It's mid-December, 2009. No snow in this part of California, but plenty of cold weather. Christmas is 10 days away. We'll be going over to our son's in nearby Redwood City for Christmas Day. His wife and sister-in-law will be there and of course his two sons, now 16 and 12. Yesterday we got the last of our Christmas letters in the mail, and we're enjoying the constant stream of letters and cards coming to us here at Pilgrim Haven, the retirement community we've lived in since we moved here in April of 06, after 34 years in Nashville TN. A new novel, my second, came out in September and joins the roster of 28 books of fiction and non-fiction for adults and young children I've published over the years.
Jericho Rhodes, twenty-seven and just out of Union Seminary in New York City, leaves the man she is in love with and plans to marry and comes to the small town of Licking Creek, Pennsylvania, to try out, on her own, her vocation as a parish minister. There she confronts the issues of the larger world--a factory making missile detectors, few employment opportunities for young people, drug abuse,neglect of the poor and outcast, violence, sexism in many forms, and fears for the future. It is also in Licking Creek that she meets two more men--one not at all intimidated by ministers, and another who alternately attracts and infuriates her. The greatest need of the town is for a place where the community's youth can gather. Jericho, with the help of the church's young people, enthusiastically undertakes a fund-raising event to set up such a center. But along with work on the Youth Center project and other personal, church, and town concerns, the minister as innovator, as catalyst, has set in motion forces which will ravage the community, and before Talent Night is over a marriage will be in serious jeopardy, a father-daughter relationship will have escalated into violence, a young man she has urged the community to trust will bring about the death of two people Jericho Rhodes has come to love.
Our two oldest grandchildren are having good years at college: a granddaughter in her junior year at M.I.T., planning to major in Mechanical Engineering; a granddaughter in her sophomore year at Carleton, major as yet undecided. Each has a younger sister at home, happily busy with high school, thinking about colleges. Two grandsons, brothers--one in high school,very interested in robotics, plays the oboe; one in sixth grade plays the clarinet, and likes Mango comics. Another granddaughter is a member of her school fencing team, and plays in a local orchestra. Another likes to cook. Sometimes her whole family cooks together.
A couple of highlights from the past summer: a week-long family reunion in Gloucester, MA, attended during the course of the week by more than thirty immediate or extended family members from near and far; then on to our beloved Chautauqua in New York State for up to two more weeks of being together for those who could make it, including for a time Hoyt's brother from New Jersey and members of his family.
And now the year is almost half over. What will this new year bring to us all? Blessings on all our houses? May it be so.