2024 was a juggernaut that broadsided me when I least expected it. One minute I was sipping a Pisco Calafate in Patagonia and the next minute I was down on my knees, taking a full ten minutes to crawl the ten feet from my bed to the nearest facility. But this is getting way ahead of my story. 

2024 began with my firm resolve to continue with my blog—Mywanderingsintheworld.com.

I had begun it in late 2023, a few months into my retirement. I needed to find a calculus for my days, separate from watching the world go by. Putting my feelings down with specificity made sense to me—of writing a blog twice a month to capture my inside stirrings as I moved through my world. I traveled through Chile and Antarctica, Milan and Turin, Maui and Kauai, Trinidad, New York and Cincinnati, Highland Beach in Florida and the surrounding environs like Miami and Sarasota, Washington DC and Boston. In late fall, we went to a wedding in the Athens Riviera and then to India—Kolkata, New Delhi (again, for a mega wedding), and the soulful backwaters of Kerala. I ended the year in Patagonia, a place that made me fall in love again—not only with landscape but how we humans turn to nature to rediscover ourselves and our wayward complexities. 

In the meantime, the US, like India, tended to a monolithic nationalism. I barely wrote ten blogs this year. But I vowed to write more in 2025, beyond my daily scratchings in a bright red, 5-subject College Rule 200-sheeted book. 

I also moved, again and again, from temporary housing one after the other, to our condo in East Walnut Hills. The remodeling was complete—we were home again, the kitchen fully stocked, art on the walls. 

Our dearly beloved son also got married this year—in August, in a traditional blessing ceremony and in December, with an officiant competently doing her job. The newly minted couple looked relieved that the elaborate festivities were behind them; right away, they took off for Zanzibar, to the remotest place on the map that they could imagine.

And then the acute stenosis, the cramping of the nerve endings inside my spinal column, my body refusing to act on command and demanding its own rest and relaxation.

This year, I also continued my diligent work at several museums—as a trustee and docent at the Cincinnati Art Museum; as a docent at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; as a member of the Program Support Committee of the Weston Gallery; as a Board member and Secretary of Bader & Simon gallery in Cincinnati; as a co-chair of the Ohio Arts Group of NMWA; as a member on the National Advisory Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. 

Thinking about art all around me, my writing, and my family are the pursuits that take up my days. And then there are books to read and films to watch. 

This year, I am incredibly grateful for all the good-hearted, sensible, imaginative, creative souls that I have met everywhere. There are such people all over the world and one need just pay attention to one’s surroundings to find them. I am grateful for leaders calling for a ceasefire or those being ousted because they have carried it too far. I am grateful for the minuscule strides that we make toward a better world, a healthier body, a sustainable climate. I am grateful for artists who come in all shapes and sizes. I am grateful that I am not so jaded that I cannot lose myself in a good book or film. Mostly, I am grateful that I can lose myself in a museum, imagining through art how people made choices, or had these made for them, just like we do in our present time.

I am mostly, mostly grateful for the love that I feel for all humanity, and especially, my friends and family. I find myself still capable of a good cry. Gisele Pelicot draws tears to my eyes just as other innocents do all over the world. May we all find our singular peace in the time to come…