Musings for a New Year on Family, Country Life & What Matters Most

The world may be changing, but a new year is still an opportunity for new adventures, renewed gratitude for life's blessings and positive change! Find inspiration as Kentucky farmwife Catherine Pond reflects on years past and what really matters.

There is a story I’ve enjoyed called Christmas at Eagle Pond by poet Donald Hall, who lived and wrote from his family farm in New Hampshire. I continue to be impressed by one small detail from the book: that his grandmother, every day, wrote on the back of a penny postcard to each of her three daughters (including Hall’s mother) — and they, in turn, wrote back to her their own daily postcards.

Imagine: a few lines scrawled on the back of a card with brief news or observations about one’s day.

I have saved most of the cards and letters that my maternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, parents and many other friends and family have written to me through the years. They are treasures, but few are as concise as a postcard. 

A stack of memories like that is so much better and more tangible than a silly “tweet” on Twitter or even a random Facebook musing. I imagine they are more comparable to the few lines a day that my great-grandmother kept in her voluminous daily dairies or what I once wrote in my few-line-a-day 10-year journal (a gift to myself a few years ago): “Quiet day on the ridge. Our cattle are well-fed thanks to the boys, in Temple’s absence. Put up the last of the applesauce. Needed rain is coming.

Of course, to mail one postcard today is the cost of a month’s worth back in the 1940s, and with unlimited minutes on phone plans and email, sending any handwritten correspondence has become a lost art. Notes and written greetings have gone the way of the telegram (my parents received several when I was born in 1962, and I’ve only ever seen one in my baby book).

My Old Order Mennonite friends, who rarely have phones and certainly no Internet access, like to send around “Round Robin” letters to each other.

This is a delightfully archaic act and something that seems more like a chat on a Facebook wall in lieu of actual conversation. The difference is that it is handwritten and slower in its arrival. A letter gives one time to pause and think before responding — something, perhaps, that social media has all but destroyed.

Rural magazines of the past had similar forums for women to write in and exchange ideas and notes.

I am returning more to my postal roots.

In the last few months, I have found many stashes of stationery, note cards, postcards and even unused Christmas cards in a massive post-move (even if it was seventeen years ago) box cleanup. I have also found many well-intentioned and numerous stamp purchases that were tucked away.

So, like everything in our pantries and freezers, this year I’m trying to use them all up, or at least to make a large dent in the stash that will hopefully brighten the days of my friends and family on occasion, too.

I still recall the New Year’s note we received from our old Order Mennonite friend, Ruth, who is now deceased. She was the matriarch of many children and grandchildren, some of whom we know in a nearby county. She wrote, “We are so thankful that we have a nice warm house with the chill weather we are having." 

The world is a difficult place right now, but we can always be here for each other — to connect in “real time” and by what we can do in person for our immediate families, country neighbors or larger communities.

Here's to a very blessed New Year to you.

I can promise that mine will be filled with words and good books and much writing in and amongst our days on the farm.

After a busy 2025 reconnecting with old friends and family in real time, I am ready for a quiet few months on the ridge before our glorious Kentucky spring (and the ease of socializing that comes to me with brighter and longer days).

Like Persephone, I have learned to welcome both the inevitability and the inward retreat of darkness and seclusion each year — I no longer fear it.

For 2026, let’s just enjoy the now and infuse it with everything positive that we have to offer the world — with, as the Shakers wrote, “Hands to work and hearts to God.” 

Try to gladden each day with a positive bit of your soul. Choose your words carefully.

Ruth closed her note with this lovely poem, and I pass it along to you:

God bless thy New Year! 
Thy rest, thy going about, 
The smooth, the rough, 
The bright, the drear ~ 
God bless thy New Year!

Happy New Year from all of us at Rethink:Rural and Raydient Rural!