This is ludicrous. I know it. The tree knows it. The woodland creatures know it.

By Zach Hively

When I was a younger man, I had a grand vision for my future: I would buy (or otherwise acquire) some land, and with this land I would grow a Christmas forest, planting a pine tree each year to create homes for woodland creatures until enough of them became my friends that I could dispense with human interaction altogether.

I have grown and matured, though, and so has the vision. Namely, I am less certain that the forest is a Christmas one. I might more honestly call it a solstice forest. Or a Thanksgiving forest, since that is closer to when I buy the trees. Or a January forest, because that is when I plant them. Or, perhaps most accurately, I could call it a money pit.

​Regardless of cost, this is one dream coming true. I may not be a world-famous paleontologist ballplayer with a commercial pilot’s license (yet), but by Jiminy Christmas I have a forest. It is five feet tall, four trees large, and counting. 

Mostly it seems to be counting up. It almost counted down last year, when one of the trees developed an infestation of some kind--not the type of woodland creature I hoped to befriend—that made me abandon, with prejudice, my no-chemical kumbaya approach to winter forest management. 

This tree also had a comorbidity, a second infestation, that I could not identify despite my four years’ experience in forest stewardship. I showed a picture to a man at the nursery. “Looks like bird vomit,” he said. In hindsight, I question if he actually worked there.

These are the difficulties that confound my annual tradition. You see, growing a magical EOY forest is less simple than picking up a tree from a lot and strapping it to the roof of any ol’ car. It is predicated on several factors, chief among them that picking up living trees is really, really hard. 

Living trees require dirt. Dirt is heavy. It is also notoriously difficult to strap to the roof. 
If we are perfectly frank—and why shouldn’t we be—half the reason I keep the registration current on my thirtysomething pickup is so that, once a year, I can drive it to my tree dealer, and he can direct two much younger men to hoist the tree into the bed, and I can drive it home where I unload it by my much older self.
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This is relatively easy to do; I have the advantage of gravity. The real trick is sliding this half-ton or so of wood and soil from three feet high to ground level without seriously injuring the tree, or myself, or my pride.

If we are still perfectly frank—why stop now—this moment, usually taking place in dwindling daylight and encroaching cold, when I must navigate this living being and its dirt to the earth without the aid of an advanced pulley system, this is the moment I use to assess the state of my physical health. In short, it is my annual exam.

When getting the piñon to the ground goes well, I am also doing well. When it is a struggle, or I throw out my back, or I wonder legitimately at any point if I will be spending the night pinned under a root ball, this motivates my exercise regimen for the next twelve months. 

I say this in earnest: other people train for beach bods or lower cholesterol. I look at a pull-up bar in May and think, “Better try to jump and touch that—I got a tree to unload this winter.”
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This is ludicrous. I know it. The tree knows it. The woodland creatures know it. But I can make myself think that I can indeed transform my body and my physical capabilities from one winter to the next. It sure seems much more plausible than transforming my body in a month, which is about how long I have to enjoy the tree, festooned with white twinkle lights outside my living room window, before I need to put it in the ground.

This requires an even greater feat of strength than dragging the tree out of my pickup truck. Because I cannot get the tree back into the pickup truck, I have nothing but my wits and my muscles—mostly my wits—to walk the tree, all while battling friction and pine needles to my face, from my living room window to the Yuletide forest and the too-shallow hole I tried to dig after the ground had frozen.
Still, somehow, I have survived this odyssey every year, and so have the trees. We will more likely than not survive it this year, too. The forest will not be any taller, but it will be one tree bigger, and I will swell with pride every time I gaze upon it instead of doing a workout. In the spirit of frankness—in for a penny, in for a pound—I sure hope the birds don’t hurl on it. 

Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand.

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Republished from 12/2019

​By Hilda Joy

Christmas and cookies go together ofcourse.  I have many happy memories of cookies sweetening this year-end holiday, but my favorite is of a woman with whom I worked who took Christmas cookie baking seriously.  Every December 1, she bought 20 pounds of butter.  Every day after work, she would make a light dinner and go to bed early.  Then she would awake about two o’clock in the morning and bake a batch of cookies.  These would be packed into candy boxes she collected throughout the year at the office, where we had a custom of celebrating our birthdays by buying two pounds of chocolates, passing them around after lunch, and then giving my friend the empty box.  These boxes of cookies would be stashed in her freezer to be shared at Christmas, especially at her annual Christmas open house.  In addition to all the Swedish recipes she learned early in life, she made Mexican besos (kisses) and a shortbread cookie so rich that she cut the dough into half-inch cubes, sprinkled with red and green sugars.
 
Another woman, with the help of two of her friends, gathered all of her grandchildren into her large kitchen on a Saturday early in December for a full day of baking and decorating cookies while their parents had the day free for serious Christmas shopping.  When their parents returned, each child offered them a tin of Christmas cookies.
 
My all-time favorite Christmas cookie is my Mother’s unusual butter cookie, which is offered here for you to try.  Please do and remember to leave some out for Santa Claus.   EnJOY

Christmas Eve in our Unger household always was scented by pine from the Christmas tree, furniture polish in the living room, the fishy smell of tuna salad (the only time in the year that this meal was served due to a meatless vigil), and the best smell of all---Christmas butter cookies.  My Mother’s Christmas butter cookies are like no others due to their 1/4-inch thickness and primarily due to the inclusion of sieved hard-boiled egg yolks, which affect the texture and enhance the yellow color.  The cookies should be golden yellow, not brown, so one must watch the baking carefully (my Mother would pull up a chair to the oven with its light on to watch color).  This recipe was lost for many years until a happenstance long-distance phone call with our long-time next-door Illinois neighbor, Laverne, gratefully brought it to light.  On Laverne’s recipe card, this recipe was attributed to another neighborhhood baker with whom my Mother shared it but who claimed it as her own.  I still use my Mother’s five old Christmas cookie cutters; they are willed to my children, Lisa, Sheila, and Patrick, and to my granddaughters, Haley and Zoe.

​Bringing fresh blood to old things.
Zach Hively

My dogsitter leaves me surprises every time I return home. A book to read. My dogs’ poker winnings. Streamers and empty wine boxes from the dogs’ wild parties (which reportedly keep him up too late).

One time, he left me an axe.

This axe was not a new axe. Its head was rusted over. The handle, washed-out gray. You couldn’t swing it without the head sliding four or six inches. It was perfect.

“Found it on a hike,” he wrote in the welcome-home note. Where? I asked. “The dogs swore me to secrecy,” he said. “Better ask them.”

I figured this axe would make a perfect wall-hanging. It had that rustic feeling that city folks pay big big dollaz for. Plus, if my home ever stumbled into a slasher flick, the axe head would come flying off riiiight when the masked lunatic went to swing it at me, throwing him (or her!) off balance and giving me my window to pee myself.

But I didn’t hang it, because of course I didn’t. I let it sit by my firewood rack all winter. Then I tucked it in the shed. Then I pulled it back out this fall. Was I ever going to do something with this? Or should I just toss it back into the desert for someone else to find?

Because I had big projects that required a solid reason to procrastinate, I said, I’m a-gonna re-handle this axe.

So I am. It’s not done yet, because it turns out that a distinct lack of woodworking tools and general axe-shafting knowledge is a detriment to successful (or even unsuccessful!) axe restoration.

But I am falling in love—deeply, madly, Christmas-movie-level in love—with bringing new life to old things.

This undoubtedly has nothing to do with the fact that I am careening toward forty and looking to make certain I am both relevant and useful. Nope. It might have something to do, however, with making something tangible with my hands. Hands that are increasingly knurled from using the wrong wood file and trying to open a dried-up bottle of wood glue.

Could I buy a new handheld wood-splitter at the hardware store for under a hundred bucks? Absolutely. Am I likely to spend more than a hundred bucks on this project with a reasonable chance of ending up with a handle-shaped piece of kindling? For sure. Could I, though, grow as a human being, developing skills that bring me closer to my forebears who knapped their own flint and smelted their own iron and probably, at more than one point, cut off their own fingers?
Perhaps. But my ancestors aren’t likely to get too close until they’re reasonably certain this antique axe head won’t come flying off the handle.

Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand.

​You can subscribe for free to Zach's Substack to receive weekly short writings -- classic Fool's Gold columns, new poems, and random musings.

​By Tamra Testerman

​Image Courtesy of Andri Mae Romero

Bode’s Mercantile and General Store, the Abiquiu landmark known for providing “service to travelers, hunters, pilgrims, stray artists and bandits since 1893” has (relatively) new owners at the helm. Established in 1890 as Grants Mercantile, Bode’s has always been more than a roadside store. It operated as a post office, stagecoach stop, and even a jail on the eastern end of the Old Spanish Trail, a historic trading route connecting New Mexico to Utah and Los Angeles. In the early 1900s, the Grant brothers sold the store to local ranchers, and by 1919, it was purchased by Martin Bode. This signaled the dawn of a new era for the store, and it has since transformed into a pivotal community hub and tourist attraction.

Adding to the bodega charm and an eclectic inventory, the proximity to Abiquiu Lake makes Bode’s a destination for anglers and campers. And there is a small ‘grab-n-go’ kitchen famous for its breakfast burritos and green chile cheeseburgers. Hot coffee is always available as is a warm and friendly welcome. Throughout its long history, Bode’s General Store has not only been a place of commerce but also a cultural and social gathering place, embodying the spirit and evolution of the Abiquiu community—It is the oldest General Store In New Mexico.

Who has time for reunions between filling out medical questionnaires?

By Zach Hively

​So my high school graduating class (go Mascots!) just held its twenty-year reunion. This struck me as odd because 2003 was in no way 20 years ago. In that much time, you would expect the world to evolve, people to grow, something—anything at all!—to feel different. I mean, something besides smartphones spreading like viruses and viruses spreading like smartphones and AI surpassing, by all meaningful measures, the capacity of even the most advanced Speak & Spell.

To be sure, some things really have changed. Here’s an example: In high school, I never got invited to any of the parties I heard about. Now that we’ve all grown up and had the chance to mature, I don’t even hear about the parties in the first place.
I welcome this development. I had all the time in the world in high school, so if I had been invited to the parties, I would have had unlimited bandwidth for making myself sick with preemptive social anxiety before ultimately talking myself out of going at the last minute and staying home to finish my book instead.
Now, I don’t have time or energy for that kind of emotional horseplay, let alone for finishing books. I am a Busy Adult who has recently discovered how gripping Instagram Reels can be when I should be sleeping.
So even if I had been invited to the reunion, I would have ignored the message altogether until inevitably running into a classmate at the grocery store while visiting my folks for Christmas, at which point I’d have to pretend I changed my number and lost my contacts so let’s text each other right now okay great I’ll see you at the twenty-fifth reunion and then I would promptly have to drop my phone in the grocery store garbage can and buy myself a burner, probably a flip phone, and start a new life in another state or even better a Central American nation.
Or, I could tell the truth. This would likely be “Sorry I missed the reunion, which I only learned about after the fact on a Reel. But I had a urology appointment that day anyway.”

This is the reality about realizing childhood ended long enough ago that today’s children are dressing in your old clothes for Decades Day at school: Your body is changing. But unlike the fun times of puberty, no one has the awkward conversation with you about what to do when you find a weird lump, or that mole on your back extends like a pencil eraser, or you get sore from doing the dishes. And making appointments for this stuff takes up all—and I mean all—of your free time.

Then, whatever time you don’t have left is spent filling out the same extensive questionnaire in the waiting room that you already filled out online for the Expedited Pre-Check-In, and which you filled out the last time you were in to discuss the changes in your otherwise flawless urinary history.

I’m trying to embrace being such a Busy Adult and doing the Right Thing by going to the doctor for all these concerns before they become even bigger concerns, like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, which as a side note came out closer in time to my high school graduation than my graduation is to today.

What I find is that, by and large, falling apart is not what those in the medical profession call “anything to worry about.” I spend hours and hours of my precious not-so-youth sitting on hold to book appointments, and deleting reminder texts, and actually remembering to go to the appointments, and how am I rewarded?

I’m not. I don’t even get a piece of candy, unless I book for the week before Halloween. Nor do I get a diagnosis. I get some concerned grunts, if I’m very lucky, then the doctor puts her stethoscope around her neck and says, “Everything seems perfectly normal for a man your age. That lump should resolve itself. Get up from that computer more, even though that’s how you earn the money to pay for these appointments. And remember to floss! You can schedule a follow-up with Debra at the front.”

Which I do, because the lump still hurts and I don’t believe it will “resolve itself.” Medical appointments are in scarce supply these days, so it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and have to trade a kidney for it and book the requisite kidney specialist on top of everything else.

Plus, I am a Busy Adult, and it’s helpful to have these things on the calendar—preferably in five-year intervals, in hopes of getting out of another reunion that day.

That’s a wrap! This Fool’s Gold is public, so feel free to share it with your friends and enemies

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By Jessica Rath
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What are the odds that two people who were born and grew up in Germany and who ran into each other a few times in Munich during the late 60’s counterculture movement would meet some thirty years later in a tiny village in Northern New Mexico? Pretty slim, wouldn’t you say. And yet, that’s exactly what happened to me and Renata Zimmermann.

I had moved to Abiquiú from Berkeley/California in the fall of 2000, and when I got to know my neighbors a little, everybody asked: “Have you met Renata yet? She knits these amazing sweaters. And she is from Germany, as you are!” Hmmm. I wasn’t really all that interested in meeting other Germans; I had left the country for good in 1973 with no intention to ever move back.  But when I was finally introduced to her – a kind neighbor had invited me to a Thanksgiving Party – both of us were thunderstruck. We had actually met in Munich! We knew many of the same people! Since then we’ve become good friends and I learned enough about Renata’s life to decide to write about her adventures.
 
She was born and grew up in Bavaria, Germany’s most southern state. She trained to be a dressmaker and moved to Munich, the hub for intellectuals, radicals, and artists. It so happened that a German avant garde filmmaker, Michael Verhoeven, made a movie in the flat below the one where she lived, which started her career as a wardrobe and costume maker. She worked for and with people who later became famous, such as Wim Wenders, Mel Ferrer, and Dennis Hopper.
 
I also knew Wim Wenders at that time, not so much because of his movies (he was a student at the Munich Film School), but because he was part of the political anti-establishment, anti-Vietnam war movement, as I was. We were all hanging out in the same coffee shops and pubs in Schwabing, Munich’s famous bohemian district frequented by artists and students ever since the 1900s. I left Munich at the end of 1970 and never heard of or saw Renanta again until we met in Abiquiú, just about 30 years later.  

​That’s when I learned that she not only made costumes, but also starred in some movies: “The Sweethearts” for example, about four girls who like to sing and then start a band. The director was Klaus Lemke, and it opened in 1977. Renate told me that the band really existed, and they performed in Frankfurt and other cities – just for fun! “They don’t sing beautifully, but are successful” states a newspaper critic. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has several entries about Renata: as actress, costume designer, and wardrobe maker.

​But at some point she had enough of all this. When did she leave Munich and Germany, and why? I recently gave her a call to find out more.
 
“Everything exciting seemed to come from the United States at that time”, Renata told me. “I loved Bob Dylan’s songs, I met Dennis Hopper, but I never learned English at school and couldn’t understand anything. I wanted to understand Dylan’s lyrics!  As long as I can remember, I was impressed with American culture; I longed to get to know it better.” What a unique motivation!
 
“I left Munich in 1981”, she went on.  She had to vacate the flat where she lived because the owners needed it for themselves, and the Munich housing market was always difficult, even then. So she decided to visit a friend in New York City, a German journalist who had relocated to the United States a year earlier.  Renata used the time there to research whether she could find a place to live and support herself, and once that was settled she returned to Munich and sold everything she owned, except for her records, a feather bed, and her books.  Then she left Germany to live in the United States, unfamiliar with the language, without a safety net. That’s quite courageous, don’t you agree?
 
For about one and a half years she rented a room with a woman in Uptown New York. That’s when she started knitting: she bought a knitting machine, taught herself how to use it, came up with unique designs, and sold her creations. 

“I met this Danish woman who had just opened a store for knitted items in Sag Harbor on Long Island. I went to the opening reception, and I liked it there so much that I decided to move to the Hamptons.” And a little later she had her own store which she called “ZIRE” – for Renata Zimmermann. 

​A few years later the Hamptons became ever more popular as a getaway for people from New York City. Movie celebrities and other rich and famous folk bought summer residences along the Atlantic Ocean beaches. Rents skyrocketed, and Renata was looking for a more affordable site. A friend told her about Santa Fe – how stunningly beautiful it is there. And it would be perfect for her knitwear; the city was known for high-quality art and attracted a steady flow of tourists. After her second visit she decided to move to Santa Fe – that was in 1986.
 
With a streak of luck, she was able to rent the Gustave Baumann  house on the east side of town. It was within  walking distance to the Plaza – that was important, because Renata didn’t have a car yet. She went everywhere by bicycle. Several stores and galleries carried her work, and everything went well for a year.
 
When her landlady took her along to participate in a section of the Hands Across America event (planned to raise awareness and money for homeless and poor Americans) along Interstate 40, she met many of the people she’s still friends with today, including her future boyfriend who lived in Medanales. In 1987 she moved in with him. A bicycle wasn’t sufficient any more, and she learned how to drive a car and got a driver’s license. 

​In 1992 some land was for sale further up on the mesa, and Renate bought some property – for $1,500/acre. Soon after she started to build her house; it took six or seven months to finish. 

​And that’s where she still lives. After many moves she found her ideal place, the one she loves. The pristine, natural setting all around her has inspired her creations which easily found buyers. For many years, Renata drove to art fairs all over the country – from California to Florida and almost every state in between. And she is part of the Abiquiú Studio Tour, she joined just a few years after it started.
 
Nowadays she doesn’t drive to art fairs any more, but she sells her wearable art at several stores and galleries in northern New Mexico, and she still participates in a few studio tours. I think if one would ask her how to become a successful entrepreneur she’d say “Find out what you love to do, and then DO it”. Sound advice, especially if one is gifted with talents for creative design and for matching colors and patterns in a unique way, as she is.