Happy New Year!

The pork simmers in the slow cooker, and we have sauerkraut in the fridge— tonight we will feast. Pork and sauerkraut are traditional Pennsylvania German dishes for January 1.

On Saturday, I bought the pork loin, a great 9-lb slab, on sale at Oregon Dairy Supermarket. At the crowded meat counter, I saw another shopper’s cart loaded with pork, sauerkraut, and hot dogs.

Another folk tradition, one I learned about only recently, is burning bayberry candles on New Year’s Day for good luck in the New Year. I got some taper bayberry candles at half off just before Christmas and added to them to Mom’s Christmas gift. They smell almost as lovely as the pork.

This past week has been a pleasant pause between our big family get-together on Christmas Eve day and the January craziness of my job. I worked Tuesday thru Friday, but spent evenings reading and writing. Last night, I saw the New Year in with some old and new friends at small party in Adams County.

My writing projects for PCBE were wrapped up several weeks before the holidays, but with the turn of the year, I’m now working on a couple of new leads. Freelance writing has been taking a lot of time, but to me, it’s time well spent. In October, I actually flew to Wisconsin to do an interview, but that’s not the norm. If you’re local and know a small business that would like free publicity, let me know!

Anne Lamott says “One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.”

Another gift is meeting new people. In June, I attended a writers’ seminar and met a woman who matches writers with each other in writers’ groups. I’m now with a group of five women from four different states. We email each other a piece of writing every month and critique each other’s work.

Recently, a part-timer at work, a quiet girl I don’t know well, asked me if I liked to write. She had seen one of my articles in PCBE. When I answered yes, she answered, “That makes two of us!” She enjoys writing historical fiction for Pathway, an Amish magazine.

Are we writing for a small subset of the Anabaptist community, which is “one branch on the great Christian tree”? (The quote came from a Mennonite writer whose name I can’t remember.) Or for only a minuscule percentage of North Americans? Yes to both. But our gardens and holiday feasts also only reach a handful of souls, and we don’t stop planting flowers or baking bread because we can’t bless a million people.

Since my freelance work includes taking photographs, I’m also enjoying an excuse to take pictures. The photos in this blogpost are extras that didn’t make it into the magazine.

My New Year’s goals are boring— lose ten pounds, stop ranting so much, get on an earlier schedule. Last evening a friend told me her New Year’s resolution is to “rest better” and I tried not to laugh at the ubiquitous millennial idea. Then she clarified, “When I have a day off, I end up scrolling on my phone and not getting anything else done. I want to be more intentional, and plan good things to do instead” and suddenly I was a big fan. Probably one of my goals should be to listen better.

I’m trying to increase my vocabulary. I’ve been writing new words in a notebook almost daily, either ones I don’t know a definition for, (bitumen, remaindered) or I can’t pronounce (patchouli, bruschetta, deus ex machina.) The last one is a Latin phrase only a writer would care about. I’m too embarrassed to list the all words. Somehow I never really learned the word “propagate” until last year. I use a dictionary app on my phone, and Google works fine too.

There’s a few more concrete goals too. Paint my upstairs sewing room, now that the leak has finally been fixed, or so we hope. Continue saving for my own house…yay for the high interest rates, “there’s no ill wind that’s doesn’t blow someone some good.”

In a few weeks, maybe I’ll start some plants from seed. I’ll just have to move the succulents I’ve been propagating on the windowsill first.

Wishing you God’s blessings in 2024!