Happy Holidays! Jim and I hope this finds you happy and in good health.
This past year seems to have sped past. Lucky for us, we’ve had a lot of fun along the way even though Jim still puts in very long hours and days at PRB. Despite that, he finds as much time as possible for mountain biking, camping and kayaking. He also often walks and bikes into work. It’s environmentally friendly and good for his health. Despite some back trouble this year, I still regularly work out at Curves.
For the first time ever, we spent a winter week in Florida. Our friends Nancy and Jesse invited us to visit them at their new home in January. One of our favorite things was the afternoon soak in the swimming pool, drinking Bloody Marys that often also served, the way Nancy made them, as lunch! We also enjoyed the tour of the Gulf in their cabin cruiser. Nancy sent me home with a commission for “The Florida Series,” a set of six paintings for the dining area of their family room. I spent a good part of the rest of January and February having a lovely time working on them. I don’t have photos on my website, but if you want to see them, as well as a picture or two of us at our leisure!, you can check out January through April on here. Also, check out nephew Dylan’s birthday painting, which I made for him for his very important 16th birthday in February.
In March we spent a week in New York City, with Mom and Carey and Kaye, for our annual Allman Brothers Concert Pilgrimage. Jim went to five ABB concerts in 7 nights; Carey, Kaye and I went to one of them with him as well as another concert on one of the off nights at the Town Hall. Mom got sick on the train coming out, but she was finally able to join Carey and Katy and me for a Broadway play, “Rent.” Carey, Kaye and I also saw an opera at the Met. It was great, but had the longest death scene EVER! It was supposed to be tragic, but after awhile we could barely stifle our giggles. It was Katy’s first time in ”The Big Apple.” She shouted, “I heart New York, I heart New York!” several times a day.
Much of April and May I spent, with the help of some stalwart others, including Jim, setting up and incorporating the Girls Gotta Run Foundation (http://www.girlsgottarun.org/). I was inspired by an article in the December 2005 Washington Post by Emily Wax (on the website). We raise money, in part by selling shoe art, to buy athletic shoes for Ethiopian girls who are training to be professional runners in order to avoid early marriages and all the health and other problems that often result from that. (You can read more on the site.) I also painted two commissioned portraits: one of Kaye’s boys, Thomas and Taylor, and one of Ricky, son of a friend and former neighbor, as well as a watercolor collage for a breast cancer fundraiser which I was happy to hear raised $150.00 for the cause. I also completed and sent off to Northland College a painting of the Northland Bridge to be auctioned at the all class reunion in July.
Early June gave Jim his much anticipated and always greatly enjoyed two weeks at his family’s cabin in Upstate New York, where he got to spend time kayaking his favorite river, the Roe Jan and help his Dad do things to/on the cabin. I am still our Neighborhood Watch Block Co-Captain, so while he was away I visited all the neighbors to get signatures on our petition to close the street for our annual autumn block party.
Mid-June Carey and Sarah came to visit us for a couple of weeks, and we had “Camp Aunty” with her and our neighbor, Sarah’s little friend Charlotte. Carey and I took the girls to revisit Mount Vernon, Sarah’s perennial favorite, via the ferry from Old Town Alexandria and to see “Little Women” at the Kennedy Center, among things. But perhaps the most exciting moment was the day Carey and Sarah arrived on the train, very, very late, and we had to dash Sarah in a taxi over to the Warner Theater to a concert Charlotte’s mother had gotten tickets for them to see on the very evening of their arrival. It was quite the event (Ally and A.J. - whoever they are).
Carey, Sarah and I left D.C. together, by train, for Wisconsin at the end of June and we spent almost the whole next three weeks in Ashland. I stayed with Mom and my brother Tom, while Carey and Sarah bunked with Kaye and her family. Needless to say, Mom and I spent a lot of time at Kaye’s, visiting, while the kids played at Kaye’s House of Toys. We also got to spend some quality time with our brothers and with lots of aunts and uncles over the 4th of July holiday.
Carey and I attended several Northland College reunion events, at one of which they auctioned off the painting. The winner was a member of my very own class of ’71. My cousin Lorraine came down from Hinckley and spent a night with us; my best friend from high school, Goodie, came up for our 40th – egad- high school reunion and stayed with us a couple of nights. I also got to reconnect, however briefly, with several other old friends.
When I got back to D.C. in mid-July I had to focus almost exclusively for the next several weeks on the Inaugural Girls Gotta Run Shoe Art Exhibit and Reception at the Sewall-Belmont House, which was a lot of fun and very successful in launching the fundraising. But having postponed our annual late summer visit to the cabin until after the reception, Jim and I got up there in mid-September for a rainy but quiet and restful week. Our friends Stephanie and Chuck came over from Boston for a day and we finally got to meet Florin, the miracle baby who weighed 13 oz at birth in 2005 and is now almost 20 pounds and starting to walk. We also enjoyed time with Jim’s parents, who came up to visit for a day and with our friends Larry and Chris, who live up there. I came back to painting commissions, two murals and a portrait, and it was nice to do that after so many weeks of working solely on the GGRF exhibit. I also recently was excited to learn that my painting “Equity Rules: Be Fair, Be Fair, Be Fair” will be on the cover of the new “Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education” which will be published in Spring 2007!
December started out with a GGRF Holiday Shoe Art Exhibit and Sale at the Coffeehouse at our own nationally known local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose. We had a fabulous reception on the 4th, with Emily Wax, the Washington Post journalist who wrote the original article that inspired GGRF. We are going to run up to Connecticut this week end to visit Jim’s family, and Mom and Charles are coming to spend Christmas with us this year! I’m looking forward to taking Mom to see “Shear Madness” at the Kennedy Center and to the Christmas eve service at the National Cathedral as well as just hanging out with both of them and seeing Charley Lauren and Dylan, too.
Throughout the course of the year Jim and I attended several other concerts as well as spent many other lovely evenings, as well as some weekends here and there, with both old and new friends, including a friend of mine from high school teaching days who calls her home in Fairfax, Va., our “country home,” and our friends John and Brigitte and their son Miles with whom we spent a pleasant weekend at their Chincoteague home this fall. I’m glad we got to share time this year with so many of the wonderful people in our families, as well as friends we have collected over the years, but also a little sad that there are so many we rarely get to see, due to distance and/or circumstance, especially when life does seem to rush by so fast. But if we didn’t get to see you this past year, we will keep a good thought for 2007! The good thing is it seems that no matter how long it’s been or how many miles are between us, when we do get together the time magically disappears and it’s like we’ve never been apart. So, until we meet again in person, this letter brings you our wishes for all the best that life has to offer in 2007.
Peace and love,
P. & J.
