Another Atypical Christmas
Last month, I wrote about how Christmas 2021 was setting up to be an improvement over last year. That in fact proved true for the most part, as we managed some friend and family visits and other activities in the days leading up to the big day.
However, as those of you living in the New England know, Mother Nature had other plans for Christmas Day. An icy, white-knuckled trip to church services on Christmas morning and a look at the forecast for all of the region convinced us to cancel our planned trip to my sister-in-law's home in Massachusetts.
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Christmas Day at home with our new presents: me and my jigsaw puzzle; Zoey with her ducky |
So, for the second year in a row, Christmas was spent quietly at home. Vowing not to do anything "constructive" all day, we spent the day reading and working on a jigsaw puzzle against the TV backdrop of one Christmas special after another. Dinner was by candlelight in the dining room - an American Flatbread pizza (15 minutes from freezer to table!), served with a suitable bottle of Malbec. A perfect peaceful day! (and in fact fortuitous, as we found out afterwards that my sister-in-law's husband was diagnosed with the virus just two days later).
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At least it was a White Christmas! |
An Atypical - But Perfect - New Year's
For most of the last thirty-plus years since we've owned this house, we've hosted the same basic group of friends for a New Year's Eve weekend of celebration and skiing. Last year's festivities were limited to a toast via Zoom, but thanks to the rapid home tests, we were able to open our home to our visitors from the south again.
Unfortunately, the warm and rainy weather in the days after Christmas thwarted any plans for skiing, but it didn't thwart the merriment of sharing laughter (and lots of food and wine) with old friends!
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| Happy New Year: Jerry, John, Brian, Chris, Laura, Diane |
Good-Bye to a Faithful Furry Companion
Happy though the holidays were for us, they had started out on a sad note: we had to say good-bye to our Chocolate Lab Abby on December 1. She lived an incredibly long life for her breed - 14 years and 8 months (100+ in dog years).
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| Abby in 2007... ...and in 2021 |
To paraphrase part of a story that I wrote about her here a few years ago:
"Abby has a sweet nature and, like just about all Labs, does not have a single mean bone in her body. Still, there is something a little "different" about her. She has never figured out quite what to do with dog toys, and has never managed to get one to squeak. She loves to greet visitors, but can hardly be touched without melting into the ground in a jumble of wiggles (indeed "Wiggles" has become her nick name). On walks, she never follows a straight line, but takes a serpentine path from one side of the road to the other for samplings of roadside weeds and blades of grass. No clump of mown sod, random twig or stray animal dropping is left uninspected as she drags us behind on a zig-zagged route.
Abby is also the only Lab we've ever heard of who is afraid of water. John maintains that she’s got a hidden zipper somewhere in her chocolate Lab suit and that someday we'll find she's really just an oversized cat in costume."
"Different" or not, Abby found her niche in her later years. She followed her big sister Gracie (our Black Lab, who we lost at age 13 1/2 in 2018) into a career as a Therapy Dog of Vermont. Abby had failed the qualification test the first time she took it because she was too timid; but she studied hard and earned her TDV credentials a few years later at the advanced age of 11. For the next couple of years, she brought smiles to the residents of the local nursing home as well as the senior day care center. Her career was cut short when the pandemic forced the facilities to shut down to non-essential visitors, but her retirement was spent contentedly at home, with her little sister Zoey at her side.
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| Gracie and Abby, in much younger years |
