January light

January sunrise

Mt. Hood

The first light I see

      My friend Sheila and I walk in the mornings when day is just breaking. On clear days the January light comes up brilliant, making jewels of the raindrops at the ends of the Japanese maples in the neighborhood.   Some cloudy, foggy days days it is still dark at 7:30, and daylight struggles to  come at all.   First the charcoal gray gets a little softer.  Then the gray sky gets a slight pink hue to it.  When the gray has a slight bluish tinge, we guess that the sun is just rising.   When the gray in the west looks a little powder blue, the sun in fully risen.  When the gray looks really dirty and opaque in the west, and light and translucent in the east, the sun is almost ready to break through the clouds.  Some days it does.

My favorite oak

     On clearer days, we can see Mt Hood when she is out.  Sometimes she just a blue shadow with the top hidden by clouds, some days a glorious snow-covered bulk with pink light streaming onto it.  But every day we see things that lift our winter hearts.  Last week it was a flock of robins in a big oak tree.
     We come home to share a pot of coffee and talk.   I feel like I have another  Sullivan sister here in Oregon.

Sheila                                              

     Walking is easier now than it was before I went to the Maldives, because I am lighter.  I lost 20 pounds without trying to during my first two month there.   Eating was much more difficult in the Maldives than it is in America now; maybe it's more like eating in America was in the 1950s.  The kitchen was very hot ( no air conditioning in that room, and no fan for the first month), the food choices were limited, meat was unusual,  and fresh vegetables rare. We had the added complications of bad tap water. We had to be scrupulous to make sure that there was no drop of water on any plate or glass or utensil that we used.  It was such an endeavor to make food that we only did it as simply as we could, and only for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.   We all  lost weight, including Maxine.  David remarked at Thanksgiving, "You are all thinner."  We gained some weight back during the last month in Hithadoo, when Satya was cooking delicious vegetables curries for us.

Photo by Maxine

     My son Paul and I have a running dispute about why so many  Americans  have gotten so fat over the last thirty years.  I was sure  that the main cause has been  a change in the contents of the food we eat.  He holds the position that the cause is eating habits--how much and how often we eat.  Now I think that Paul is right.