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Happy 2011! Ryan fell asleep long before midnight, and I was reading Winter World: the Ingenuity of Animal Survival as the clock quietly ticked over. We shared an Alaskan Amber, which is a sweet selection, given how many we shared on our honeymoon. Ryan's brother brought a case back for us from Colorado.

Every year, a list of a few favorite things I encountered during the year. I read a lot of books, but somehow, not a great many of good ones. Last year's goal had been to gather a dramatic number, and 228 is the largest by far, and this year, I hope to look at my list and feel as if I'd read a great many good books, books that I savored. For now, here are a few good things I read or watched in 2010:

Books, Fiction
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (re-read)
- Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport
- Push by Sapphire
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robi
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (re-read)
- Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

Books, Nonfiction
- This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich

Books, Poetry / Books on Poetry
- Cooling Time by C.D. Wright
- My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habeggger
- School of the Arts: Poems by Mark Doty
- The Last Clear Narrative: Poems by Rachel Zucker
- The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep: Poems by Linda Gregerson
- Bird Eating Bird: Poems by Kristin Naca
- Juvenilia: Poems by Ken Chen
- Face: Poems by Sherman Alexie
- The Country Between Us: Poems by Carolyn Forche (re-read)
- Little Boat: Poems by Jean Valentine
- Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees: Poems by Julianna Baggott

Films:
- (500) Days of Summer
- The Girl in the Cafe
- I've Loved You So Long
- Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
- The Boys Are Back
- La Moustache
- The Big Question
- Babies
- Under the Same Moon
- Facing Windows

Television: We don't have cable or any reception at all, for that matter, so we rely on Netflix, and I went through The L Word and enjoyed it; we also discovered the charm of Eureka and had an oddly transfixed time watching Discovery Channel's Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment. 2010 held a brief bout with cable, and we crushed on Ace of Cakes as well as Life.

394: a few best-loved lists for 2009

(image: mine, our last book club meeting where we read The Wild Trees,
which might have made the list, if I hadn't read so darn many books this year!)
(the "cupcake" is actually fruitcake made by Angie)

In the past, I've taken a moment at this time of year to make a "Top Nine of Two Thousand Nine" type list, but this year, I followed Eireann and Shari's lead and reflected a little in singular posts looking back on the momentum of the year. I couldn't leave it at that, though, not this list-maker.

I reduced it to reading and film watching, because I think of these lists as a giant string of recommendations; this year, after reading as much as I did, I opted to also break the favorite reads by genre, since I know so many of you have different readerly tastes.

Books, Fiction:
- The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
- Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
- Anagrams and Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
- Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
- Inventing the Abbots and Other Stories by Sue Miller
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- A Mercy by Toni Morrison
- Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry

Books, Nonfiction:
- Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier
- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski
- The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis
- Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber
- Dog Years by Mark Doty
- A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
- The Geese of Beaver Bog by Heinrich Bernd
- The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich

Books, Poetry:
- (several collections of poems) by Ellen Bryant Voigt
- Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
- The Heat Bird by Mei-Mei Berssenbugge
- The Watercourse by Cynthia Zarin
- Still to Mow by Maxine Kumin
- Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove
- Old Heart by Stanley Plumly
- The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje
- Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Filibuster to Delay a Kiss by Courtney Queeney
- The Museum of Clear Ideas by Donald Hall
- The Descent by Sophie Cabot Black
- Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker

(Link: my Good Reads profile.)

(Number of books read in 2009: 220)
(For the curious: 2002: 104; 2003: 146; 2004: 129; 2005: 83; 2006: 77; 2007: 81; 2008: 128. Can you guess which years I was teaching high school and which years I was in graduate school? And yes, this is my second time in graduate school.)


Films:
- The Beautiful Country
- Dancing in Lughnasa
- Rachel Getting Married
- Things We Lost in the Fire
- The Visitor
- Dear Frankie
- War Dance
- Food, Inc.
- Raising Victor Vargas
- Vicky Cristina Barcelona
- Dan in Real Life
- Away We Go
- The World's Fastest Indian
- Rudo y Cursi

Anything you see you loved (or hated)? I'd love recommendations, if you have any, for my 2010 list.

Happy new year: xo

393: beautiful year, december

I catch mice beneath our upstairs bathroom sink, though I've since put a pause on it with our forest of snow.


I am surprised when the semester ends--didn't it just begin?--and have taken on a whole new subject in my writing, returning to The Bodies exhibit twice in order to explore this muse a bit more.


Meryl and Shawn come up for an afternoon of kale and white bean soup and hiking at Memorial, but the new medicine I'm on (I take this for five days each month) gives me pause. They're patient and the world is gorgeous.


We spend Christmas at the in-laws' with his siblings and nephews. Christmas with children is undoubtedly one of the most magical things indeed, and while we are gone, we have another snowstorm at home, and our neighbors kindly take care of our sidewalks and driveway. When we return, we take the two out to dinner with their sweet daughter Bailey and have a game night at their home afterwards.

I begin to send my chapbook out, even though it's not really truly ready. But it needs me to nudge it out the door in order to blow a little dust off. My fingers are crossed.

Ryan and I sleep through the turning to midnight, though the dogs wake me at half past, and I read for several hours in celebration.

392: beautiful year, november

I turn thirty and am surrounded by some of my absolute most favorite people in the world--so much so that it is even a little overwhelming. We go to a vegetarian restaurant I've longed to try, and a week or two later, I receive a handful of text messages, telling us we had good timing--Cafe Brenda is to close. Despite this, I enjoy my autumn pie, my cranberry juice in a wine glass, my good good company, and finally kissing the twenties good-bye, which is more of a relief than anything else.


There's more hiking up Memorial Bluff, more celebrating of the fall colors, more of Penelope and Zephyr romping through the bracken. This is the last month Penny can come home without limping, and in December, I take her to the vet for x-rays, which come back inconclusive and are sent off to Rochester for further inspection. We joke about taking her to Mayo.


I make plenty of washcloths, as usual, and begin to learn how to felt.



We actually spend a weekend preparing the garden for spring--tilling the soil, mixing in leaves and compost, emptying the worm bin save the few worms that are left. I buy a composter and Ryan assembles it in the garage. We talk about getting a CSA share in the summer.


Thanksgiving is spent in Michigan this year, where my grandmother is in a care facility recovering from a broken hip. She has since been cleared by the doctors to go home, but her physical therapist has kept her into the new year. I head up the meal execution, but find there is no possible way I could have done so without the great help of my husband and two parents. My mother worries over my medication-sickness, but I assure her it's all part of the charm of my disease, and I will be better soon. My father smashes a deer on the way to one of our nursing home visits, and I forgive him.

391: beautiful year, october

It's a big month, MFA-wise: so much so that I have to hibernate a little after. But for now, there is the MFA road trip....

... Meryl's first public reading ...



... Adam Zagajewski coming to town for the Twin Cities Book Festival, and after driving him about, dinner and lunch, an interview for our lit magazine, a manuscript conference that really elevated me ...


... Anne Carson(!) coming to town with a gorgeous performance ...

... and a hike with some of my favorite people in the program.



This month so much was about keeping up with reading, about writing so many poems, about making our way up the small slopes of Minnesota. The colors are gorgeous, striking. I bring my leaf identification book with me on my daily walk. We use birch branches for fetch.

390: beautiful year, september

To celebrate the end of summer, we invite our nearby friends to our home for our annual wine tasting party. Because of some partner's working shifts, we end up with two parties--one with a Spanish theme, and the other second group of MFA friends and partners with a local theme.


More Hay Creek, more chasing balls, more summer. I forget, sometimes, just how summer can be, how it lingers and teases.

I get an internship with the creative writing department, I get trained in teaching freshmen composition, I start the second year of my MFA.


When I get to the State Fair, I think: This is my last year, but then the animals charm me. This year, I go with Kelly, the only person I've ever gone with steadily, and we bring along our husbands and I bring my former student too. We pet pigs, eat honey ice cream,


I get a tattoo. A really big one.


And I meet Maxine Hong Kingston. I also drive Jim Shepard around, part of my internship, to MPR and lunches. I'm schmoozing with authors. I'm writing more. I'm feeling a bit more comfortable here in the program.

389: beautiful year, august

Last year, Ryan and I celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary by visiting my grandmother in Michigan, and this year, we travel to Austin, Texas, to visit my sister. We discover the joys of migas and grackels, chicken shit bingo and ostrich cowboy boots.


I attend Bread Loaf. I'm on cloud nine.

388: beautiful year, july

We keep hiking at Frontenac. The dogs keep rolling in fish carcasses.


We enjoy Colville in the summer. This year, there are gorgeous flower beds and vegetables, all in an interactive garden next to the updated playground equipment with squishy footpaths.


There is a small reunion of some of my high school girlfriends, three of whom are full-fledged mamas. Their children are charming, and it's good to spend time with families, updating one another on small accomplishments in life.


The garden is getting tangled, and we burn Ryan's father's tongue on hot peppers. I catch toads, which Zephyr and Penelope dutifully sniff and drool upon. I start a new blog, one that has actually stuck.

387: beautiful year, june

Ryan and I go on our annual end-of-school-year camping trip with or dear friends Lane + Angie + Chad. It rained the entire day on Saturday, and we kept ourselves beneath tent flaps; I read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and tried to keep myself from rushing to the bathroom (that would be bout of flu #2, thankyou). Sunday the skies cleared and we were able to enjoy the falls. I love sleeping outside, and I love any time spent with this cluster. Cherries have come into season.


I spend half the month in New jersey, but the only time I leave the confines of the white house in Toms River is when we go to the shore, which is resurrected in a poem by my friend Colleen later in the year. I go out east strongly believing I will come back no longer wanting children, prepared to grow old with a series of golden retrievers, but then: look at how sweet they are.


Christian has his first birthday, which is essentially spent in the Nelson's garage, watching him smear frosting in every crevice of his face. This is followed by a rousing game of four-square while the birthday boy sleeps. I'm glad to be home, to feel the Minnesota sun and examine the Minnesota green.


We turn to Hay Creek on weekends to tire out the dogs. We pull our first strawberries from the garden. We're happy summer has finally burst into full bloom.

385: beautiful year, may

We went to the Minnesota Zoo for the first time with our dear friend Mike. I fall in love with the Canada geese especially, the ones fiercely guarding the nest.


First Hay Creek trip of the season, and already the world has burst into green. I'm shocked and thrilled, trying to spot other instances of growth, of colors that aren't the same as dirty snow.


We go to Duluth for a wedding, and the next day we appreciate the sun on the lake.

The semester ends, and I witness my first thesis defense. I realize I have a lot of reading to do. I survive another bout of the flu, a smaller one this time, and I'm sad to say good-bye to many of my classmates for the summer, though the relief at the end of this semester overrides much else.

I've finished my first year of an MFA.


Ryan and I travel to Missouri to visit our friends Dan and Tracy, where I feed carrots to elk, eat pulled pork barbeque, and continue my book-a-day of poetry in May, a project that I'm repeating this December.


I take my first letterpress class, fall in love with the Vandercook, settle for a Kelsey platen, and buy my first press. I love wood type the most, though I suspect lead will be my type of choice, sturdier and swifter and able to survive the broadsides I'd like to one day print.


When planting this season, we find lettuce from last year, wild patches of it, and have salad for dinner. We plant strawberries and peppers and squash and ease our worm bin outdoors after the last frost.


We begin Frontenac hikes, which are torturous, but gorgeous. On our May hike, we spot bald eagles, deer, bumble bees, and wild turkeys. Ferns are out now, a plant I love in its pattern and intricacy.


We go to farmer's market stands, bring home the first produce of the year, make plans for summer trips. I survive my month of poetry and turn to novels in June.

384: beautiful year, april

I start the month fulfilling a promise to Kelly and watch her son for two evenings, one day, and I come away from the experience haggard and uncertain of ever wanting my own children. This solo-parenting is miserable, but I soon realize things change when it is a part of your own growth and change, and not a sudden trial-by-fire, not of my own flesh and blood. A sweet boy, but I know nothing amounts to the love a parent can have for a child, and I'm glad to learn the lesson of sacrifice a little early.


In our first hike of the year, we are surprised by a prairie fire on Barn Bluff. I run up to take photographs as it approaches and find myself a bit caught, getting out of the precarious situation just barely. The dogs and we have soot in our hair, in our nostrils, everywhere It's a beautiful and terrible sight, this renewal before growth.


I'm able to watch the cedar waxwings eat last year's crabapples from our trees. They're small, like cherries, and withered. I take so many shots that floor me, so close to the birds, such a change from years ago when I couldn't capture anything wild. A few days earlier, I found one of the birds on our storm doors to the basement; it must have broken its neck somehow.


Two of us get violently sick: Zephyr, whom we suspect has gotten into the compost, begins this awful shaking that appears neurological in nature. Ryan has to drive him an hour away, a drive where he vomits in the car so much that we have to have it detailed. The vet gives him activated charcoal, which makes him belch like an inked squid.

I'm also sick, the sort that has everything coming out both ends, often at once, humiliated and sweating in the upstairs bathroom. I cannot remember the last time I felt so awful, and looking back, I wonder if H1N1 was rearing its ugly head just yet.

Is this beautiful? This month has been difficult, for certain. The survival is what makes it resonate.


At the end of April, the daffodils rise up out of the loam, their sunny heads bobbing as I pass them on my way to campus. The semester is almost over and though there have been many high points, I'm mostly relieved. After two writing conferences, jury duty, and what will soon be two bouts of the flu, I'm ready to close down the running tally of failures in the classroom and begin again.