get a first class rail pass although the biscuits at the one in Glasgow are better.

My train was cancelled due to flooding and I was hurried onto an earlier train. Then at last I was at Castle Cary station. At last I was hugging Sue and Wendy. Everything was lovely and familiar except that it was raining and there are no summer strawberries. There are floods and train strikes and rain. Let the magic begin.

Recently I posted a piece about a violation of my privacy –one I consented to—in the form of an app called Right Track. For three months I allowed my insurance company to track my driving so that I could scrounge a discount on my auto insurance. My ordeal is now over, the app has been deleted (I hope. Cue sinister sounds), I am driving like a madwoman and I am saving $164 a year on my premium.

But there was a bit of a speed bump earlier. Even though my insurer had a GPS out on me and presumably know I live in Seattle, a city of hills, they nevertheless took issue with my braking. They thought I used it too often. I felt they preferred I not use it at all.

After every trip, I checked my rating on the app, read the report which always said I braked too often and watched the rising tide of my savings. Halfway through the process I was saving $145 a year. Remember that figure.

One Friday afternoon a traffic ticket arrived in the mail. I had been caught on camera running a red light. Up to that point, I don’t think I quite believed there were cameras at intersections but evidently, there are. I remembered the incident even without the photo and video that came with the ticket, which, by the way, was for $139. Bringing my annual premium discount to $6 a year.

I was so pissed, I almost deleted the app right there and then. I was in a snit all weekend. But apps don’t run red lights, people do. I hate it when they have you dead to rights. I decided to request a mitigation hearing on the off chance that I would get a magistrate with either a good sense of irony or a degree in English literature.

A week later a packet of stuff arrived in the mail. The first page gave me a hearing date and the courtroom in which I was to appear, followed by threats of arrest, custody, jail time for reasons that had nothing to do with me since there aren’t any outstanding warrants for my arrest. I considered that paragraph overkill but nevertheless, it encouraged me to plow through the rest of the information carefully. After the first two pages of schedules and threats, was an Important Notice in regards to Courtroom Hearings During Covid-19, which some parts of the government think we are still in.

I had four options: mitigation hearing by 1) written statement, 2) telephone conference, 3) video conference, 4) in person hearing. Puzzled, I went back over the first page. Why did they schedule me an in-person hearing date if there were these other options with penalties attached if I made one incorrect step?

At the top of the next page the words “Important Notice Please Read” was highlighted, the first hint of an actual human being involved. It almost seemed kind and encouraging, that highlighting. On this informative page, I was told to disregard everything on the previous pages although it wasn’t so straightforward as to say actually that. What it said was that all in-person mitigation hearings were suspended. I turned back to look at the court date I had been assigned.

I opted to change my mitigation hearing to a written statement. I do better in writing than screaming hysterically over the phone at civil servants.

Here is what I sent the court:

September 12, 2022
Statement of Elena Louise Richmond re citation # 0212201135192:

I am 68 years and have been driving for 53 years and have never run a red light. I don’t expect to ever do it again. I want to explain why I did on Aug 8, 2022.

My insurance company is tracking my driving so I can reduce my insurance premiums. At the time of this incident, I was up to saving $145 a year. The feedback I get from Safeco is that I use my brake too much so I have been consciously trying to watch ahead, anticipate other drivers and keep my speed even so I don’t use the brake unnecessarily.

When I approached the light at 80^th, it had turned yellow, I didn’t know how long the yellow would last and my mind froze for a moment because I thought, “Oh no, I can’t slam on the brakes now because well .  .  . the App.” So I went through it at the point it had turned red.

The irony of a $145 discount for trying to drive more safely and getting a $139 ticket has an O. Henry quality to it.

I am hoping that, while I did commit the infraction, the circumstances of my driving record and my desire to be a better driver—this insurance company tracking has been kind of a driving refresher for me—the court might lower the fee.

A week later I got an un-ironic response with $42 dollars knocked off the fine. Now I am waiting for a second shoe to drop because it seems to me I ran a second light a month later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kay decided she was going to die on Saturday, July 9. She didn’t have the death-with-dignity drugs or anything, she just felt that was when she would die. Pursuant to that she sent out her own death notice on Friday, July 8. On Tuesday when she was still alive, the calls started coming in.

“Who is it?”

“Lulu in Issaquah.”

“What does she want?”

“I told her you were alive and she wants to talk to you. She got your announcement.”

I watched Kay’s face as she realized the ramifications of having sent out 75 notices. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Oh, fuck!”

Kay died two months later, the second week in September. Although I promised her I would write about her life, the summer of her death was a journey and an education for many of us. She taught me how to die with grace.

When she first got the diagnosis of three to six months to live, she thought about her options, talked to friends and decided she would go into hospice. Her directness and calm made it easier for, well, me anyway. She and I talked freely about death. She promised me that if, when she got to other side, there was any way to tell me what it was like, she would. It was our little pact.

I once sent Kay a card that said, “we aren’t just friends, we’re a small gang.” Her then partner Jerry said he always felt a little nervous when the two of us were together; we were a dangerous pair.

I only wish we had had the time to spend a night at the Tulalip Casino. Not to gamble, but to see how many things we could pinch off the maid’s cart. Speaking of carts, another idea we had was to get on those motorized carts at the grocery store and chase each other around the store like we were riding bumper cars.

In case you are understandably confused, Kay and I are not children. Not chronologically. She was 84 and I was 68 when she died. We had known each other for about 15 years, our friendship secured with learning we shared a birthday and the subsequent Gemini energy that went with it. We each found something within the other person.

Not only a friend, Kay was just old enough to be the mother I didn’t have. I was comfortably myself with her, not something that comes easily for me. She accepted me, she was honest with me, she called me honey. My own mother never called me honey.

“If you had been my mother, the republicans would have forced you to give birth,” I said.

She smiled her mischievous smile.

Kay was a beautiful and sexy woman who was self-conscious about her looks. She was a bright, creative, capable woman who was self-conscious about never having gone to college.

She was mystified by the internet.

“What’s the cloud?” she asked me. “Do I get my own cloud or do I have to share?”

She managed to grow old without the headache of gaining computer skills. I told her that was a great accomplishment and she was a happier person for it.

July 9 was only the first time Kay was sure she would die. Like those eschatologists who continue to nail down the date of the rapture (she would hate that comparison), Kay would regularly decide it was now or tomorrow or soon. I think these pronouncements occurred as she seemed to feel life seeping from her.

One Sunday morning she called me.

“Can you come over?”

“Sure, when?”

“Now.”

I almost went over in my nightclothes, not sure how much time I had. I sat with her for much of the day, watching the rise and fall of her breathing and holding her hand. This was late-July. Over the next month and a half, I clocked in hours of holding her hand, watching her sleep, talking gently or making jokes, singing songs, feeding her ice pieces, eating popsicles with her.

She had stopped eating thinking that would hasten the process. When the hospice nurse said it didn’t work that way, we started giving her ice cream, pudding and Jello, things that would slip down her throat because she had difficulty swallowing.

She liked the Lindor milk chocolate truffles. “Dying is fun!” she declared, her mouth smeared with chocolate.

Lisa, Kay’s daughter, had moved in and was living in the house. Chris, a mutual friend, was often there. K.C. and Jamber were health aides that came in every morning. And Christina was the hospice nurse occasionally referred to as Dum-dum when Kay was annoyed with her. Kay perked up when we were there. She had always liked a party.

Once when we were all there, talking and laughing among ourselves, Kay piped up from the bed, “Hey, I’m the one who’s dying here!”

She had a big party for her last birthday, mid-June. She managed to be up and to walk around, talk and smile. The food was fabulous. Her son –who I called her Beloved Son and she called Randy—Randal flew up from New Orleans with Adrianna, his wife. It was after the party that she settled down to start dying and a full two weeks before she decided that July 9 was the day.

There was always a little flurry of activity when Kay decided she was dying the next day. She was in a fever until she got her will and directives in order. Once she had me haul out all her jewelry and divvy it up in little plastic bags with the names of her nieces and friends. She liked to look around the room and point out objects. She’d ask me to put a tag with someone’s name on them.

Other times we looked through her paintings. (I had taught her to paint and she painted joyfully for years.) She saved her best paintings for Randal who heads the art department of various movies and TV series. He will use her paintings as props in upcoming shows, a lasting legacy of his beautiful mother.

We all went through a period when we had to constantly arrange flowers for her. We had vase after arrangement after pot of them and we grouped them all together on the coffee table. Kay, who had to look at them all day long from her bed, made us move them an inch this way, an inch that way. Put those yellow mums together and the round hydrangeas in the middle by the pink delphiniums. Set the orchid a little to the side. The next day, annoyed with something that seemed off, she made us move them around again.

I liked seeing Chris when I visited but my favorite times were when it was Kay and me and I could watch her breath and tell her how beautiful she was and how gracefully she was doing this. I felt like she and I had a little world of our own, our little club of two, our small gang.  It felt priceless.

On one visit, Chris was in the family room with Kay.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s been asleep for a while.”

I leaned over the bed and stared at Kay. She opened her eyes.

“I bet you thought you’d died and gone to heaven when you saw me,” I said.

“I did think that,” she whispered with a smile.

I started to sit but she reached for me. I put my ear close to her.

“Can you stay?” she whispered

I felt as though my entire heart flowed right up into my throat and my eyes and I almost sobbed. I couldn’t remember what I needed to do that day but yes, of course, I would stay.

I learned something about my capacities for end-of-life-care. For two months I lived in fear of being asked to help with the process of cleaning Kay, the kind of cleaning that required I put on surgical gloves. I wanted to do whatever was needed and I suppose I could have learned how and gotten used to it but the surgical glove operations were not my skill set.

I was the one who sat with her and watched her breathe. One day Kay said, ‘When I die, you have to call hospice and they —”

“Kay,” I said. “We all know what to do when you die. But if you die today while I am here, I am just going to sit with you for a long time.”

Her face relaxed and she closed her eyes and nodded. I wasn’t there when she died. I wanted to be but I wasn’t. In the end I decided it was far better to have been there while she lived.

 

 

My automobile insurer has a program called Right Track, a device to help you get a discount –up to 30%– on your car insurance. It’s an app you install on your phone; using GPS, the company tracks your driving for three months. When they decide how much of a good driver discount you deserve, you can take the app off your phone.

At least that is what they said when I decided to try it.

It sounds creepy, I know. It feels like some dark figure somewhere is sitting in his cave (or in his basement in his underwear) spying on me, maybe accessing my personal data or establishing permanent spyware on my phone.

For someone my age, they are most interested in how I accelerate from a start, how I use my brake and my night-time driving. I thought this would be an easy gig. For one thing, I rarely drive at night and these days the nights are so long I am usually in bed before dark. I don’t peel out from a stopped position and I didn’t think there was any problem with how I used my brake.

I have been consistently getting bright, smiling faces and starry eyed emojis for my acceleration. That’s not surprising as I am purposely creeping forward in ways that previously would irritate the hell out of me if I was the car behind me. I hope that drivers behind me aren’t in a bad mood and don’t carry firearms.

Braking is another matter. As far as I can make out, this app would prefer I don’t use the brake at all. Just go so slow that I can roll to a stop when I need to.

I asked my student Alex, who is in drivers training, if she had been given any guidelines about braking and accelerating.

“Huh?” she asked.

“Are you told anything about how much time you should take to get to cruising speed or to come to a halt after you start braking?”

“Nah. You step on the gas to move and the brake to stop.”

Alex is much more forthcoming and specific when she tells me what words and gestures I should not employ as an adult to try to seem cool to kids.

“When adults do that, they look cringy.  That’s another word you shouldn’t use.”

But I digress. For every trip I make, the app gives a little report card telling me—with face emojis– how I am doing, how much money I am currently saving on my insurance and if I am trending up or down with that figure. When my braking had me trending down, I started paying close attention. It brought back memories of learning to drive with my dad in the front seat with me.

My dad never grabbed the dashboard and gasped like my mother did. He said things like, “Don’t take chances, look for opportunities.” “Drive ahead, watch two cars ahead of you.”

He read with amusement the Driver’s Guide that I was given for the driver’s education class I took in high school. “Implement your directional signal indicator,” he’d say with a snicker instead of “put your blinker on.” Then we’d pull over for ice cream.

His words come back to me now that I am creeping along like a 90 year-old woman afraid to go into traffic at the end of her driveway. My friend Kay, who is in Hospice, lives three miles from me. I’ve been visiting every day for the past month. Thanks to my new skills, I can almost get there with using my brake at all.

But you do not want to be behind me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recently hosted an episode of Wild Kingdom here in my quiet Seattle residential neighborhood. Coyotes live in Carkeek Park, a wildish, greenbelt a mile from my house. They have, in the past, drifted up from the park to terrorize the neighborhood for a night or two. The alarm goes out, we keep our cats and small animals inside and then the threat slithers back to Carkeek.

The coyotes have gotten quite bold in the past year. They routinely trot down the middle of the street like private citizens. My neighbor’s small cat (in a face-off with a coyote, my money would be on Suli) sits in her gate and observes their coming and going.

My own cat is more cautious; she’s also older and more fragile. One morning she stuck her head out the sunroom door, backed up, ran into the bathroom, jumped in the tub and made a sound I have never heard from her. In my garden a coyote was strolling around, assessing the real estate.

I chased him out. This is not a sustainable thing to do with a coyote. They are like street punks –or cats, actually. They retreat a few feet, turn around and give me a look that says, “Oh yeah? Make me.” I grabbed something I could wave around, a broom, and chased it like a madwoman, yelling “No, no!” It slipped through the fence. That was it for an hour or two. Then it was back. I chased it four times that day.

The next day, Artemis (my cat) was still sniffing tentatively and backing up from the door. The coyote came through with a dis-emboweled squirrel hanging out of its mouth. I got a pang because there is one squirrel—Smudgie–who will eat out of my hand and I hoped Smudgie wasn’t the one now in the coyote’s mouth. The coyote dropped the corpse and ran when I chased him but he came back several times to finish his meal. Last I looked there was a part of a squirrel behind the raspberries. I left it in hopes the crows would clean it up. To date, I am afraid to go behind the raspberries.

The next afternoon I was reading in my front room when a faint siren sounded in the distance followed by a blood-curdling scream that sounded like it was coming from the chair next to me. I leaped up and looked outside. The coyote was sitting in my raspberries right outside the window, responding to the siren. They do that. The sirens set them off. They are like nerve pain. There’s a twitch in one part of the body and then a whole party starts up in another part. I chased him out yet again.

I went next door to talk to the guys in the cemetery. (Not the dead ones—I don’t discuss current events with them—but the caretakers.) As we chatted on the road, a coyote came waltzing by. This was a different one than the one attempting a coup on my garden. My nemesis was light tan and short-haired. This new one was gray and white with a fluffy tail like a malamute or a collie. The guys said they had seen two pups. We mused over where they had their den and why they were still around after five days. There’s not much cover in the cemetery. We compared our brief notes on Animal Control: they won’t do anything.

The next morning, I went out to feed the birds and what my father used to call the “shy, wild things.” (Yes, I know I am not supposed to feed them.) A miniature of the fluffy tailed coyote shot up and went zipping through the fence. A street punk in training.

I feed the birds and squirrels on the north side of my house where I let things be wild. Mid-July, the grass is four feet tall. I don’t usually pay any attention to it but this pup sighting made me curious. I waded into the tall grass.  There, inside my fence, I found some spacious, comfortable indentations hidden by grass and the low-hanging laburnam.

Oh. my. god. (And you must know I never, ever put periods in front of words like I just did, that’s how shocked I was.) The den was in my yard, inside my fence. The enemy had breached the gate. They were a day away from breaking into the house and seizing the remote.

To be fair, I think coyotes are wonderful animals. They are the tricksters. As someone with a Gemini sun, I can’t help but appreciate the mythology around them. That doesn’t mean I want them in my yard.

I got out the weed whacker and took down all the grass. My neighbor Bill (servant of Suli) came over with his lawnmower and cut the grass to the ground. Next thing I knew, both Suli and Artemis were out there observing the change in terrain. Artemis was considerably bolder; she didn’t run from the open door any longer. The odor of coyote had left the premises.

I checked “Coyotes” off my list and moved on to the laundry room, which had flooded.

 

 

 

 

A few months ago I printed a 25 page article from The Guardian called “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.” Thirty different writers contributed their lists. I thought the article might inspire me to start thinking about writing another novel.

A Billy Collins poem, “Advice to Writers” was the prompt for a writing group I am part of. The poem is an imaginative journey that Billy Collins does so beautifully. What I came to write as a response to the prompt was my own advice to writers. It works just as well for any creative endeavor. And as a bonus, I have 15 points of advice:

1. Before you get started, make sure the kitchen is in a state that will make it easy to make lunch because you’ll be hungry after hours of writing. Otherwise, you’ll throw together something while nibbling that whole bag of potato chips you weren’t supposed to buy.
2. Make a large cup of tea—or coffee with cacao nibs and real cream.
3. Open your computer. Do not look at email. Maybe just check if your order has left the Fed-Ex facility yet. Oh, and check the hourly weather.
4. Find where you left off writing yesterday (or last week or before Christmas) and read what you wrote.
5. There’s a cacao nib in your teeth that won’t dislodge so get some dental floss.
6. Now the cat is staring at you. Go get her food dish. She likes to eat wherever you are. Rather she expects it.
7. There goes that couple from Santa Fe, walking their dog, Biscuit. You don’t remember the couples’ name but you have it written down in a drawer with their house key. They want you to feed Biscuit for a week while they’re away. You don’t know why they asked you; you’ve only spoken over the fence a few times. You wonder if they’re Russian agents investigating whether or not you’d be a possible asset.
8. OK. Write.
9. Take a sip of coffee
10. Blow your nose
11. Wonder if you took your thyroid medication this morning.
12. Those coupons for the hardware store expire in two days. What is the likelihood you’ll get up there by then. You don’t know what you’ll even buy but that’s five dollars.
13. Check Fed-Ex. Is it Out for Delivery yet?
14. OK. Write. Starting now.
15. Maybe read that “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.” For the first time.