resolutions

SUGGESTIONS for 2026

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

It’s New Years Day, the day we make promises to ourselves about how to have a good or better year. But I’m not making promises, only suggestions for myself. Here’s the short version:

  • dress crazier
  • watch what I eat
  • vacation even if it’s just for the day
  • walk long and run short distances, no hurry
  • write and create objects to please myself
  • try
This sunset was photographed by most everyone we know. It changed and got brighter, more magenta than orange.

In 2025: I went through dramatic changes with my novel, the most notable of which was sending back the advance, cutting it to 60k words, and recognizing that if it’s going to be published I will do that myself. We stopped drinking altogether in October as a result of observation of a friend’s disastrous decline. I injured my foot in May and recovered enough by November to run.

Gary and I quit drinking in October. He was having a beer or three each day, and I averaged a glass of wine. Then our tenant totaled his car and left his home in filth to go into assisted living—that was September and we’re still repairing the damage caused by incontinence, smoking and drinking, and neglect. We were surprised by how easy we found our choice to quit drinking, we don’t miss the alcohol or the hangovers, and we’ve noticed we’re saving more than a hundred dollars each month, which is particularly welcome.

The national news was mostly awful, but we are well.

One more personal suggestion for this coming year… I was once an eight-hours-sleep-a-night person. When I was still a child in the early 1960s, an article about sleep made me determined to get my eight hours of sleep each night, and I maintained that excellent habit all through college and parenting and teaching Art and English and writing. But in the 2000s, I found teaching while caring for my mother did not leave me much “free” time to write, so I deliberately cut an hour from my sleep schedule. Seven hours allowed me to write novels and complete an MFA, but I’m now down to an unhealthy six hours of sleep and I’m missing those other two hours.

I really want that sleep back, and I will be taking steps.

I’ll probably read at least 50 books in 2026 and worry too much. We’ll pick up litter on the beach, hopefully find someone to rent our rental, and visit family and friends. I’ll bake and cook and make stuff. Gary will do kindnesses, remember, listen to music, and garden. No promises, but we’ll try not to do anything stupid while staring into the face of fascism and maintaining some level of optimism because we are hopeful people.

May it be enough.

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BABKA & GOALS

/ janpriddyoregon / 12 Comments

I have made New Years Resolutions since I was young, really young. I weighed 114 in high school, but most every year my goal was to maintain that weight, or often to lose weight. And I did it after my first child but not the second and not ever again. Soon I had more important goals, more pressing concerns, and more significant ideals than my weight.

I baked my very first chocolate babka today, January 1st. Without a recipe! Half the twisted loaf was gone inside five minutes and there were only the two of us! This is not on my list of goals for 2024.

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PLANNING ATTENTION

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

—Mary Oliver
Our son Alan and his daughter E.V. wearing the sweater I knit her for Christmas.

I had to think hard about what happened in 2021. It was not a terrible year, not even a bad one. “Inconvenient”, as a friend suggested in 2020, a year that felt much worse. So goodbye to two years of pandemic and hello to a third. I have plans.

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STILL, SHE CLIMBED

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

I have a photographic negative showing my grandmother, Fay Fletcher Jackson (before she married Gordon Keays Smith), standing on a Mount Hood glacier that mostly isn’t there anymore. This would be in the early years of the 20th century. She carries a small backpack because she is a very small person and wears heavy boots, thick leggings (no skirt), and a broad grin. She set no records, made no history, but she climbed.

That thing we do… remembering

The crow that hung out with gulls all summer.
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“Greta Who?”

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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The year is ending and to most people’s manner of thinking, so is the decade. (Yes, I know that the third decade of this century begins in 2021, but all logic aside, that is not how most human beings view the calendar, and the calendar is a human construct after all, so there we are.)

We walked for nearly three hours the other day, gathering a great many tiny pieces of plastic, mostly foam this week. It takes a lot of crushed bits of plastic the size of my thumbnail to add up to twenty pounds in a month. Collecting trash is an ongoing goal. More happened and will happen in the coming year.  Continue reading →

CLOTHES HORSE

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

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The “Flamingo” quilt before being cropped and the edges bound. The white showing around the edges is cotton batting; the red showing on the very outside beyond the batting is the backing.) My quilts generally begin with a signature fabric that drives the design. In this case, I was captivated by an Indonesian batik in a Japanese plum-blossom pattern, imported and sewn in the United States. This is one of the pieces that will go into a local show in December 2020. (Assuming they allow me to bring such large works.)

Gary sewed a button on the other day. A few months ago I made repairs to quilts I’d sewn for our older son—quilts that are decades old and have been through the wash too many times. I recall my dad talking about learning to darn socks in the Army. I know, in theory, how to darn socks and I even have a favorite pair of wool socks that need darning. I also have a tweedy charcoal/brown silk noil sweater that I bought at Banana Republic that needs some attention under the right arm where the stitching has come undone. It was originally intended for one of the boys—it’s a man’s sweater—but none of them wanted it. I took it for myself and despite the label that says “dry clean only” have been machine washing it in cold water and hanging to dry for over twenty years. It will take me a few minutes to repair.

Repairs have become rare. Continue reading →