Ruth Calvo

This is that midwinter time when it isn’t time to start planting, and it’s a bit cold for the outdoors; the days may be getting longer but they feel the same, and I light candles to cheer myself up.

We’ve even gone past what is my final day of the mid-winter holidays, Twelfth Day/Fiesta de los Tres Rejes/Epiphany. Now do we start the regrets, just to balance off any excessive cheer we felt? There’s a lot behind the old saying that we’re going to pay for this later.

Happy New Year to you all, and if you’re in the neighborhood, I’m serving black-eyed peas (with bacon seasoning), and you’re welcome.

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the very last day of this year from Hell. This year 2011 has been terrible in so many ways. It’s a good time to make sure we start off right on 2012.

The only time I’ve ever been unable to communicate, many years ago, was with a nun who spoke no English, in San Jose, Costa Rica. My Spanish is abysmal. We hugged instead.

As you all know, I went on a long vacation, and I have a lot to share. Strangely, one of the things that has preoccupied me over this past week has been farming. Do you have a background in farming, and do you grow things?

Do you have a fond memory of something a teacher did for you? I will never find a better teacher than my first grade one, Ms. Scott, who reassured me in a clannish atmosphere that I was new to. Yes, I may have had more gifted or harder working or more impressive ones. But the nice way she tried to help me wedge into an already bonded society is among my best memories of teachers.

It’s kind of hard to determine what a background is for me, and this week I was really confused. I am from the south. I have cajun and Jewish and native ancestors. I can’t actually tell what makes me what I am.

There is a special feeling about Fall, for me. If you grew up in the southwest, you know it doesn’t happen all that often. Too much dry weather means the leaves fall early, turning all brown and withered during the heat of summer. That happened this year.

There are simply attitudes toward manual labor that we can’t and shouldn’t accept, but encounter every day in subtle and not so subtle ways. They go back to the royal traditions, that set the rulers up as being part of the gods’ social set, I believe. In ancient China, the rulers did not lift a hand, and grew fingernails to ghastly lengths to show that they literally never lifted a finger. In ancient Rome, the gentry were carted about in litters by their slaves, while in India and surrounding nations, rulers’ howdahs were borne on elephants.