
That day it poured rain all day long as we drove the four hours to Vermont. We were living in Rhode Island at the time, briefly, and the breeder was in Vermont. I will add that we were scheduled to pick the puppy up on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy's death. The breeder told me the name of his famous ancestor, and asked the name of my favorite cracker. When we picked up this puppy (RC), I said I had no idea what to name him. He got his name because he had loads of English bloodlines, and he had a very famous ancestor named Cream Cracker, who was an English champion and a Crufts winner (not best in show-Labradors never win best in show).
#Into the wilderness piano cracker
Ritz Cracker was a remarkable dog, I can tell you. I'll weigh in tomorrow or Sunday, with my end-of-year reading plans, but MOSTLY I want to hear about yours! I have so many books available, my own and from the library, that it's so difficult to choose. But I am on the verge of picking up steam. Whither books? My reading has taken a huge hit in November and into December, mostly due to my novel-writing course.

I questioned whether my pals would want to go and how long they would hold out. But those who I sensed might have bowed out, persisted, and we reaped huge rewards in candy and cookies for braving such a storm! People fed us to the hilt, so glad were they that we made it again that year despite the storm.

#Into the wilderness piano torrent
One Christmas Eve we endured a torrent of sleet and freezing rain hailing down on us. It was tasty-cinnamon, cloves, apples, cider, red wine, and brandy. We sang uproariously after sampling glogg! Christmas cookies, cakes, eggnog, and at one very notable house, a Scandinavian glogg was offered, though we were all underage as far as alcohol was concerned. I find myself reminiscing about my younger teenage years-how my gang of neighborhood friends, on every Christmas Eve, would practice our caroling, gathering around our family Steinway (inherited from a wealthy great aunt), and once sure of ourselves, we'd go singing our lungs out into our neighborhood where loads of treats awaited us at every door. With my new piano, I'm going gangbusters, finding songs and arrangements that work. I love playing holiday songs and Christmas carols on the piano, for one thing, just as I did when I was a kid. I like to have the time in December to enjoy preparing for the holiday season. The idea got squelched immediately, though I do think I deserved a treat for the knowledge of customs in other lands. Nicholas Day, December 5th). I thought that this was a terrific idea and tried to convince my mother to go along with it. Interweaving the fate of the remnants of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati's compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an emerging America.When I was a child, I read about children in the Netherlands and Belgium leaving wooden shoes on the doorstep for St.

Elizabeth's ultimate destiny, here in the heart of the wilderness, lies in the odyssey to come: trials of faith and flesh, and passion born amid Nathaniel's own secrets and divided soul. An alliance with Todd could extract her father from ruin but would call into question the ownership of Hidden Wolf, the mountain where Nathaniel, his father, and a small group of Native Americans live and hunt.Īs Judge Middleton brings pressure to bear against his daughter, she is faced with a choice between compliance and deception, a flight into the forest, and a desire that will bend her hard will to compromise and transformation. Financially strapped, Judge Middleton has plans for his daughter-betrothal to local doctor Richard Todd. Much to her surprise, she clashes with her own father as well. He is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk people as Between-Two-Lives.ĭetermined to provide schooling for all the children of the village-white, black, and Native American-Elizabeth soon finds herself at odds with local slave owners. And she meets a man different from any she has ever encountered-a white man dressed like a Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his blunt honesty. It is December of 1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has ever experienced. When Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine years old and unmarried, leaves her Aunt Merriweather's comfortable English estate to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers from the very first page. Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place.and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman.
