These January Days

Earlier in January, I went to the Land O’Lakes Kennel Club dog show in St. Paul. My partner Mick and I meandered around for the better part of a Saturday, petting dogs when it was appropriate, saying hello to friends who were showing their dobermans, checking out the wheaten terriers because we anticipate a wheaten puppy of our own in the near future. I returned with our daughter Abby on Sunday and spent the whole day there, delighted to watch a parade of puppies, some with very young handlers, then watching the selections that culminated in Best in Show, awarded to a shih tzu (GCHP Hallmark Jolei Out Of This World with handler Luke Ehricht).

Both days, being around all those dogs made me happy. Serene. Dogs are in the moment, no worrying about anything but what’s right in front of them. Their owners may have been worried about how their dogs would place, but the dogs themselves could not be anything other than, simply, dogs.

When we try to be something other than what we are, we always get into trouble.

---

January 9 was my father’s birthday. He would have been 110 years old this year. I thought of him as I watched coverage of former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral. I remember my dad saying Carter looked like a used car salesman back when he was running for president, but he was the guy Dad voted for. A Democrat, someone with values like ours. As a Catholic girl growing up in the 1970s in a household that supported union workers and whose father worked for the federal government, politics and religion were often discussed around the dinner table. My father was always aware of what was happening – he read the newspaper in its entirety daily, religiously watched the local news at 10 p.m. He had little patience for people who shirked their duty, whether it was to their family or to their country. He himself had served in a war when he had two small children at home waiting for him. He returned home to father two more children, work a job that paid enough to live on, and hold it together after seeing what war does to people because he felt that was the path for him. He was lucky and he knew it.

I believe Jimmy Carter knew he was lucky, too. Over and over, I was struck by the reverence with which people spoke of him – his grandson, the sons of former President Gerald Ford and Vice President Walter Mondale, and others. His honesty was mentioned again and again, his commitment to doing the right thing even when it was unpopular. He doesn’t seem to have ever taken time off to rest.

As the cameras covering the funeral service panned those in the church pews, I wondered how the remaining US Presidents would each be remembered when their times came. It doesn’t seem fair that one of them in particular should even be in the same room with Carter’s body. I can’t imagine Trump sacrificing anything for the good of another human being or being honest about it.

---

Sitting in front of our fireplace, laptop in my actual lap instead of on top of a desk, I feel grateful for a life that has allowed me to live with people I love in relative safety. The Los Angeles fires and subsequent widespread devastation has been on the news for many days now, long enough that we expect to see its images first thing on every news cast and in every news digest. I cannot fathom how it feels to not only lose everything you have, all of it burned to nothing but ash, but to witness everyone around you also losing everything until the place you live and love is unrecognizable. Like war, I suppose.

I’ve been near only one fire gone out of control in my life – and it was in California, at a science conference on the California side of Lake Tahoe. We were told to evacuate on what would have been the last day of the conference. My partner Mick, our then-12-year-old daughter Abby, and I watched planes dump red fire retardant beyond the nearest mountain ridge as we put our suitcases into our rental car and prepared to leave. One of the spouses of another conference attendee completely freaked out, which surprised me. Everything felt very orderly and we were all going to leave before we were in mortal danger, but he was so frightened he could not get a grip on himself. We drove away as part of a long line of vehicles headed toward Sacramento. It happened to be my birthday. We found a place to say and headed out for pizza instead of having a great bottle of wine with friends at the end-of-conference dinner as planned. And it was still a lovely thing. We were safe and we were together. The fire did not spread to the conference center, we later learned.

We have disaster potential in Minnesota, too, of course: tornadoes, blizzards, floods. Somehow, those feel more manageable – maybe I mean more survivable? – than a massive out-of-control fire that gobbles up an area larger than Manhattan. But I do wonder what tornado season will become as climate change continues its mutations of our weather conditions.

All we can really count on is change.

---

Things feel scattered and disjointed everywhere. There is so much uncertainty. My friends talk about the uneasiness they feel as this year lurches forward. This post is a little disjointed, too, and yet these things I’ve written about do all go together – they are part of what comprises this start to 2025. Lives unfold with little certainty that our days will be what we’d planned, even though we like to think our plans are exactly what is going to happen.

This morning, Mick and I talked about how people experience this world: whether they first look for the beauty, the awe, that which causes gratitude to come tumbling from our hearts, or whether they default to what is wrong in the world and how everything has to be someone’s fault. Every day Mick and I hit a point where we cannot absorb anymore news and we choose to do something else: read, cook, go for a walk, watch something sweet like PBS’s All Creature Great and Small – anything that will ease the sense that the world is crumbling.

Easy for us to do since we are not in the middle of a disaster, nor are we burying a loved one or trying to rebuild our lives. We will contribute however we can to helping those who need help right now and we will not second-guess those on the ground in Los Angeles or anywhere else that is torn apart for any reason. What is in front of us is a Minnesota landscape, covered with snow at the moment. We have no experience – other than travel, which has always brought us back here – from which to justify offering criticism or advice to someone in a completely different environment.

---

The Wolf Moon setting on Monday morning flooded our backyard with light. It peered through trees, illuminating winter-bare branches. This same moon would illuminate fire-ravaged trees in California, Washington politicians jogging in the early hours before facing their day’s choices, school children waking to get ready for classes in hopes that they get to come home again later. In this violent, divided country that the rest of the world shakes their heads at, we all share the same moonlight, unwilling to admit we could be sharing so much more.

Meanwhile, Mick and I are going to pick out our puppy in early February, and that puppy will come home with us at the end of that month. I can’t wait for this little creature to become part of our family, to be a constant reminder that there are other perspectives besides our own, especially from all the beings on this planet beyond the humans who are scorching everything, both with and without actual fire. Letting some non-human wisdom, some non-human perspective, into our lives feels like exactly the thing we need in 2025.

And, since we cannot be anything but human ourselves, remembering our common ground – desires for love, happiness, safety, comfort – every time we all look up at the same moon is a good practice. It may be the very practice that helps us keep offering ourselves to the scarred world.

photo by kcmickelson 2025