January 2026: A Letter

Dear Friends – friends in real life, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, old friends, friends I’ve yet to meet, and friends that I’ll likely never cross physical paths with,

I hope this letter finds you well as we’re heading into a brand new year. I don’t know about you, but I feel like the past few years have changed me. I suppose that would be true no matter the year, no matter the era, but I’m feeling the changes from recent years more acutely. As a result, I’m feeling the desire to reconnect with people and my community. So I’m starting the year by writing you a letter.

I don’t know if there are any rules to letter writing, but my aim is to begin a conversation.

A good conversationalist asks questions, shares news, tells stories, and tosses out ideas that invite a response. A good conversation isn’t formed like an essay, so writing a letter that’s meant to be a conversation should, in theory, be able to ramble a bit, and switch topics, and ask rhetorical questions. It shouldn’t require a topic or a reason for existing. Which is good, because I don’t have a plan here, I’m just writing to say hey.

I fear that a letter in the form of a blog post will not have the charm that a handwritten letter would have. There’s no paper to unfold. There’s no handwriting to decipher. There are no eraser marks or crossed out words.

I recently came across a decades old letter that was sent to me from a college friend a year after her divorce. We each got married to our spouses in 1990, and the four of us were close friends in Missoula. Over time, we all moved on and our correspondence became infrequent. Now, enough time has passed without contact that I would have to do some searching in order to find her. Maybe I’ll add that to the list of things I’d like to do this year.

Her letter contained a lot of catching up but it wasn’t just small talk. It was real talk, and it reminded me of the conversations we’d shared back when we were both in our early 20s. Her letter, which was everything you’d want a letter from an old friend to be, came to me at a time in my life when I was pretty overwhelmed with raising children and trying to make ends meet and in general trying to keep my act together, and I don’t remember if I ever wrote her back. I hope I did.

When I was done reading it, I tucked it back into its envelope with its stamp that cost a whole lot less than a stamp costs now, and placed it back in the box that I’ll probably not look at for at least another decade. That’s a hard experience to create in digital format.

Now we have AI and I’m still trying to figure out my relationship to this thing that is here whether I’m ready for it or not. Have you noticed all of the AI written essays that are floating around social media lately? They’re stories about people or historical events. Often they’re political in nature. These essays are all similar in length and have short and choppy sentences that seem to be written for maximum impact and an overblown emotional response. They’re full of descriptors and metaphors that sound clever but I find them manipulative, and annoying.

I’ve always felt like I have a good bullshit detector, and I’m hoping that this particular super power will help me out in this age of AI, but I fear that as the technology gets better my BS detector will be put to the test. It’s a good argument for handwritten letters and across the table conversations.

What’s new with you? What changed for you in 2025? What are you looking forward to in the new year?

Are you sleeping well? Do you have good food to eat? Are you staying warm this winter? Do you have enough money to pay your bills? How are you in your relationships with your parents, your children, your significant other, your friends? How is your health?

I know these are questions we don’t often ask each other. Maybe that’s because we’re afraid of prying, or maybe it’s because receiving honest answers to these kinds of questions would require a response.

Somehow it feels safe to ask these kinds of questions in a letter. The reader (you) have a choice about whether or not to respond. Sometimes the written word acts as a barrier, which can be a good thing in certain situations or for certain people. In that way, a letter is like an opening. You can choose to go through it, or choose to stay outside.

In the local public library where I work, there are a few people who come in first thing when we open each day and stay until we close. I resist the urge to ask them if they have a warm place to sleep, or if they’re hungry, or if there is anything they need. I stick to my professional library worker persona and greet them with kindness when they walk through the door each morning. Sometimes I’m afraid that if I asked them direct questions about their well-being the spell would be broken and they’d stop showing up. And I’m glad they’re coming through those library doors. I’m glad a place exists where they can exist without being hassled. I wouldn’t want to mess that up.

I guess I’m trying to figure out if asking them those questions would be the right thing or the wrong thing to do. This is really all about acknowledging the hardship we see in the world rather than pretending everyone is okay. I guess I want people to know that it’s okay to not be okay and their value does not hinge on having a warm place to sleep or money in their pocket.

Transitions have always been tricky for me, both in writing and in life, which is another reason why this letter writing thing just might work for me. In 2025, our daughter and daughter-in-law made the difficult decision to part ways. This was a big transition for me to wrap my head around, but as these things go, it wasn’t about me, it was just a change I needed to accept. The two of them have demonstrated that breakups can be done gracefully, even with love, and for that I’m grateful. I’m also thankful for the time they chose to be together, because our lives were enhanced by the relationships their pairing brought our way. I can talk about it now without so much sadness, but I had some grief to work through this past year.

There were plenty of things to be thankful for in 2025. One of my ambitions for the year was to achieve more balance in my life, and while that is always going to be a work in progress, I feel as though I made some good strides in that area. My measuring stick was how I felt at the end of the summer, and for the first time in several years I wasn’t totally exhausted at the beginning of September. I attribute the better balance to an overall lowering of expectations. The garden wasn’t perfect this year. We didn’t vend at as many farmer’s markets. We only went to one day of the big music festival instead of the full three days. Those and many other small tweaks made a difference and allowed for a more relaxed summer vibe, which in Alaska can be difficult to achieve.

The most relaxing weekend of the summer was a camping trip Dean and I took in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. We had a campground to ourselves and the weather was perfect. Dean had his canoe and I had my banjo and a lake to swim in. We ate well. We slept well. We spent a lot of hours around a campfire. It was the perfect way to spend a few days.

Another fun highlight of 2025 was winning the Kachemak Heritage Land Trust raffle. We were vending at the farmer’s market when I got news that I’d bought the winning ticket. My winnings included incredible bounty from local food producers and businesses – birch syrup, honey, a whole goose, a Traeger Grill, lots of fun swag, ice cream, a fondue pot, and gift certificates for knife sharpening, baked goods, garden supplies, a fishing charter, and loads of veggies, which helped compensate for this year’s less than perfect garden. I felt lucky, to be sure, but also grateful to live in a town that’s comprised of so many generous people who are contributing to such inspiring work.

Speaking of inspiring work, 2025 was a good year for our small business, Twin Fish Gardens. It’s growing slowly, as planned, and I’m enjoying getting to know this entrepreneurial side of myself that was lying dormant for a lot of years. Over the summer, between work and camping, we managed to harvest and process enough fireweed to keep our customers in tea for another year. My goals are to make things more efficient, incorporate more writing into the whole project, and start working on our garage conversion shop.

I’d love to know what’s inspiring you. Any good podcasts or albums to recommend? What about books?

Here are a few of my current inspirations:

* Bonnie Prince Billy’s 2025 album, The Purple Bird.

* Radio Paradise. Online radio that’s listener supported and free of ads. A real person curates every set, so it never feels monotonous and it’s introduced me to a ton of fabulous artists over the years. (My daughter calls me a Radio Paradise evangelist.)

* The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

* I’m currently reading Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World by Kat Armas. I’ve borrowed the copy from the Homer Public Library but am feeling the need to get a copy of my own.

* If you are interested in such things, I highly recommend contemplating the Lord’s Prayer as translated from the Aramaic by Neil Douglas-Klotz. I’ve been using lines from it as journal prompts for the past couple of months and it’s a deep well of inspiration and insight. It’s good teaching, no matter your belief system.

If you’ve gotten this far into this letter, then you really are a friend. Thank you for being out there and for listening. I tend to be self-conscious about my writing and I put pretty high expectations on myself to make it all sound smart and well put together. I’m learning though, that for my intentions, being real matters more than being polished.

So here’s to a year of being real.

Let’s stay in touch, please, and let’s try to take care of ourselves and each other.

With love,

Teresa