Chanukah ends tomorrow.  Friday I made kugel for us, along with a noisette of lamb from the Noon Family Farm and leeks.  Woody dug all the leeks yesterday, since it’s going down to 20 today and they would turn to mush.  I use the fat leeks for Leek and Potato Soup.  The slender ones I use in dishes that can absorb them but also my own recipe, that I’ll make tonight, I prefer making potato kugel to latkes as it’ not as high in oil and I don’t have to stand there over a hot frying pan spitting to me while Woody or guests eat the latkes.

The seawall broke in Provincetown and flooded main street and the houses nearby including Woody’s friend Mary’s B & B.  High winds make me nervous.  We’ll like lose power.  We have a generator that will, as long as the propane lasts, run the pump to give us our water from our well, the furnace, the refrigerator and the freezer plus a couple of lights.  This evening, we’re supposed to go to a party at Tony’s given by him and his mother Karen.  It’s the Seven Fishes feast, the traditional Italian Christmas Eve feast.  Tony allays makes eleven. I will make a whitefish salad to add to the many sea foods.  There will be no salt cod bacclhau as Karen’s daughter in law from Brazil is not coming to Wellfleet this year with their teenage daughters and her husband, Tony’s older brother Michael. I only hope we can get there in spite of the glaze ice.

Woody gave me a gorgeous dull-gold cashmere sweater for Chanukah and I gave him a new pair of desert boots.  Most of my sweaters wee chew up by moths this year and I’ve had to throw away six of them that were just rags.  I can’t wear regular wool, only merino wool and cashmere – no alpaca either.  I had terrible le eczema as a child because my mother always bought wool sweaters.

I am proceeding with my new book and also writing poems again after a hiatus of a month and a half after leaving the ICU.  I’m sitting here nervous about the high winds supposed to be up to 60 mph, enough to lose power and knock down branches and even trees.  Friday, yesterday it was in the high 40’s.  Today it’s way down in the low 20’s and still dropping as I write this.   Ice is far more dangerous than snow, causing more accidents, causing me to hobble like the old lady I actually am, making everything far more dangerous.  I have a great fear like most older people of falling. 

I am reading Elizabeth George’s Lynley novel, SOMETHING TO HIDE focused on FGM – female genital mutilation. The cutting that makes women unable to have an orgasm and makes sex incredibly painful, childbirth dangerous, and is just guaranteed the women will be a virgin [she is sewed up leaving only a tiny hole to urinate through and let our menstrual blood] and won’t stray.  All for the man, the woman is damaged for life.  It is a procedure done without anesthetic usually and can be fatal. I wonder what turned her on to this I’ve worked with women for whom preventing this being done to girls as young as three or six was a life’s

passion.  Saving girls so they can become whole and healthy women.