A New Year, New [and Old] Goals

one of our cats in the middle of Christmas packaging

Two months have passed since I last wrote a post. My absence is partly due to the business of the holidays, partly due to my usual turning inward during the cold winter months--even here in not-so-cold southeast Louisiana--and partly due to my resolve not to be drawn into the poisonous rhetoric of today's politics. I'm just tired of the hatred directed toward and the conspiracy theories projected onto our first African-American president. Facts do not seem to matter to a great number of people. Other bloggers are writing more consistently and engagingly about politics than I am, so I've decided occasionally to link to a post I find interesting and to focus my writing on my own projects--or on more positive events in the world than the latest right-wing, fear-mongering topic, though I won't rule out the occasional post on politics. 

Most of my goals for the new year are the same as the past year: I will spend a great deal of time gardening, and maybe this year I will begin clearing out the brush that has grown along the fence line of this acre of land on which our hundred-year-old cottage is located. Last year my husband and I put in 8X8-foot raised garden areas for herbs and flowers behind our house, and my husband finished tilling and adding compost to a large row garden on the north side of our property for vegetables.  We began building a shed for my garden tools; the shed is almost complete, and now I have to paint it. My goal is to have the shed ready for use before spring planting.

One of my new goals for this year is to become more engaged in my community. My move here was a difficult one for many reasons--the older I get, the more stressful moving seems to be. I grew up in a community of relatives, where five or six generations of families had developed relationships, many of the ancestors of my contemporaries having migrated to that area of Texas together. My adult life, however, has been a very mobile one. When I was younger, the moves seemed much easier, the friendships more quickly established. I easily found employment teaching at local universities and colleges, joined local churches, immersed myself in work, family, community. Now I no longer attend church--and in the South, church attendance is the quickest way to establish one's self in a community. The children, also, are grown, away at universities in other states, so their activities no longer pull me out into the community. And since I decided, after over twenty-five years of college-related work, not to continue teaching, I find myself unemployed at the age of fifty-five. I have a natural tendency towards introspection and am not averse to spending a great deal of time alone, and now none of these external demands--children, church, career--temper those tendencies. I have to work against them myself.

I have already begun work on one of my goals for this year: to scan and transcribe many of the hundreds of family letters my husband and his sister inherited. The bulk of these letters were written from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s, and they follow the movements of an educated and genteel class of Southern families after the Civil War. I began this work a few years ago on my Left for Texas blog, and am continuing that work, though with a great deal more concentration and commitment.

The work is tedious, as I am creating digital files linking documents of the transcribed letters to images of those letters. But some of the letters are fascinating, full of chatty news about the family's activities as well as historical events, and in the research that I'm doing concurrent with reading and transcribing the letters, I am learning a lot more about history, especially history of the South after the Civil War--and the attitudes of those who fought for the Confederacy. In another post, I'll write about what I perceive to be the burdens of this work--and those burdens are not restricted to the tedious work of the amanuensis.

Last year--and the year previous--I spent a lot of time making things out of recycled materials and yarn: folk art felted wool quilts and throws, necklaces and scarves of my own design, felted wool pouches, felted wool pins, etc. I sold some of these items at a couple of festivals, but at the end of the year, I gave away as presents some of my best pieces and decided that this year I would concentrate on making quilts of my own design. So when I'm not immersed in family history or gardening, I'll be stitching on quilts, some made conventionally on a quilt frame and others made out of felted wool from recycled sweaters. In late spring of last year, I finished a felted wool folk art quilt, and last summer, I finished a quilt top inspired by a friend's photograph; this year I plan to finish quilting it. 

quilt top inspired by a friend's photo--cotton and felt

 These are my goals: seeking more community involvement; digitally recording old photographs and letters with the intent of editing those letters eventually; gardening and beautifying the grounds of our "cottage"; quilting. Any personal growth will have to arise out of those activity-oriented goals. I gave up on aspiring to become a better person beyond what might be a natural outgrowth of what I do.