29 January 2026

As the snow storm approached last Saturday, 24 January, I found myself in a rare if brief mood, focused and pleasantly anticipating both the coming snow and a lovely little tea party in New Castle to honor two friends with January birthdays, one 87 and one 89.  Humans are hard-wired for certainty, leaping to embrace it, and even foolishly creating it when obscured by ambiguity or complexity.  As I once heard Senator Ted Kennedy say:  “For every complex problem there’s a simple solution.  And it’s wrong!”

Winter Storm Fern was certainly coming; I saw it on the radar.  And Walker Percy’s “hurricane theory” would, I knew, obtain.  Disasters replace abstract anxiety with immediate purpose:  survival and community solidarity.  We feel alive and connected, no longer passive participants in daily routine.  The unusually cold temperatures—it was 3^o that morning, -16^o with wind chill—meant the wetlands trail bordering our property would be frozen solid, with insulating snow keeping it perfect for snowshoeing later on.  And the birthday party, laid on by a designer with exquisite taste, would, I knew, be lovely.  The humiliation and frustration I had felt on Wednesday morning on hearing the inane, self-aggrandizing, and insulting ramblings of our Felon-in-Chief (FIC) addressing global leaders at the World Economic Forum temporarily ceded mental space to hospitality and gemütlichkeit (I recall the FIC telling this august group assembled in Davos, Switzerland that but for the U.S., they’d all be speaking German.  This to a highly educated audience in Switzerland).  Our New Castle hostess had suggested we keep politics out of her house, and we complied, even though we’d heard there’d been yet another shooting in Minneapolis.

And then I came home and watched the videos of an ICU nurse for the Veteran’s Administration help shield a fellow protestor when an ICE agent pushed her to the ground. For his brave compassion, true to his training and ethical service as a nurse, he was then surrounded by ICE agents, pushed face down to the ground, and summarily executed, his last act to help the helpless.  Yet more blood on the hands of our abominable leader.  A tipping point?  I am not sanguine.  I write to my representatives and senators and I protest, but I’m more scared than optimistic.

Vladimir Iliyich Lenin is rumored (incorrectly) to have said “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”   January has felt like that, and it’s taking a toll on my emotional equilibrium:  tears sprang to my eyes on hearing the calm and reassuring baritone of Robert Redford in a broadcast clip explaining why he created the Sundance Film Festival, first established by him in Salt Lake City in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival.  Redford, Sundance himself, is gone, and his festival is leaving Park City, Utah for Boulder, Colorado next year, having outgrown its home for the past 45 years.  I miss Robert Redford. I miss talent, generosity, and decency.

I try to stay in motion, seeking solace and direction in art, and certainly I’m not alone.  The Winslow Homer exhibition at Boston’s MFA was mobbed on the Monday morning I joined the claustrophobic crush of mostly seniors (too many taking pictures) crowding the exhibition “Of Light and Air,” its title taken from Henry James’s review:  “Mr. Homer has the great merit that he naturally sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air.  He sees not in lines, but masses.  Things come already modeled to his eye.”

Homer’s famously luminous but delicate watercolors with their all-too-fugitive colors were well served by the MFA (if not the online images I reproduce here); a video featuring artist James Prosek attempting to duplicate Homer’s technique and conservator Judith C. Walsh guiding Prosek and us through Homer’s studio on Prouts Neck in Scarborough, Maine (now managed by the Portland Museum of Art) provided helpful insight into  Homer’s artistry.

All museums are suffering in our unenlightened era, however, and the MFA, confronting a widening structural deficit, has announced it will lay off 6.3% of its staff as part of a sweeping restructuring plan.  So, I suppose we must forgive both the congestion of the Homer show and the commodification of his work.

From the Homer show, I made my way through the MFA to the Lynch and Servison galleries and the “Boston on the Eve of Revolution and the New Nation” show, and found myself once again sadly misty-eyed.  What, I wondered, would Thomas Jefferson make of us now?  What has become of the sacred honor those Founders pledged along with their land and their lives in this the 250^th anniversary of their great experiment?

So I beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

The personal past exerts a gravitational force, too, even as I pursue distraction.  Case in point:  I saw The Last Class, Elliott Kirschner’s 2025 documentary about Robert Reich’s final semester at UC Berkeley teaching his “Wealth and Poverty” class and so ending his 42-year teaching career while wrestling with his own aging and his students inheriting a world out of balance.  Over my own 43 years in college and university classrooms, I certainly witnessed many of the changes Reich did, and worried as much about the morphing “idea of a university,” the title of a humanities course team-taught by my late husband.  The next morning I dreamed I was part of a protest on the Berkeley campus while wearing a clown costume (!) and digging in my bag for makeup to refresh my red, white, and blue face paint (!), being late for class, and then sitting in a little school desk to take my GRE exam, from which I was summarily expelled as a protestor (!!!).  I awoke worried that I had no cold cream to take off my grease paint.

Another attempt at salutary distraction was confounded by the final (and superb) 18 January  performance of Tina Satter’s play Is This A Room by the Apollinaire Theatre Company at Chelsea Theatre Works just outside Boston, a thrilling verbatim transcription of the FBI’s interrogation of young Air Force linguist Reality Winner in June 2017.

In May 2017, Winner printed and mailed a classified NSA report to the news outlet The Intercept, which published the document.  The report described efforts of Russian military intelligence to interfere with US election systems in 2016.  Winner was subsequently arrested the same day she was interrogated and denied bail while awaiting trial.  In 2018, she accepted a plea agreement and received a 63-month federal sentence, at the time the longest sentence ever imposed for leaks to the media.  In 2021, Winner began three years of supervised release.  The transcript/play, with Parker Jennings so engagingly portraying Winner, includes Winner’s confessing that having Fox News playing 24/7 in her workspace helped prompt her action. 

Yesterday, 28 January, the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia Election Office, seizing original 2020 voting records, authorized by the Felon-in-Chief’s Justice Department to continue investigating his false claims of election fraud.  And CNN reports that Minnesota Secretary of State, Steve Simon, has declined to hand over voter data demanded by Attorney General Pam Bondi because doing so would violate state and federal privacy laws.  “Literally hours after the second, let’s not forget second, killing of an American citizen in the city of Minneapolis by ICE agents … there’s this term sheet,” he said, “this ransom note” (https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/pam-bondi-voter-rolls-minnesota-ice).  Extortion replaces the law of the land.

Even my two book clubs have inadvertently conspired to keep the roiling of our republic top of mind.  Our Madbury Public Library group tackled Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet as well as Chloé Zhao’s film last week, and the Shakespeare discussion at the Portsmouth Public Library took up Hamlet the following Tuesday.  O’Farrell’s novel is an almost too evocative representation of grief and Hamlet a tale of revenge in a poisonous court ruled by a murderous, fatally obsessed king.  Oh, NO KINGS, please!

Where, oh where lies relief?  Well, there is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s principled and pragmatic speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos on 20 January.  The date recalls not only a painful inauguration day (and by association the FIC’s attack on the Capitol), but also the loss of my sister Jane, born on 20 January in 1958.  But Carney’s rational erudition (he quotes Thucydides, not Hannibal Lecter) and pellucid, persuasive rhetoric are a balm of reason.  I recommend you read his plea for middle powers to “live in truth.”  And then take peaceful political action.  And make plans to go spend money in Canada, as I have.

Also, get a few bulbs growing indoors.

And then, go spend some time outside, however cold it might be.

Nature helps us live in truth, as Duke Senior, in exile in the Forest of Arden knows:

                                                . . .  Are not these woods

                More free from peril than the envious court?

                Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,

                The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang

                And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

                Which when it bites and blows upon my body

                Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,

                “This is no flattery; these are counselors

                That feelingly persuade me what I am.”    (As You Like It, 2.1.3-11)

As the historical sign at the Durham landing suggests, this, too, will pass.