We visited my sister's new home today, which is approximately a gazillion miles from anywhere, roughly between The Sticks, The Boonies and East Bumfuck. She's as far north as Piscataway, New Jersey! Over a lovely late Christmas dinner she shared holiday cards and letters from old friends and neighbors (she's much more attentive than I am about maintaining relationships. I rationalize this with the thought that I spend considerably less on Christmas postage than she does). There were letters from people who had grown up in our neighborhood, friends from Canada we had met on our summer vacations to Newfoundland, and a picture from one of my sister's high school friends who has 10 kids ranging in age from 21 to 18 months. Caitlin declared that she would run out of names before she could name that many kids.

My sister has 7 cats, one dog, one husband, one son and is now the proud owner of a coal stove smack in the middle of her dining room. I didn't know it was even legal to burn coal anymore. She hasn't tried it yet and sounds skeptical about how clean, or not, it might be, but her husband seems enthusiastic about the ability to burn a fossil fuel inside the house. The 7 cats are down from a high of 9 last year, before the rabid kitten (desribed in an earlier entry) and an older Siamese died. She still has a cat I donated to her, Midnight, who is about 15 and continues to have a penchant for biting. It was probably something in his childhood that he can blame his parents for.

As we were driving home tonight in the winter darkness, we took a route through a portion of the town near us that is a tiny town-within-a-town - a cluster of a dozen or so ancient homes in a hollow. They made me think about how much I like to look in the windows of homes I pass when driving. Not in a peeping Tom type of way (in fact, it rather ruins the effect if I see people in the houses), but just to get a glimpse into people's lives and see what they're surrounded themselves with in their homes. There's one old house with a big glassed-in side porch that has a Christmas tree up year-round and has for a long time. What would possess you to keep a tree up all the time? Does the person who lives there sell Christmas tree ornaments and use that as her showroom? No storage space for the tree? Did someone die in the room and has it been locked ever since? Is this sounding a little creepy?