Merry Holidays....All of Them

December 2023

Happy Holidays to you and yours. 

    I have been contemplating a letter or a card now for some time and only when the time has now grown so short that there is not a chance that this will make it to anyone before Christmas...or New Year's….only then, does it feel like the right time to sit and ponder on the year’s events and antics. As much fun as a card or pictures might be to send, I feel sometimes that social media has taken away the actual events of life and left us all with only a few saccharinely sweet highlights.
    So, to avoid the lack of context that often comes with social media, I am embarking upon a “Holiday Letter” - and by "Holiday" I mean this might not actually get out to anyone until sometime in the early part of 2024 - Happy Valentine’s, Happy Saint Patrick’s day and maybe even Happy Easter for all I know.  Also, if you want the abbreviated form, here it is:
We are all fine, life is weird, carry on. 
If you have read this far, by all means carry on if you feel so inclined. 

Last year I made a resolution. I even think I said it out loud to people, which by all definitions makes it harder to pretend that you were only kidding. The resolution was to move closer to selling my practice to the young associate that I so fortunately stumbled upon while ranting on-line about not being able to find a young vet that wants to own a business. 

 There are times when the universe seems to smile on me and I do my best to pay attention to those moments and not screw it up. So, after 5 years of organizing, employing, appraising, re-organizing, and re-appraising, I am finally selling my practice to another woman veterinarian to carry on the Family Pet Vet business.

It has been 16 years of income and 5 kids that my business provided for, but it is time to pass it off to the next generation of veterinarian that can continue to move it forward.  

I know being a veterinarian is often in the top 5 things of what people want to do when they grow up, but what isn’t widely known is that most vets I know should be awarded an honorary degree in psychology and grief counseling.  As rewarding of a job as it is at times, it eventually wears a person down. 

I will still be working at the clinic - just more or less swapping positions with my associate so she can take on the income as well as the nitty gritty of business ownership and I can just go to work in the morning and focus on the animals. I am looking to do that for the next year at least and then see what happens from there. 

Keith is busy working on various projects around the house. There are enough here to keep him busy for several more years, but with my bowing out of the business ownership scenario, he will likely be looking for something a little more full time that keeps us out of the poor house at least for the near future.

He has also been busy this summer helping my mom move into her new condo and helping to organize the sale of my parent’s property. He is like a one man force of nature when he gets down to doing things. 

    Amid several adventures this last year, Keith and I took a wonderful trip through Canada this summer. Flew to Maine, rented a car and then essentially drove home while stopping to see the sites in Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, and many small towns along the way. During the trip, we left accommodations completely up to chance and had a great time trading off between camping and staying in available AirBNBs - our good fortune found us staying one night in a Geodesic dome, one night in a Yurt and our last night in a haunted Ringling Brothers mansion. Keith and I travel fairly well together and I wouldn’t mind a few longer sojourns in the future.

Meg is our last and final hurrah at parenting. I like to pretend that we finally got it figured out, but I think she would be the first to point out our many parental flaws. She is a senior at Solon and (as of this moment) considering going to University of South Dakota in Vermillion or maybe today it is ISU in Ames? If she does go to SD, she will be the only kid of ours to have ventured out of state…or maybe she just needs to get that little bit further away from us since her dad and I have been double teaming her this year. Her senior year has been a good one - inducted into the National Honor Society, played Rizo in the school musical Grease, holding down two part time jobs, and excelling at League of Legends where she can often be found gaming with her sister Ella late into the night. 

Jaime (whom many of you have known as Mara) has finished the first semester at the University of Iowa majoring in Anthropology and taken on many new challenges in embracing the person he most wants to be. New friends, new subjects of study, new adventures all seem to be suiting Jaime well, despite the occasional blown fuse or bedbug infestation in the dorms.  It is the crazy events that make college so memorable.

Ella is down to only one more semester at Iowa State University and then she will graduate with her degree in Animal Ecology in May. Not sure yet what is on her horizon, but I suspect it will involve both her boyfriend, Seth (who just graduated this December) and finding a few cats to adopt. Ella spent

her summer in Kenya, Africa studying Baboons and their family systems while simultaneously dodging being trampled by the elephants in the area that have a serious dislike of humans thanks to too many poachers in the past. Thankfully, she waited until she was home in our kitchen before regaling us with her near death encounter with a trumpeting elephant that chased her and her cohorts down a hill.  Kinda hoping that whatever is on her horizon is a little less death defying than her Africa adventures. Ella is the only kid (so far) that has ended a phone conversation with us by saying, “I have to go now, there are lions outside.” 

Duluth, northern Minnesota, and her boyfriend, Justin have captured Faye’s heart. She is working as a sustainability coordinator for the city of Duluth and pondering getting a masters in Education in the next few years.  She is currently bent on talking Keith and I into moving up to Duluth and much of our time on the phone is spent expressing to us all the

wonders of Minnesota, which, being a Minnesotan myself, doesn’t take a lot of convincing. I sometimes have to remind her that I was the one that originally took her into the north woods and boundary waters of Minnesota.   Faye spent last winter shoveling her way out of record snow falls in California when she was teaching at the Pali Institute and then hopped a flight to Argentina to spend some time hiking around South America with Justin prior to his graduation from Luther last May. 

Simon continues to thrive in Colorado with his fiance (yes, you read that correctly) Clarie!  He works remotely for REG while Claire is finishing up a Masters degree in Bison nutrition. Simon surprised Claire with a proposal over Thanksgiving this year while they were out finding a Christmas tree and they are contemplating a wedding sometime in the fall of 2025.  Between skydiving, running ultramarathons, and climbing, he seems to have taken a special interest in freaking his mother out on a routine basis. Thank goodness he sometimes has to fix cars - it keeps his feet on the ground. 

So, that is the general run down of all the family happenings. Kids are great, life is amazing, yada, yada, yada…except for those times that I catch myself suddenly wondering where my kids have all gone, because it seems like just yesterday that they were all racing around here as toddlers and tweens. 

 And I have to stop and think about all the veterinarians that I have worked with and for over the years and what it likely felt for them to sell off the business they had worked so hard to build - it’s good, don’t get me wrong- but it is also a difficult transition and I don’t think I ever totally understood how much of themselves they invested into something until I am on the “seller” end of the long legal paragraphs and the tangled mess it can be to unravel all of the machinations of a business and make sure it gets picked up mostly intact. 

 I told Stacy it is a little like she is trying to catch a train mid-flight and I am trying to jump off of it.  Her’s is the technically more involved situation, but my situation likely hurts more.  

Haven’t been running much of late, but have high hopes of training for another marathon in the fall of this year.. I will likely never be able to match my best time and that, in and of itself, has taken some mental readjustments. As my grandfather noted so eloquently, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken” and I am starting to sense the age-related weakening of joints and muscles. But  the challenge of training and the hurdle of surviving a race is enough to keep me moving and focusing on other things other than my existential anxieties that creep into my daily thoughts. 

Concerns over the environment, US politics and the world in general feel like a pot on a slow boil at the back of my mind and it feels like it is rapidly running out of water and will likely burst into flame. I then have to go out to my garden and walk amid all the perennial crops that happily bring themselves forward again and again to provide sustenance to the insects, animals and humans around them and am reminded that even after all the humans have managed to muck up the place, the planet itself will likely go on quite contentedly without us.

Reading and listening to books is my go-to for focusing my otherwise worried mind. I managed to flog through 69 books this year, not counting the three or four I am in the midst of. My favorites were (in no particular order): “Wellness” by Nathan Hill, “Mad Honey” by Jodi Picoult, “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus,  “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin, and “I’ll Show Myself Out” by Jessi Klein.

And with that, I am off to finish maybe one or two of those other books to round out the year. 

I hope the New Year brings to you whatever you need most - a break, an old friend, a new start, and exciting adventure, a good cup of coffee, a great book….

Cheers!