The stockings were hung. The cookies and milk were laid out with a note of thanks. The reindeer food was spread across the lawn. Emma and her family were going back to Gramma's house after spending Christmas Eve with Aunt Jo, Uncle Jamie and Emma's two cousins, Conway and Grace. Santa wasn't coming to Gramma's this year. Emma had written him to say that everybody was going to congregate at Aunt Jo's on Christmas morning. As they were climbing into the car for the short drive back to Gramma's, Emma and her mom looked up at the sky to see the stars shining bright.

"Look!" said Emma. A red light was blinking overhead. "It's Rudolph!"

"Hurry, Mom!" she said. "We have to hurry back to Gramma's and call Aunt Jo!"

"You have to go to bed right away!" she told Aunt Jo. "I saw Rudolph! Almost at your house! Santa's coming! He's almost there!"

"Everybody go to sleep right away!" she commanded. "Or Santa might miss us!"

But Emma herself was too excited to sleep. She crept to her window to see what she could see. Only the white stars winked on and off in the night sky.

Next morning her mom found her wrapped in a blanket asleep by the window. "Good morning," she whispered. "Merry Christmas!"

"Did Santa come?" asked Emma.

"Let's go see," said her mom, so they gathered up Dudley and Emma's dad and Gramma and Grampa and they drove over to Aunt Jo's. And, guess what?

"Oh, Mom!" said Emma. "Santa did come!"

"Thanks to you," said her mom. "Isn't it lucky you saw Rudolph?"

"Just in time!" said Emma with a happy smile.

P.S. Sinatra would have been 94 today. XM/Sirius radio is playing his music all day long. The Voice.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!

I spent a wonderful week in Oregon in October. After several days of hiding (I called it Mt. Hoodie), Mt. Hood came out of the clouds. We ate good food, enjoyed poetry together, saw lavender fields forever. By "we" I mean, variously: a first cousin and his wife, neither of whom I had never met; my high school classmate Francie; and my new friend Adrianne, who is the daughter of my mother's best friend from the time she was about nine through young matronhood. Adrianne found me through my website several years ago, after her mother had seen an article about me in our (mutual) high school newsletter. I knew nothing about her. There's a photo of her and Adrianne and my mother and my older brother when the babies were maybe 9 months old. I didn't know who the other woman was until Adrianne showed me a picture of her mother, whom I then recognized immediately.

When Adrianne and I got together after several years of correspondence, it was like bringing our mothers together again.

Then last night I had a dream about Mt. Hood. I dreamed I had climbed the mountain with a guided group of people. Next day we were offered another, overnight climb, but without a guide. I wanted to spend the night on the mountain, even if it was dangerous. I wanted to lead the group. So did others. It was never clear to me who was chosen. It was raining and cold. I wondered if I should wear my rubbers over my stockings and flats. The rubbers were packed in my suitcase, which was being carted to the van that was going with us. I had to jump out a low window (like Laura Riding) to retrieve the suitcase. When I did, I landed in a large puddle that turned out to be not just a puddle, but a mud hole, very deep and very muddy. Over my head. I got stuck in the mud. Nobody knew where I was. Nobody could see me deep inside the mud puddle, over my head. I tried to cry out. In my dream Louis woke me up and saved me. In fact, Louis heard me cry out in my sleep and woke me up and saved me.

The future is not clear. I'm trying to be patient until the mountain reveals itself again. I'm grateful for Louis every day. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

Anne Cammon Fiero is the wonderful host of WKCR's "Arts and Answers" - 9:30PM, Tuesday and Thursday at 89.9FM in New York. We did an interview about Degrees of Latitude that was broadcast last Tuesday evening, August 18, 2009. She was great - very smart, sensitive, and informed. It was a great interview and I invite you to listen to it in her archives at:

http://www.annecammon.com/audio/Laurel_Blossom.mp3

I'm very proud of this interview. Give a listen, if you have a chance.

I'm a new fan of WKCR. If you're in the New York area, you can tune in on your radio. If not, you can stream their programs live at www.wkcr.org

I inherited a pretty gold bracelet watch from my grandmother. When I see it on my wrist, I remember how it looked on her wrist, how the flesh on her lower arm was loosening from the bone, and her sturdy hands were wrinkled and spotted, with broad, well-tended nails that had never known dish water or dirt.

Last year, after many years, it stopped. It would not wind. I took it to the jeweler, who could not get the needed part, and replaced the works with a battery-operated mechanism. He gave me the old parts in a little plastic bag, which I keep with the watch in a jewelry bag in my jewelry drawer. The watch is in there, ticking away, whether I wear it or not. It no longer needs winding. I miss that.

I like opening and closing the curtains every morning and evening, too, for instance.

Yesterday afternoon I took a nap. I hadn't slept well the night before. I'm not sleeping well these days at all. I dreamt about my grandmother's watch. I was putting it on when, without any warning, the back came off and all the workings, gears and filigree plates and springs, came tumbling out. I tried to gather them up in the right order, in the hope of putting them back, but they scattered across the floor, to my despair. One by one I carefully picked them up. They were beautiful, delicate, gold, some embossed with four-petaled flowers, some engraved with intricate designs. Art. I wondered at them. Then I woke up.

Did I think I was wasting time, napping? Does time spill out if you don't use it? Is every minute a work of art, inside where you don't even see it? Shall I take my grandmother's watch to another jeweler, to see if the old needed part can be found? Can't I rewind and rewind?

You know what I miss? I miss glamour. Which includes, but is not limited to, the sense of being at the center of things.

When I was growing up in Cleveland, the least glamourous of cities, even in the 1950s when it was prosperous, even with its great cultural institutions, including the Art Museum and the Orchestra - when I was growing up there, I knew I would eventually want to get out. It was stodgy.

On my (first) honeymoon, at Caneel Bay, I was enthralled by the Rockefeller resort. This is the same Rockefeller family whose patriarch Cleveland turned down when he wanted to build Rockefeller Center on Lake Erie! There was a couple there, at Caneel Bay, also on their honeymoon, from Connecticut. She looked in my memory like Carolyn Bissett (probably misspelled) and I longed to be like her. I longed for the life I imagined she led. Next to her and her husband, I and mine looked frumpy and midwestern, dun and dull.

I got myself to New York by hook or by crook. It took me years to adjust, to feel that I belonged, but by the time I left five years ago, I had found my way, myself, and my work, and I had found the glamour I was looking for. Of course, New York is one of the most glamourous places on earth. It is the center of everything: Fashion, culture, even grit. I lived through the 1990s there, when New York was on top of the world. It was glorious.

Even September 11th added to New York's glory. Only the greatest city in the United States would invite such a spectacular attack. Only New Yorkers could take it. We were all proud of our city and ourselves. It brought us to our knees but it didn't stop us.

Rural South Carolina, where I live now, has many virtues and pleasures and advantages. Space. Pace. Grace. But it hasn't got glamour. Recently I read that rural people are the ones most satisfied with the places they live. Urban people want to be someplace else, either some other city that looks greener across the highway, or some rural place like this. We're restless, we urbanites. Maybe that's what's wrong. I'm never satisfied. That's the thing about glamour, it keeps changing. I miss it.

It's over now, but in the spring the pine trees give off a pollen that covers everything in layers of yellow haze. Recently I came across these passages (in the New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008) from Edmund Wilson's journals of 1942, at Gull Pond on Cape Cod, describing the same phenomenon:

"As one walked in the water one encountered pines putting out their soft straw-colored (?) bunches of cones and smelling with a special almost sweet-fern fragrance. The baby cones seemed almost embarrassingly soft, almost like a woman's nipples."

"The little yellow buds of the pines are not the cones, neither these nor 'the candles', with bristly conelike scales, that rise from the middle of the cluster. The cones are little round green cones that grown underneath the branch. When you shake the soft things, they give out a lemon-yellow dust that looks like (lemon-colored) smoke."

Emma's dad put up a tent in the brick courtyard of their house on Saturday and the two of them spent the night camping out, complete with hot dogs and s'mores. Mom and little Dudley were not invited.

They actually stayed out all night. Isn't that adorable?

Emma takes gymnastics on Saturday afternoons. When her mom asked her who she wanted to have take her to gymnastics this Saturday, she said her dad should take her because she was going to hang out with him all day.

He was the star of Saturday.

This is a great thing because Emma doesn't like boys! She has shied away from her dad in the past, so we're all very happy that he has succeeded in getting her attention.

Once, when she was watching her dad change Dudley's diaper, she said, Dudley's penis is little. Then she said, Daddy's penis is gigantic!

She was the star of that day!

Our driveway looks like the economy! it's a mess. Replacing it at this time may not be the smartest thing we ever did from a financial point of view, but we had several natural speed bumps along the way (unlike the previous economy!) and had no choice really but to remove the roots (hmmm) of the problem and start over. Let's hope the White House is able to do the same.

The cat, who used to be white, is now peach-colored from the red clay dirt and dust. Meantime, it's peach festival time in our corner of the orchard. Peaches are one of the great joys of being here. Those and Vidalia onions, I'd never heard of before coming south.

Meantime, I'm just back (again) from New York, where I passed the first anniversary of Jason's death with an ache in my heart - and from Dartmouth where i did a reading with a young poet named Suzanne Frischkorn. Believe me, anyone who can write a line like "I am almost invisible with longing" has a bright future.

To all and everyone, a mild and smiling springtime. It's already summer here! Once we get the driveway done, the outdoor furniture painted and the plants arranged outside, we're going to start having parties. I missed last summer because of my hip replacement, so I'm going to doubly enjoy this one.

Who knows what the future holds?

Merry Christmas to all and to all a Happy Inauguration!

I will be flying back to South Carolina from New York City as President Obama is being sworn in. I'll be sorry to miss the moment in real time, but in a way, it's appropriate for me to be in the air, going from my beloved city home to my "lovely village of the hills", to quote from Edgefield poet, Sarah Rainsford Collett. It seems I will always live my life between two poles. I'm a Gemini, after all. Does that explain it?

I'm thinking on this Christmas Eve of all my distant and absent friends and family. I miss you all and embrace you all and send you all the glad tidings of the season, meaning joy and peace and muddling through together, no matter how far flung.

Sentimental blessings on your heads and hearts.

I so did not want to turn 65 that I accidentally left my cell phone in my clothes closet and shut the door on it. All day. I missed all my birthday calls.

It's over now, I've talked to everyone, and thanks for another day alive, on earth. I miss Jason.

Then one day, as I was driving, a squirrel got caught in the middle of the road in front of me, not knowing whether to stay put or run. I swerved to miss it, but instead I hit and killed it. I felt awful. I don't think I'd ever killed anything larger than an insect before. Except a snake.

I kept thinking afterwards that if I'd just kept going straight, the squirrel would have figured it out, what to do. By changing course, I had run into his plan for escape.

Don't swerve is my new motto.

I was out by the pool when I saw her first, a deer running along the crest of the hill on the other side of the stream. She was followed by a smaller figure I took to be a fawn. But, very shortly, the doe came crashing down to the stream and crossed to my side of the water. She was impaired in some fashion, she couldn't stand straight, she seemed weak and wobbly on her legs. She was just below me, where I stood on the pool deck, separated from her by a six-foot high stone wall. She was not twenty feet away, and on the other bank, watching her and dodging back and forth, was a real live scruffy-looking long-legged grey coyote. It was like watching TV. I was in civilization up on my safe pool deck, they were in another, dangerous, realm. Except it was real, it was right there. The deer ducked and parried for a moment or two, then broke upstream with the coyote in hot pursuit. I followed them along the bank until they were out of sight.

Later, when I went out to throw away the trash, a flock of buzzards lifted off from the trees and from the rocks along the curve in the stream bed, where I discovered the body of the deer lying, ribcage exposed, along the bank. Our friend who came to haul her away said that coyotes are all over the Eastern US now, even in the cities. Chicago, he said, has a big problem. Fortunately, around here, he added, people still shoot them, so they're wary of humans. But they will eat small animals -- so we worry about Phoebe, who was hiding, and Amos, who was curious about the smells, but leary. He did not bark.

Then, this evening, a buzzard was sitting, black and big, big as life (big as death), on the stone wall that supposedly marks the boundary between them and us. A challenge, a reminder, a warning, a hint.

Plus, for two nights running, the deck chair has been moved. Who has been sitting there? What's the idea?

It's been a long time without much to report from life in the South. Emma is taking ballet and tap, both of which she loves. Our new little guy is almost five months old.

But the big news is that Louis and I were invited to a house party that included, on Friday night, a black tie dinner and, on Saturday night, a coon hunt! That's how we do things down here in the Southland! I threatened to wear my evening gown on the hunt, but I didn't. I would have been sorry. The twenty or so of us, host and guests, were transported to the starting point, an oilcan fire next to the mud, in a hay wagon drawn by a tractor. We waited there, half an hour or so, until dark. Then the hounds were let loose to find a raccoon. Soon we heard them baying. We walked to a spot beside the "road" no different from any other spot, where our leader, wearing a mining cap to light the way, suddenly plunged into the underbrush. After we had traipsed through the woods for ten or fifteen minutes, shining our flashlights before us, frequently stopping to let those who were slower catch up to the rest of us so no one would get lost in the dark, over and under branches and hillocks and tree stumps and tree stump sink holes, we seemed, I swear, farther away from the hounds than when we started out. After more traipsing and stopping, and another ten or fifteen minutes, we finally arrived at the aforementioned tree, the hounds were leaping and yowling, we trained our many flashlights up, way up, into the bare branches, and eventually were able to make out, very uncertainly, two very small yellow eyes looking down upon us. And that was it. Except of course, for the traipsing back and the hay ride home. The actual payoff was not the shooting of the coon (which shooting we did not do),let alone the eating thereof (for this was a "green" hunt), but the country BBQ dinner, for which we were all as hungry as hogs. Pulled pork, beans, rice, cole slaw, rolls, smoked salmon, and pecan pie! But naming does not do justice to the cooking, everything was slightly sweet, like well-made Southern tea, we all had second helpings, and slept in Sunday!

Dudley has arrived! 8 lbs. 7 oz., 20 1/2 inches long. His name has been changed to protect the innocent -- and to honor the uncle he didn't get named for!

Comparing pictures to his sister when she was born, we find the following: Emma was VERBAL from the start! Dudley is quiet, content, serene. He only cries for a reason. Mostly he sleeps, of course. His horoscope said he would be easy. (Hers didn't!) We expect lovely, gentle, amiable things from him in future. He will be a late bloomer.

Comparing parents, those of Emma were skittish, nervous, and protective. The parents of Dudley took him to the pool at the grandparents' hotel when he was four days old, and to the art museum the day after.

Everyone is happy. Except Emma, sometimes. The first time she needed something when her mom was busy feeding her brother and couldn't help, she said, No Want Dudley!

This sentiment continues, off and on. But we have a picture of her stroking his face. That too.

Emma is looking forward to the arrival of her baby brother. Sort of. When her crib was moved into his room and replaced by the bunk bed, she was excited. But later she told her mother she wanted grampa to come back with the big boxes the bunk bed had come in and take it away.

She often plays with a little boy in the neighborhood who has a baby brother, eighteen months old. Emma loves that little brother. She hugs him and kisses him, she likes to take care of him and protect him. Three weeks ago she started squeezing his head!

So Emma has mixed feelings about a baby brother, though, as her mom says, she likes the "concept."

We'll see. We'll know shortly!

More news from the country! It's been a rough couple of weeks. A much loved local teacher -- which does not begin to describe who she was or how much everybody loved her -- and expert rider died near her home after a fall from her horse. In addition to feeling the community's grief for her and her husband and son, I also felt an unexpected survivor guilt and need to control everything else i thought I could control, including how my daughter and grand daughter live their lives down to the smallest detail of talking on cell phones and crossing streets. Anything and everything can change so stunningly, in an instant and without warning. I want that to stop!

I thought I was over J's death when Louis and I went out of town for the afternoon and evening Saturday, leaving Amos and Phoebe here on their own. Driving back, we noticed some evidence of a rainstorm -- wet streets, minor debris -- but when we turned into our driveway, we were blocked from progressing by three or four large tree limbs, one of which turned out to be a whole dogwood tree, across the drive. The storm seemed to have passed right through our property, leaving land on either side of us unscathed.

There's a message in there somewhere. Not that somebody has it in for me, not that one. The message is about control, how I haven't got it.

We were lucky. While there were several trees whose tops had been lopped off by the storm, including one in the woods whose trunk was too big for me to get my arms around and which had been split only a couple of feet above Louis's head -- nothing had hit the (1) pets, (2) house, or (3) truck.

We heard of one family who left to go grocery shopping while their house was without electricity and came back to find that their house had burned to the ground from an electrical surge once the storm had passed.

Everything can change in an instant and without warning. Our broken trees stand as a sign. When the paper shredder jammed yesterday, I spent an hour digging out little pieces of shredded paper like a madwoman. Not LIKE a madwoman. I'm a little nuts with anxiety and rage. I think I fed it too much paper. I remember wondering how much it could take.

I couldn't fix it. I think I'll have to get a new one, which makes me blush with shame. Which makes me want to cry.

I'm writing you in an effort to let go. I'm writing you to warn you of what you already know: things can change in an instant and you have no control. I'm writing to tell you that I love you.

Hey you up North. Spring is on the way. The geese were honking and flying overhead this morning, on their way to you.

We have daffodils. Part of the cardinals song sounds like "pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty".

Writers, take heart! When I turn in my manuscript for Degrees of Latitude this month to Four Way Books, it will have been 18 years to the day since I began this project! Can you believe it? It better be good!

We had a spectacular Christmas with a week-long visit from Emma and her mom. Emma, now 18 months old, is no longer a baby, but a real little girl. I hadn't seen her for four months, so I could hardly believe how grown up she was. I'm never letting that much time go by again! When she's thirty-five, if I'm still on this earth, and especially if I'm not, she's gong to see her G not less than every two months!

May 2007 bring us all health, happiness, peace and productivity!