The Christmas Letter, a Week Late…

… with apologies to those of you who got this letter in the mail. This is the hasty cell phone picture we took of our crew on Thanksgiving. I love it because we were all so happy to be together, and it didn’t cause anyone too much pain to dress up and try to be coordinated. 😉

Dear Friends,                                                                                                       12/2023

Season’s greetings! It is the time of year when we find ourselves a little obsessed with light, looking forward to the turn of the solstice and more daytime hours. Daylight here does not equate sunshine, but it is my challenge for this winter to learn what God wants to teach me by calling me to live in such an overcast area. (Without complaining: shew!) And of course, the good news is that the Light of the World has come, and it is our great privilege to walk in that Light!

            We have been blessed with a year of adequate stamina to live at a full gallop for surprisingly long stretches. Ha. A lot of the busyness was our choice, and the rest was simply a call to faithfulness in our everyday life. No time for twiddling thumbs just yet.

            Gabriel started a travel position with UPMC at the beginning of the year. It means that they send him to under-staffed hospitals across the state instead of regionally. We decided to give it a try for a year, and were pleasantly surprised at how well it went. Occasionally there were five shifts in a row, but having him home for up to a week at a time is not a problem! Most of the assignments are in Pittsburgh; the farthest from home was in western Maryland, which happened to be the hospital where he did his nursing training, so that was interesting. He continues to love his work in the emergency department. In his spare time this year he has done a lot of cleanup in the woods around here, felling dead trees and cutting firewood. It’s only a five acre place, but it is a needy place. We enjoy the challenge, although he wouldn’t mind having a little more time to do woodworking with his collection of antique hand tools.

            My year can be summed up with teaching, pottering (both with clay and about the house), gardening, cleaning up copious amounts of mud, and writing (in fits and starts). All of these things I love to do, except for the muddy parts, but it’s a given with the rural lifestyle and hobbies we have chosen. I admit, I am not always very philosophical or even reasonable about it in the moment of mess.

There was a day we got home from picking up groceries, the front door was open, and there were muddy dog prints through the house where Lady had gone back and forth, back and forth, to try to find her people. This was at the height of the digging that was going on in our yard to install rainwater drains and fix the lane. It was epic in a grimy sort of way. Eventually the lane did get fixed, but a broken gas line got missed and the lane had to be dug up again when the weather got cold and it was obvious that the heat wasn’t working in the shop. The patio and sidewalks got poured during a stretch of beautifully warm weather in November. We did not get the lawn reseeded in November; I’ll let you imagine how that works out with an indoor/outdoor dog. But we can walk to our cars without splashing through puddles and that is progress!

            We managed to get two long trips into the year. In late February we flew to Florida to spend some time with my parents down there. It is amazing to me that you can get onto a plane at the absolute snottiest of times here (That’s not a complaint. It’s a pragmatic statement of fact.) and two hours later you can debark in brilliant 80 degree sunshine. Our family got to stay in my uncle’s house in Sarasota, the house where Grandma lived when she was alive. It was still full of her things, little notes here and there, and just the feeling of her. I loved that part! It is on a secluded dead-end street, which we also appreciated. Aside from one very chilly day when the guys were attempting to fish in the Gulf, it was a gloriously sunny interlude for all of us.

            This fall we decided to take a few weeks to travel through the Midwest. We packed a trailer full of camping gear and planned the itinerary around the Handworks Festival in Amana, IA. The festival was wonderful! The guys met a lot of their woodshop and forge heroes; during supper we spotted Roy Underhill at a table nearby! We ladies enjoyed strolling the town, visiting shops full of handmade goods and fingering the gorgeous woolens at the mill. After two days we drove on north and spent half a week with Gabriel’s brother’s family in Lake Andes, South Dakota. It felt a bit sad that our time in the big sky country turned out to be wildfire smoke season. It was still an amazing time of catching up and bonding, and the cousins showed us some of their favorite places along the mighty Missouri River.

Along the way, we slept in a lot of neat places, boondocking wherever we wanted. That was our first experience of simply pulling off the road and setting up a campsite on public land. The no-fires rule was the biggest stretch, but we were prepared to cook with a small Blackstone griddle. We have never gone camping without getting pickled in campfire smoke, so that was a novelty. Gabriel had done a lot of homework and found some beautiful campsites, most notably on the rim of the Badlands.  By the last night on the road, however, we were so tired of setting up tents and blowing up air mattresses that we got a motel and enjoyed long showers and white sheets. Home looked absolutely wonderful!     

            We saw Alex pretty often this year, mostly when we went back to Bedford County. He is currently working as a ski instructor at Snowshoe Resort in West Virginia, and he is loving the work. Our family picture was a quick snap I insisted on taking after Thanksgiving lunch because we were all together and that is harder to accomplish than it used to be!

            Greg is working with a local construction crew. Along with learning new skills, he is especially enjoying working with some of his friends. His hobbies include woodworking, fly tying and fishing, and cooking manly chunks of meat with sauces that use lots of butter and garlic. I really like when he cooks, but we haven’t always seen eye to eye on techniques or cleanup methods. We are so grateful that his last EEG showed zero seizure activity! He is reveling in the freedom to be able to go rock climbing or to hitch up the fishing boat to his Nissan Pathfinder and drive himself places.

            Olivia is in tenth grade and keeps herself studiously on track with her biology and algebra video courses. I look over her shoulder occasionally and get excited when there is a grammar/composition concept that I can teach her. Other than that, I check the work and keep the records for the school district. Her favorite thing is to make something with her hands with yarn or felt while listening to audiobooks. This year she has worked her way through a hand-lettering book, which comes in very handy when I need someone to make place cards or labels. A few weeks ago, she started driving on a learner’s permit, very carefully. I am excited to have an errand runner coming along soon!

            Rita is fourteen now, and as full of big ideas as she was when she was a toddler, only now she can actually pull them off. Her current big project is tanning a deer hide. The hair is harder to strip off than she thought it would be, but she perseveres. She’s my gardening buddy, and she loves to pick fresh things, then go cook them on the hot plate in the old camper we turned into a playhouse. She also has a respectable teepee in the woods where she and Addy cook over open fires. One of the highlights of her year was pulling a big pike out of our tiny creek when she was fishing. We didn’t eat that one, but she has butchered many a fish for supper.

            Addy is twelve now, and nearly as tall as her sisters. She is catching up with them in many ways, an elusive goal of hers ever since she was tiny. I can ask her to clean up the house, and she really goes for it! She likes making a fire in the fireplace, setting up tea parties, and dressing up nicely. She has spent a lot of time writing chapters for various books she has started. Recently we had a sad day when there was a glitch with the computer, and it swallowed a lot of her work. I could have cried with her.

            It’s hard when life is hard on your children. There are so many things we learn through the pains, though. With the children growing older, they have lots of interests outside our home. The girls played volleyball with a homeschool group this fall. At first it was discouraging for them to try so hard and feel like they just weren’t getting it. As they practiced and practiced, I watched them gain confidence and improve. I often tell them, “You have to be willing to be bad at something before you can be good at something. That’s just how it works, and guess how I know!”

            This has been a happy year, but of course, it included a lot of challenges. We choose to focus on the pleasant things for the annual letter.  However, there is no good story without conflict. There is no victory without a battle. When I think about the next year, it gives me courage to know that we are overcomers in Christ, and He is already there!

            Blessings and much love from all of us!

-Dorcas for the Peights