So many friends are relieved that 2014 is over. One friend writes from Paris that after two deaths in her family and the loss of her two dogs, she couldn't wait for the year to end. My feeling about 2014 is that it went in a flash.
We moved from the house we'd been in for twenty years, and this was a wrench and a self-administered shock. Now my feet are on the ground again in our new, smaller house. My feet are on the ground much of every day but it's hardest of all to be without our view across the valley.
The view's been changing radically. Last spring I looked to the west and saw a house that wasn't there before. Then the cranes were up in another direction, and three new houses were built on precarious lots across the road. This is nothing but change as Austin grows and grows. When we moved here in 1982, everyone was complaining about growth. They still are.
I'm working on stories again after a few years with a novel set in Paris. But—note the date of this blog and think of Charlie Hebdo—Paris seems like a stranger today. I feel so sad for that city's busy, oblivious dwellers. They're used to living together in daily beauty, crowdedness, tolerance and intolerance, not this kind of fear and death. But who is? And who should be? Who in the world deserves violence? Those who dole it out?
Mostly, I feel so lucky and privileged to have my work, my job as O. Henry editor, my family and friends. And my new, peaceful, dull neighborhood.
We moved from the house we'd been in for twenty years, and this was a wrench and a self-administered shock. Now my feet are on the ground again in our new, smaller house. My feet are on the ground much of every day but it's hardest of all to be without our view across the valley.
The view's been changing radically. Last spring I looked to the west and saw a house that wasn't there before. Then the cranes were up in another direction, and three new houses were built on precarious lots across the road. This is nothing but change as Austin grows and grows. When we moved here in 1982, everyone was complaining about growth. They still are.
I'm working on stories again after a few years with a novel set in Paris. But—note the date of this blog and think of Charlie Hebdo—Paris seems like a stranger today. I feel so sad for that city's busy, oblivious dwellers. They're used to living together in daily beauty, crowdedness, tolerance and intolerance, not this kind of fear and death. But who is? And who should be? Who in the world deserves violence? Those who dole it out?
Mostly, I feel so lucky and privileged to have my work, my job as O. Henry editor, my family and friends. And my new, peaceful, dull neighborhood.