Dear Readers,
This is my fifth year of sharing my end-of-the-year review
process, and it has become quite popular. This was a big year for me as a writer - with my book coming out and all its subsequent adventures, and so I updated the workbook a bit to reflect my current way of looking at the writing world. It is an evolving thing, after all!
I hope you've been having a wonderful holiday season. For us, Chanukah came early this year and wrapped up before Christmas even came around.
I'm writing this last newsletter for the year in a major mode of sorting through, throwing out, and cleaning up as my husband and I just returned from a short visit to Munich, Germany, to sift through my late brother-in-law's apartment there. The banner picture shows the view over the city from our hotel room. Alas, only on the last day did the sun peek out like this! We spent a good deal of our time there looking through photos, deciding what to keep and what to discard, especially since we came across a lot of family pictures. One piece of advice: Label your photos! You might think you'll remember who's on them but as the years go by, you won't, and one or two or three generations down the line, nobody has any idea who those people are. We have so many top quality photos from the 1930s and '40s that have no descriptions on them. We brought a suitcase full of family photos back that we're now sorting through.
Many of them are unlabeled, and I'm hoping that another shoe box full of photos that I took the trouble to label with my mother-in-law on her last visit with us will provide some clues. Sorting through what's left of a life is always a sobering experience. It hurt to throw loads and loads of my mother-in-law's vacation snapshots in the trash
but I had to admit that those pictures meant something to her but that's where their meaning ended. Incidentally, just a few weeks before this topic became of concern to us again, I wrote an essay about Dead People's Stuff for Sasson Magazine, prompted by the editor's and my rather
differing views on whether or not to cherish what loved ones leave behind.
Writing that essay also led to a great conversation with my brother and sister about items we still have and use from our grandmother and father. We now plan to put
together an album of "family things," so that the stories of those items don't get lost. As with the photos, we now know that the above glass juicer, for example, used to belong to our grandmother but to anybody else, it's just a juicer.
Thankfully, with all the sorting through family stuff there also comes a renewed appreciation for the family we do have, and so it was a special treat that my brother and sister and their families came to Munich to
hang out with us for an afternoon. I even got to sip some Glühwein at a genuine neighborhood Christmas market, see the fun snapshot with my brother above.
I've got four months with plenty of book events ahead of me (if you're in Minneapolis, Michigan or Boston, it would be great to meet you in person!) but for now I'm enjoying some sorting-through downtime at home--I feel this time between the years is perfect for that. I wish you good tidings reviewing, sorting and celebrating, or whatever else you might be up
to.
With best wishes for a Happy and Healthy 2018,
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