Season of Lights, Year in Review and What’s Ahead in 2024

Season of Lights

This week I’ve recovered from my multi-week illness enough to start enjoying going out a bit to enjoy the holiday lights. Chateau Ste Michelle has a new “Wine and Joy” sign in lights, and as I write this I’m still warming up from going out into the Seattle cold to enjoy some holiday lights with my little brother and sister-in-law.

The Bellevue Botanical Gardens Garden d’Lights are one of my favorite holiday lights show, because their lights are so creative—flowers, dragons, birds—and they have a place for you to get a hot coffee and their gift shop is full of ornaments like mushrooms and owls. It’s important, I think, as part of my traditions/rituals this time of year, to celebrate the light.

At Molbaks, with poinsettia tree

Looking Back on the Year

This year has been a big one—I had a new book, Flare, Corona come out with BOA Editions. I turned 50. I had a full dance card at AWP where I got to talk about writing with and about disability and PR, among other things, I had poems in great journals, including JAMA. For the new book, I did readings, podcasts and interviews. I had big family visits from loved ones I hadn’t seen in too long.

I spent a lot of time at farms, getting to know more about pumpkin, lavender, and Christmas tree farms, and it helped my MS to work on stability and muscle development walking around all those farms, and it helped my feeling of community getting to know the farms and farm workers around Woodinville. It also, I realized, made me happy. I’m happy around plants and people who plant things. There was a reason I spent so much time in botany classes for my first degree! I also took a lot of pictures of these farms, which I also really enjoyed.

I noticed I spent less time on social media or watching the news this year. I spent less time tracking the pandemic. I lost some doctors (I mean, they quit being doctors, not that they passed away) to what I guess was “pandemic stress” and several years of tracking death tolls and hospital rates was wearing on me, too. So I tried hard to focus on what I could control: spending time with loved ones, writing and reading, and now we’re embarking on a remodel to make our main bathroom more handicapped-accessible. When you’ve got MS, yes, you can do physical therapy and exercises etc, but you also have to make modifications to your life (and sometimes your house) to accommodate your disability.

And What’s Coming in 2024

How is it already almost 2024? I hope better things are ahead? It’s very hard to say. I will be working on my next book of poems, and perhaps more prose as well. I hope to spend more time with friends and family. I hope to spend more time outdoors when possible. I hope (health permitting) to be going to a residency in Palm Desert, which will be my first residency in a while. Going into the fourth (!) year of the pandemic, I hope to finally recover a little bit of normalcy, or at least try to integrate a few more normal activities back into my life, like going to museums and galleries and bookstores. Covid still seems to be hitting my community pretty hard, though—it would be nice if they made some breakthroughs in treatments (or at least a new monoclonal antibody treatment). I may be starting IVIG treatments for my immune system issues, which is scary and possibly dangerous but also could be super helpful? I hope to write more about environmental and disability issues, as well. There are a lot of “hope” statements here. I’ll be working on my vision board for the solstice (one of my solstice traditions) and will try to visualize all these hopes. I hope you all have a wonderful year ahead, too.

And here are a few more pictures of me and my family clowning around at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens. Merry holidays to you all!