The Photos Below

I'll post a few notes about the photographs below to share with you our news at the end of the year and help get the new one underway.

On December 17 Alison and I made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to one of her favorite places, Chicago. She had a reception for CMU's school of music to attend, I had a date with Audubon at the Newberry Library, and Jenny was flying in from Houston. This was my first visit at the Newberry, and I felt quite privileged to be examining Audubon's personal copy of Alexander Wilson's *American Ornithology.* I wanted to see it because I had read that Audubon had written personal comments in the margins, and as you can see, he did get excited in a few places, but for the most part he just points out errors or observations Wilson claimed to have made that his own did not corroborate. Some accuse Audubon of having been vain and competitive, and he was both sometimes, but he was also the best field ornithologist working in the nineteenth century, so you can't condemn him too severely for knowing it. Anyway, the real delight was viewing and turning the pages of the original Imperial Folio plates of *The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,* which measure 20 x 30 inches. The vividness and textures of these lithographs have not been reproduced in any of the reprints. If you look closely at the plate of the mule deer, you can see Audubon himself holding the gun with which he just shot the hole in the deer. And if you look closely at the plate of the gray fox, you can see a feather slowly wafting downward, indicating that the fox has just missed his lunch.

When we returned from Chicago and I retrieved the trail camera, we laughed out loud to see that our deer clearly had watched us drive away and immediately sent word out to all the neighbor deer that the party was on.

"Let's all meet at his tree stand. Dress for photos."

It's refreshing to learn that the deer have a sense of irony. The coyote--I'm not so sure about.

On Sunday, December 19, we hosted the Miller Family Christmas gathering, and were especially happy that the patriarch Chuck left the comfort of his home to make the trek to our place. Gayle and Doug were there along with Alison's Threesome: Mo, Curly, and Larry. During nap time, Doug and I snuck out with the dogs (yes, that is a dog) to see what the river was doing. (Doug is the hominid with no head.) The river was doing fine.

Our fourth wedding anniversary rolled around with the turning of the year and we returned to The Island in the mildest weather we experienced in all of our winter visits. There was very little ice in the lake, but the island itself was bordered by a kind of selvedge on which a fascinating variety of formations grew. One day I walked round the eight-mile perimeter in one direction while Alison ran in the other. We met about an hour later on the northeast coast. Beautiful day.

Our New Year's resolve is to stop eating, at least for the next ten days or so. Between Thanksgiving, Chicago, Mackinac Island, and all the home cooking--well, you know all about it.

Yesterday was January 1, 2011, and we began the new year with the snow blade on the tractor and green grass in the yard. But today it's snowing, Alison is dressing for a run, and I'm going to cook grits and venison for breakfast before writing the final section of the new prospectus.

Happy New Year, everyone.