Saturday will mark 20 years since I the chilly day I arrived at this peculiar little house on a peculiar little farm in the Appalachian foothills. When you meet people they always ask what brought you here, and in my case, there’s no particular answer. The currents of life, I suppose. It was a gamble, as life tends to be.
In the early part of this century there was an imaginative musical ensemble, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.
Was it fate or just the path of least resistance? It’s been 20 years and I still don’t know.
In the autumn of 2004 circumstances too long and boring to explain gave me the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere I wanted. There was no particular reason, no special interest, leading me to one place over another.
It startles me to realize that I’ve lived in this little house longer than I’ve lived anyplace else. I moved around quite a bit in New York and Connecticut, yet my few years’ tenancy in each of several places there is longer in my memory than my 20 years next spring spent here.
I look at it every year and every year it looks a little different from how it looked the year before.
Today’s rain would have altered plans, if today were thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, my family was sitting at a table on pea gravel under our deck eating a meal together, chalk on the concrete foundation proclaiming the venue “Augusta the Third’s” — a pop up eatery in today’s parlance — to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary. And they were ecstatic.
Do people still have warm, memorable Christmas traditions? I wonder. We used to. Here’s part of my family’s, when my family lived on our little farm in Missouri at a time that doesn’t seem as long ago as it was.
My maternal grandmother, were she still alive, would have turned 141 years old today.