I always forget how big and generous the sky is over Barraba. The town is surrounded with rolling hills and beyond it to the west is an extinct volcano, Mount Kaputar, that marks the edge of the Northern Tablelands and stands above an escarpment to the Western Plains.

Since we’ve been here the escarpment has been pushing magnificent cumulous clouds into the air above us. Yesterday a cold front came over, iron-gray and purple. We timed our swim perfectly to finish before the storm broke over the town. Thunder and lightning and the dumping of five inches of rain into Dad’s rainwater tank and the putting out of power. My poor brother-in-law and niece were at the supermarket trying and failing to get the generator up and running when the lights came on again. Let us now give thanks for refrigerators full of unspoiled food.

Barraba after the rain smells like hope.

In April next year I will be eligible for American citizenship, and it will be fifteen years since I left Australia. If love of family is as this beautiful essay says the act of bearing witness – and I think it is – then I have not done very well either by my family of birth or by my families of choice. I am an intermittent presence in everyone’s lives. I suspect now that going voluntarily into exile is unforgivable, but I suspect, too, that I wallow in how unforgivable it is, as a way to avoid the hard work of doing the best I can under the circumstances.

In Sydney. The flight over was great, because the girls are big now and self-entertaining, and because J gave me noise-canceling headphones so I slept nearly all the way to Auckland. A puddle jump to Sydney and then roast lamb and summer pudding and presents with the Fitzhardinges. Jan gave me a new piece by Rachel Honnery, to my delight. In the evening I looked over what Claire had packed for the trip, and as a result this morning we caught a taxi to Bondi Junction to stock up on clothes for her.

I’m chagrined to say that shopping in the Boxing Day sales has been one of the best parts of Christmas so far. We got Claire a super cute new wardrobe for basically no money. She bought a present for Jules. J and I got shorts and J got a new pair of shoes. We had flat whites and babycinos and talked about the likelihood of Cory Booker running for president in 2016. Bourgie enough for you?

It’s overcast and rainy but still way warmer than San Francisco. I am deeply, deeply tired, still shaking off the long tail of my cold and the end-of-year push at work, let alone the jetlag.

I didn’t have a fantastic year in reading, to be honest – I think the Kindle threw me off and that my patterns of acquisition and consumption have yet to rebalance. Here are some books I read that I liked very much:

Nonfiction

Fiction

I guess it wasn’t such a terrible year in reading at that. There are two books, though, that I want to push into your hands in an overbearing yet adorkable bookseller-or-librarian-ish way: Constellation Games and Fair Play. Please read these books. They are very great.

It feels like cheating to recommend Leonard’s book when I have known and loved Leonard for ten years, but I must have read Constellation Games four times this year and gotten something more out of it each time. It’s a first contact novel and an existential love story and it did more than any other single argument to make me believe games are an important art form, but it’s also incredibly funny and moving and Curic the two-souled purple otter is my new favourite fictional character. For its part, Fair Play is about two seventysomething women living at opposite ends of an attic having conversations about pictures and books. Yes, Tove Jansson is the Moomin person. This book is based in part on her life with her wife.

Why these two? Because I am 41 years old. Because I love animals and nature and am living through a mass extinction I helped cause. Because I am a pacifist living in America, and a progressive anarchist who spent my teens as an evangelical Christian assuming I would die in a nuclear holocaust. Because for my first quarter-century I was much troubled by despair. It’s only in the last decade or two that I have had the luxury of time to tinker with my diet and my neurochemistry and my cognitive behavior to try to make a habit of hope and not horror. Because it’s the Northern winter solstice and that means all the festivals of lights, all the songs and candles in the long darkness, and what all the festivals mean is that physics is real: this will be the longest night of the year, and that tomorrow at dawn one shaft of sun will light up the corbel-vaulted room inside Newgrange [or insert your neolithic solar calendar of choice]. And then everything will start to feel a little bit better. It doesn’t stay dark. As Bill Bryson says, life wants to be. Life doesn’t want to be much. From time to time, life goes extinct. Life goes on.

Constellation Games and Fair Play are quite literally stories of friendship and hope, not in the movie trailer way that makes you wince but in a clear-eyed, fearless way that is able to talk about betrayal and jealousy and irreconcilable differences and the cold empty vastness of space. They are both, in fact, books about how to be a friend, and how to be hopeful. We are chimpanzees with doomsday weapons, adrift on a rock in an immense dark void. We have to take care of each other and we have to believe that things can change for the better. So, you know. RTFM.

Claire said: “I had my first dream in Spanish. I was at Maestra Lisa’s house and I said to her: ‘I don’t know how I got here! What am I doing here?'”

“In Spanish?”

“In Spanish!”

She knew I’d been waiting for this moment for years.

I dreamed I was in a medieval courtyard-tavern attending a spontaneous Adacamp. As I was telling people about how the movement had started as a gleam in Val’s and Mary’s eyes, more and more women arrived, hundreds of women from all over the world: some sat at tables hacking on laptops plastered with stickers, some built huge Carnival masks covered in LEDs and held a parade, some played guitars and jammed. I wandered out onto a dock on a lake, and saw Danny and Emily Candy sitting on a sand dune waiting for a concert to begin. A hopey-changey dream.

My phone fell out of my jeans pocket and into the toilet yesterday, which is kinda tragic as they just don’t make decent hardware-keyboard smartphones any more. I’d known this for a while, and the phone was on its lastish legs anyway, so I felt rueful every time I looked at it. (“I love you, neti pot. Too bad you’re already broken.”) After its brief immersion it turned on valiantly twice before starting to light up in wrong places. Now I am charging Jeremy’s old phone, which he bought at the same time as mine, so it has a comforting familiarity that feels illegitimate, like making out with your boyfriend’s fraternal twin.

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been obsessing about horses, obviously. I had this stretch of weeks in the late fall where I was riding Bella and Jackson and spending time at Salome’s barn with the girls, and it was excellent. The weather held on fine much longer than anyone could have hoped. I had a ride where Jackson stopped at almost everything, and it turned out that he had a giant stone in his hoof, and upon reflection I realized that he had jumped around most of the course for me even though the stone bruised him every time he landed. That changed our relationship in two ways: I trusted him more, and he found out he could stop. We worked on the stopping problem for weeks before we finally had a ride where we flew every fence.

He’s lovely. The whole three months of riding him and learning his quirks and ironing them out one at a time, and getting to the point where we can do beautiful forward soft round flat work, and then jump a 3′ course without breaking a sweat (he enjoys the bigger fences much more) has been one of the greatest treats of my life. Christi keeps rolling her eyes at me because he doesn’t have his flying changes, but he’s my big rawboned Thoroughbred snuggly bear and I love him. Christi: “YOU’RE SO EASILY PLEASED.” Guilty as charged.

“I think we should get married and have babies.”

“Okay.”

“And live in a tiny apartment in the middle of an awesome little city somewhere, and I will have horses.”

“Sounds good.”

“And you can work for Silicon Valley startups, and we’ll make friends with a bunch of people who build killer robots for fun.”

Laughter.

“I know, I know, that’s just asking for TOO MUCH…”

I can’t remember if I mentioned this at the time, but it was watching Gilbert enjoy himself at Jeremy’s fortieth birthday party up at the Big Yellow House that revealed to me the secret of a happy life, which is to have friends you unreservedly like and then to play games with them. Since Salome has been teaching and riding at Sun Valley, she’s taken to calling me with reports of her rides, as I not infrequently give her reports of mine. We spent a long time today discussing natural horsemanship and in what contexts it is awesome and in what contexts it is bogus and arguably a tool of the patriarchy, and the horses available to her and which of these might best meet her riding goals, and indeed, what exactly those goals might be.

I was just thinking how lucky I am to have a friend who shares my most arcane and indefensible passion, when she said: “I am so glad to have you to talk to about all this, because you get it.”

I said: “I don’t think I tell you often enough how much I like you.”

She laughed. “You tell me every time we talk to each other that you love me.”

“Yes, but I love you and like you, and that’s so rare!”

Raena Lamont for President, 2036.

“This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else.”

There will be twenty women in the next US Senate. Twenty women. And at least one of them is a staggering badass.

Gay, straight: it’s all the same love.

Beautiful.

Rachel Maddow is perfect. The end.

NAJAH encounters a young fellow of similar age who is also dressed as the SPIDER-MAN.

ME, joyfully: Spiders-men!

YOUNG FELLOW OF SIMILAR AGE: You scary?

NAJAH shakes his head.

YFOSA: No. Spider-man no scary!

*

CLAIRE: I’m not a cat. I’m a werewolf. I’m a werewolf! I’m not a cat! I’m not a cat, I’m a wolf.

*

ME, accompanying JULIA across a particularly terrifying front yard: There’s a severed limb! There’s another one! Tombstones! A giant rat! Are these demons guarding the door? OH MY GOD THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THERE WATCHING ‘HOME IMPROVEMENT.’ AAAARG NOW TIM ALLEN IS ON!

JACK: Hush.

ME: At least it wasn’t Shatner.

*

ADA: That lady said that my costume was “very creative.” It was either a compliment… OR AN INSULT.

*

DANNY: I’m afraid Ada’s Nefertiti hat will fill up with rain.

JEREMY: She should fill it up with candy.

ME: It’s the inundation of the Nile.

Yeah, so I kind of dropped the ball there in terms of updates. A lot happened. A lot happened, most of which I will have to gloss over here. Combots was super awesome, and my mother-in-law revealed a hitherto unsuspected bloodlust in rooting for the giant killer robots. I harvested tomatos from our garden and I snuggled with Tiger Lily the pony at the school fundraiser. I got an extremely welcome phone call out of the blue. I ran a party for a dozen seven year olds, and I even baked a cake, and it was delicious, but seriously: giving a major keynote is a lot less stressful. Also incredibly stressful: a fundraising deadline for my beloved nonprofit, the Ada Initiative. Once again we hit our goal, but once again we were saved at the last possible minute by extraordinary acts of kindness.

Sunday night I called Kay and Kelso to make sure they knew where their nearest hurricane evacuation shelter was (they didn’t) and that they had a go bag packed (nope.) Kay and I were laughing our heads off over the phone: “This is a matter of life and death, missy!” Then when Sandy fell on lower Manhattan like an asteroid, a building around the corner from their apartment collapsed, and it didn’t seem so funny any more. They’re fine but have no power or cell service.

All this and two tragic, heart-hollowing, impossible-to-make-sense-of deaths in our extended circle, and I volunteered for another nonprofit because look at all this free time I have, and something about our metropolitan area sportsball team, and Jackson and Bella are shiny ponies and I had a big breakthrough with Jackson on Sunday, finding my balance so I could sit his bucks and send him forward again as soon as his hoofs hit the ground, and he was perplexed into obedience, and I am haunted by images of the evacuation of the medical center in New York, and Claire started a new swimming class and her glossy head looked like a seal’s in the pool, both awesomely fierce and terrifyingly fragile, and if anything is the message of the tumultuous last ten days, ten days that were like a roller coaster that has been swept out to sea, it is this: that in the end there is only love, nothing else, only love.

It was hot and humid last night. Even so the morning went well and we were all bundled into the car in good time. At the Cortland and Mission lights, Jeremy said:

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Me neither,” said Claire.

“Neither did I,” said Julia.

I was dumbstruck. It was such a quotidian thing and yet it was the first time I had really felt the four of us as a family, individual people all living in the same house, sharing the same weather. I can’t put it into words.

This weekend, Jeremy’s mother is arriving but Jeremy will be spending the entire weekend wrangling adorable killer robots. That’s okay; I will take Jan with me to the girls’ piano, wushu, riding and swimming lessons, and to Najah’s birthday party. That’s assuming I finish the huge work deadline I am currently avoiding by writing this. Next weekend is not so bad – just a garden work day, school Fall Fun Festival and Julia’s birthday party, plus all the usual lessons, but at least I will have Jeremy around to help.

Sigh! I do love my wildly busy life. The girls and I have been doing a lot of cooking and drawing and reading. Julia has hugely enjoyed the beginning of piano and practices every day. Fourth grade at school comes with a choice of flute, violin or something else and Claire chose violin, which in practice means that she is trying to reproduce Zoe Keating songs at one-quarter scale. I am more than fine with that.

I am reading the Jenny Linsky stories with Jules and the Swallows and Amazon series with Claire. Jules is enormous fun to read with: every plot twist is a total shock to her. Claire likes to crochet or cross-stitch while I read, but will occasionally nudge me to ask a question or make an observation that makes it clear she has been hanging on every word. Curling up with them to read, usually with the cat walking over the mountain range of our knees, is the best part of every day.

DSC_2028, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Ignore the poo.

DSC_1667, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

I seem to have spent the entire summer grinning like fule.

In an otherwise creepy and depressing thread, I found this wonderful comment:

A girl needs to learn how to perform “what boys like” in order to attract and keep boys’ attention, and boys take it for granted girls will be doing this, that girls exist as objects for their attention to pick and choose from (this is why many guys, especially young ones, feel perfectly at home evaluating women, any woman at all, with “I’d hit it” or not – we are surprised at their presumption, but from their POV that is their role as selector). Boys and girls (and men and women) will “punish” girls who aren’t trying to fulfill their given role.

This was such a strong pressure in my adolescence that specific instances of gender-enforcement stand out in my memory: Christine saying “It’s past time you started shaving your legs”; Aaron and his friends forming the Itty Bitty Titty Committee to give marks out of ten for our bust sizes; Cameron saying “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair; your long hair was the good kind, with curls.” And many more. Women were the biggest enforcers. Jan, the minister’s wife, was the worst. Anne Summers wrote a book I still haven’t finished, about women in early colonial Sydney, called Damned Whores and God’s Police. Those were our only options. Jan was God’s chief of police.

Girlness was a performance judged by a panel of assholes. I sucked at it, which turned out to be my salvation. Being a horsy girl was a recognized loophole on the tomboy spectrum (although, again, Claudia, when we were all of ten: “You can’t just talk about horses all the time, you know.” HAHAHA SUCK IT.) The panel of assholes still in full flight in Australia, by the way, where the gendered slurs against our Prime Minister boggle the mind. (Anne Summers, on point again.) But whenever I get to bitching about this on IM, Liz sensibly points out: “It’s not Australia. It’s the patriarchy.”

Argh! I have daughters. I drag them along to barns and science museums and give them math books and read Swallows and Amazons to them at bedtime so that they can have Mary King and Limor Fried and Fan Chung and Nancy Blackett as alternative role models to Jan-the-minister’s-wife. But they’ll need the hearts and stomachs of concrete elephants all the same.

And still. More vividly than I remember all the putdowns, I remember the day I realized I was a free agent, and could exercise a choice. I want that for everyone.

An old buddy is Facebooking about his mountain biking adventures on the same Ku-ring-gai Chase trails Alfie and I knew so well: the Perimeter Trail, the Long Trail, the Cooyong-Neverfail Trail. I got to remembering what it felt like to let Alfie go. He was blindingly fast well into his twenties. He outran a 3yo QH filly once, I remember, my grand old Arabian king. Yet I don’t ever remember being afraid sitting on his back. I held the rein like a gossamer thread.

I realized in my body, in a way that’s hard to put into words, that I need to find that same feeling of openness when I point Bella and Jackson at fences: the same light contact, the same absolute lack of fear.

IMG_20120929_125536.jpg, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

This is Claire on a Welsh cob and I am pretty sure I daydreamed the whole thing.