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At Year's End

December 2010
Dear Friends,

Once upon a summer’s day, on an island in northern Minnesota, I wrote letters on birch bark to my grandchildren.  It seemed somehow ancient; almost clay-tablet old.  A piece of bark.  A tube of stain.  Shared symbols.

I am doing something like that now, making words appear on paper, connecting what we are thinking here, in our house, with what you are doing in yours.  If we want to, we can make little perturbations electronically, and send the signals, almost instantaneously, almost anywhere, a world away.  The signals become words again, and the words tie us together. 

This summer Mari and I drove through Canada, west to Seattle and Portland, befriended by strangers, tasting the sweet wines of early frost, to stand at the edge of the slowly drifting continent, catching and savoring Dungeness crab, laughing with friends, reading books.  We came back through Montana and North Dakota, driving through the grasslands where the first peoples walked, catching our breath at wild horses, remembering history, feeling small on the earth, talking.

The words are like a web, an invisible net over the surface of the continents and the seas, not denying distances, but quicker than them, playing with them, but something like birch bark letters, even so.  We are thinking about you, else you would not be reading these words, wishing you well across the miles of grass and time since we saw you last. 

Outside it is cold; inside warm.  We are dipping into the short days of the year, old enough now to know that the stillness before another spring is a good thing.  From time to time, Mari and I spontaneously surprise each other, saying similar words to each other about how the years have been kind to us; how we continue to enjoy each other; that we are content, and glad.  The words are warm.  The web is strong.  

                                                                                 Conrad and Mari

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