Holiday Letter 2022 Field-Harris Family

Warmest greetings to our family and friends from Michael and Lenora,

We extend our most sincere holiday greetings knowing this will get to you very late in the holiday season (or early in the New Year. Honestly, we did think of you somewhere in there between the turkey leftovers and the ball dropping!) As we strive to extend the joy and blessings of the holidays throughout the year, hopefully the timing of this missive will not be an issue. Those who complain will be remembered in the airing of the grievances during Festivus 2023!

2022 was a _______ year! Fill in your own choice of adjective, invective, or expletive and it will probably apply to our year also as this was a roller coaster year, one with a lot of ups and some precipitous downs. Michael wrote a piece titled “The River Runs”* (more on that later) which starts off as a peaceful trip floating on an inner tube down a tranquil river. Soon the river hits rocks and the raft is buffeted by a stretch of rapids. Inner tube and rider emerge bruised, but not broken, with a profound insight into the meaning of life. It was not intended to, but, in hindsight, that metaphorical trip describes our 2022.

This letter will touch on some of the highs and lows of 2022 with no attempt made to be complete, congruent, chronological, or even logical, and certainly not concise. Many of the year’s events have made their way into Michael’s writings. Motivated readers can check out the asterisked essays and others at his blog, MichaelEField.blogspot.com.

Like most of the world, we started 2022 thinking this would be the year that COVID was behind us. Buoyed by that uplifting thought, we planned travel and the resumption of social activities. And, like the rest of the world, we bumped along, adjusting and coping, taking an acceptable risk here and eschewing a dicey opportunity there. All in all, 2022 was a fulfilling year, but one that leaves 2023 with lots of opportunity to be even better.

2022 has a lot of through lines with 2021 as we continued activities we enjoy. Singing is a good example. We each get great joy from singing and 2022 saw the resumption of live singing events. We both remained active in our fellowship’s SATB choir as 2022 marked the transition from virtual choir recordings to hybrid streamed performances to live, albeit masked, rehearsals and services. Lenora’s Concert Singers of Cary resumed live, masks optional, performances including an upbeat holiday presentation in December. Michael’s Barbershop Harmony group wrestled with the mask issue in a number of ways. Rehearsals went from vaccine required, masked to masks optional. Events transitioned from open air to inside venues, masks optional. Some events required proof of a negative COVID test that day to participate. Michael’s Barbershop Harmony year included being elected Treasurer of the chapter, becoming an official, vetted member of the show choir, going to International and regional conventions, and ended with a series of four live performances of their holiday concert at various venues.

An important component of our 2022 was travel bounded by acceptable risk. A visit to Charleston was the first 2020 trip to get cancelled. It eventually got rescheduled and cancelled twice more due to the waves of COVID variants. This year, we finally made it and had a wonderful time. We walked everywhere taking both self-guided and guided walking tours. We rode the ferry out to Fort Sumpter and learned some insights into the leadup to the Civil War which are left out of Northern history books. Visits to an in-town mansion and a rural plantation, each with partially restored slave quarters, gave new perspectives on the roots of the social divisions facing us now.

Lenora’s Mother’s Day present was a trip to NYC to visit Evan and Taylor which gave her both quality family time and fun solo explorations of the infinite variety of experiences New York City has to offer. In November, we returned to NYC for Thanksgiving as it was just the two us this year. We like to focus on acquiring experiences, not things, and this trip gave us a lot. We went to see the balloons being inflated for the next day’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It was a first-time experience which yielded an up-close look at the balloons and the fascinating process of how they go from unrolled and flattened bundles of colored fabric to the larger than life 3-D characters you know and love. The next day brought a relatively warm (low 40’s) day so we walked to the 6^th Avenue parade route and joined a massive throng of people to watch, live for the first time, the Macys’ Parade. After waving to Santa, we retreated to Evan and Taylor’s apartment for a simple Thanksgiving dinner, just the two of us, with ham, sweet potatoes and apple pie. It was odd not to have the day dominated by stuffing, basting and carving a 20 lb. bird.

The highlight of the year was our trip to the Tetons and Yellowstone. As with 2021’s National Park trip, we drove for five days to get to the West, stopping to visit family on the way, We went first to Salt Lake City where we got to meet Elizabeth’s foster child, Ace (check out “Blue Father’s Day Reflection”* for more on that.) The four of us, plus the two dogs, went to Jackson Hole, the jumping off point for viewing the Tetons. Elizabeth, Ace, and the two dogs went back to SLC while Lenora and I went on to Yellowstone. We had a fantastic time exploring Yellowstone’s varied terrain and wildlife. Following the guidebook’s advice, we got up early one day and were rewarded with sightings of a black bear, gray wolves, a moose, elk, and tons of buffalo. Of course, it doesn’t take a lot of buffalo to constitute a ton of them but we saw scores including two close encounters. We returned by way of SLC to retrieve our dog, Bella, then headed back to NC again stopping to visit with friends.

Unfortunately, this trip coincided with the decline of our beloved Bella. Most people know the feeling; a day or two before the big trip something goes wrong and the plans are at risk of falling through. Bella exhibited severe GI problems two days before we were due to get on the road for Montana. An emergency vet visit resulted in a shot, a course of antibiotics, new food and a ‘no treat’ regimen for Bella and an OK to travel for us. Bella had a day when she suffered from heat exhaustion on the way but rallied when we got to SLC. In the Tetons, Bella even went hiking with her cousin, Piper, and Elizabeth. Bella went back with the crew to SLC (a good thing as Yellowstone is not dog friendly) and, by all reports, was fine there.

The details of the next few weeks are not the kind of upbeat holiday message that people look to holiday letters for. It was, by far, the low point of the roller coaster year, a gut-wrenching period. Bella’s rally was short lived and her declining health disrupted our trip to Charlotte. Michael went but had to return early when Bella crashed and, a few days later, needed to be put down. Three days after that, Michael had a medical emergency which disrupted the start of the next trip and resulted in his first ever hospital stay. A severe case of cellulitis required multiple courses of antibiotics to resolve and weeks of repeated leg wraps to get the swelling down. This period is recounted in “When the Roller Coaster That Was 2022 Executed a Barrel Roll.”* Michael is putting off the painful task of writing a more complete tribute to Bella; however, a new ending, a poetic expression of that emotional experience, was added to an existing work on loss, “Painting a Story.”* Look for “Bella’s Eulogy” to appear on the blog shortly.

This was a year filled with music. In addition to our singing, we took advantage of opportunities to hear live music varying from getting rush tickets to Broadway shows to listening to a friend’s rock band in a dive bar. Last year, Michael documented the opportunity to hear musicians from across the country as they turned to streaming when venues closed. These connections made through online events were the “Silver Linings”* of the pandemic era. This year that silver turned to gold as Michael was able to connect with folk musicians linked to his first exposure to folk music. This “Circle of Life” (soon to be posted) will be one of 2022’s stories about home and connection. The highlight of our musical year was hosting a live performance of our all-time favorite folk musician, Joe Jencks, and a new favorite, Crys Matthews, in our fellowship’s sanctuary. We did this as our bit to transition live music out of the COVID era and back into our lives as a spiritual presence.

2022 wasn’t all about our travel – one of the highlights of the year was having Lenora’s college roommate and matron of honor, Nola, come and stay with us for two weeks. We were able to share stories, relive good times, and recall dear friends. And drink a little wine and enjoy some good food – which is what friends are for! At the Outer Banks, Nola got to be at the helm of a sailboat for the first time and, together, we saw the Corolla wild horses.

One of the reasons that this Holiday Letter is late is because we gathered family in Florida this Christmas. Lenora’s brother, Jim, lives in Venice and we have friends scattered across the state. Jim’s wife, Rose, and Lenora concocted a plan in the Spring to bring as many family members together as possible. We rented a 4-bedroom house and Rose rented a condo in their complex. While not all were there at the same time, we had sixteen Harris family members enjoying the holidays together. Florida decided to participate in Winter this year, so it was not a beach vacation; rather, it was one that was celebrated with good food, good spirits, and good cheer. The tail end of the Florida trip included visits to the Everglades, Key West, literally the tail end of Florida, and St. Augustine.

This year’s Holiday Letter will not be about the kids, per se, except to the extent they remain a key part of our lives. Elizabeth continues in her postdoc position in Utah. Her Tibetan Terrier, Piper, now has her own Instagram following. The big event in Elizabeth’s life, which rippled into ours, was Ace coming into the family as a foster child. We became, in a large sense, grandparents overnight. We have never seen Elizabeth happier and couldn’t be any more proud of her commitment to social justice – thinking globally while acting locally.

Evan and Taylor continue to live and work in mid-town Manhattan thriving in their jobs and accumulating life experiences. One highlight of the Florida trip was meeting Taylor’s charming parents who live a short drive from our Venice rental. This roller coaster year ended on a stupendous high as Evan and Taylor got engaged on a sleigh ride in Montana on 12/29/22!

This letter is getting ridiculously long but there are still things that 2022 brought into our lives which haven’t been touched on like being able to see dear friends on Cape Cod (and on the way back) after a COVID hiatus. While on the Cape, Lenora and I took the opportunity to revisit the site of our engagement 36 years ago, the bow of the ferry to Nantucket as it pulled into the island’s picturesque harbor.

As teased earlier, the first two days of our trip to the Chautauqua Institution were spent in the hospital as Lenora slept in the guest chair to make sure Michael got his meds on schedule. Despite the inauspicious start, this trip was the most intellectually satisfying portion of the year. Michael documented the Chautauqua experience in a published article, “Chautauqua Institution, My Happy Place.”* One highlight of the trip was that Michael’s essay, “Ruminations On My First Self-Editing Class”*, won 2^nd place in the 2022 Friends of the Chautauqua Writers Circle contest. The irony is that the piece, about editing out bad writing, was written tongue in cheek to feature bad writing so integral to the essay that it couldn’t be edited out without destroying the piece.

We continued our pursuits as lifelong learners in 2022. Both of us took courses from OLLI (Google it then signup yourself!) Literature figured strongly in our lives seeing Lenora in two book groups and Michael in various writing groups. The coach of one of those writing groups, a group with a focus on short form memoir, compiled and edited an anthology of pieces by participants in this and other groups. In December, “The River Runs”* and five other pieces of Michael’s writings were published in the anthology, Memory As Muse, Then and Now, currently available in hard copy and in a Kindle version on Amazon early in 2023.

In closing, from “A Christmas Eve Screed”*, to you and yours, as we transition from the winter solstice to the New Year, we wish you magic!

Love,

Michael Field and Lenora Harris-Field

fieldmi@att.net LenoraHarris-Field@att.net

2022 Pictures

Family Xmas 2022