Year end letter 2023

Yep... it's late this year. Let's move on.

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March 3, 2024

This letter is a bit late in coming this year. Elsa has been reluctant to mail the cards because she accidentally bought large format cards… “that’s more of Eric and Elsa than anyone wants to see,” she said. I reply,“I love them, we look groovy!” So, we’ve procrastinated on the writing and the sending… but here it is.

I’m writing this year-end letter for 2023 at the beginning of March 2024. We are up at the cabin near Mt Rainier, it’s snowing outside and a fire is burning warmly in the woodstove. Mila, our pup, is curled up at my feet at the end of the couch, Elsa is addressing the cards that will find their way to you carrying a reminder to check out this letter on the website. You are here.

It usually takes me a couple tries to get the end-of-year letter right. This is my third go at it. The first version was too much of “here’s what we did this year.” The second version was too morose because last year started off with a series of deaths of loved ones, a health scare with Mila, a health scare with Elsa, a health scare with my sister, a health scare with Elsa's parents...well it was just too much health scare and death.

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Most of the year after February 28 was pretty routine.  Here's how it goes: Every morning we get up, start up the magic coffee machine, scan the headlines, play the word games from the New York Times, drink the coffee from the magic coffee machine, take Mila for a 2+ mile walk  and then we start the work part of our day.   We do our work, finish the day with a cocktail, sometimes we sit outside by the fire pit, sometimes inside by the fireplace. I practice a Spanish lesson, Elsa does her weightlifting workout, we watch a show and then it's off to bed. Ahhh bed. Bed is wonderful.

Speaking of bed... my favorite accomplishment for the year was to build a king-sized bed frame out of small pieces of walnut glued together in an orchestration of woodworking mastery. The wood pieces were discards, tossed aside like old potato chips that had fallen between the cracks of your grandfather’s couch.  A friend of mine dropped them off (the walnut wood pieces) as firewood. But to me they were a treasure trove of natural artistic goodness. Once glued and sanded, they formed a headboard and footboard that framed our new large-format bed, a bed we had purchased to accommodate our three-year-old terrier, Mila, who cleverly waits ten minutes to jump up on the bed when we are too sleepy to kick her off. On our old queen-sized mattress, Elsa and I would find ourselves at 3:00 AM smushed off to one side with 1/3 the bed for us and 2/3 the bed occupied by Mila sprawled sideways.  Now with a king-sized bed, even at her most diagonal she theoretically only takes up a half and leaves enough for the humans to snuggle together on one side. Thus the need for a new king sized bed frame for the mattress....

...The mattress itself was its own marvelous revelation. Delivered by mail in a box the size of a toaster oven and once unleashed from plastic imprisonment, it inflated as if by magic into a full king size mattress 18 inches thick. What wonders exist in this world? More than we could imagine! In the search for a comforter that would accommodate our larger bed we discovered an even bigger mattress… Not a California King, not a Wyoming King… 7 feet wide by 7 feet long, but the Alaska King which is a whopping 12 feet wide!  Eighty-four square feet of mattress, enough to require special zoning in some states.  What a mansion it would need to be to have a bedroom that can accommodate such luxury in sleeping, a 12 foot wide bed heaped high with feather pillows and blankets with enough space for a litter of titan dogs all piled together in a bundle of sleepy goodness.  We did not buy an Alaskan King Bed. Even if we had one, it wouldn't matter. We have discovered that even with a king-sized bed, Mila still prefers the side that we are on, snuggling against us until we have shuffled ourselves over the edge and onto the floor, and then to the couch.  These are our problems.  Our lives are pretty great….

….made up of some lovely moments. One worth recalling was during our 20^th anniversary party in early August. Our guests had gathered, some on the porch, some by the food, some by the drinks and others around the patio in the back yard. Small groups were chatting, laughing, telling stories. Elsa sidled up to me with a nudge and we had a rare pause where we were standing together (unusual for us at parties), noticing this group of folks who had gathered to help us celebrate. I took a beat to look around. It was like the slow pan of a movie scene and lasted only a few seconds. We could feel the joy, the love… the transient but forever instance that you get a few times in your life where many of your favorite people are all together, enjoying each other’s company on a beautiful evening, and you notice how special, how unique, how marvelous it is that we are all alive together at the same time.  

As you can see from the pictures we did some stuff, took some hikes, saw some friends, and while not pictured we did our best to keep the whisky distilleries in business. Work was good. Elsa is still the chief operations officer at Catalyst Law, bringing order and discipline to processes that would otherwise run amok. I continued my work at Page Two Partners helping nonprofits navigate the vagaries of stuff that nonprofits do. We spent as many evenings as the weather allowed sitting outside by our firepit talking over the day’s drama while Mila watched for trespassers or rogue squirrels that might have the audacity to approach. It was a prosaic, somewhat unremarkable year in terms of travel and adventure. We'll try harder this year.

And now, by the time you read this, it is mid to late March. This new year, 2024, is underway, bleeding over from 2023 in a blurred haze that wise sages attribute to some kind of age phenomenon that accelerates the passing of a month. In no time, I’ll be working to compose this year’s summary, searching for a theme.  By the end of 2024, our world will be radically different. Or it will be the same. I don’t think there’s a middle ground based on the tiktok meme that floated by this morning. According to my algorithm, the zombie apocalypse is coming and we all need to be building bunkers… that plus gathering recipes for crockpot banana bread.  

Until then, please share more hugs and take more time to capture a snowflake on your tongue.

We’ll see you next year.

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