2022

 

Holiday Letter: 2022

 

Dear Friends—

 

 

I have been beavering away my on-line Herbarium, a collection of essays on individual  flowers in Virginia Woolf’s life and work which currently amounts to about 650 pages. 

 

https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/

 

I just finished water-lilies and only have wisteria and zinnias left to go, so am hoping I will achieve a neat closure before New Year’s. That will clear the decks for me to launch into my next big project, which is a more traditional academic work on flowers in Woolf, considered more or less chronologically through her life and works.  That book is already about 2/3’s written, but I broke off because I didn’t know enough about flowers.  Believe me, I know enough now.  (I have decided to leave the Herbarium on-line for now, as I suspect publishers won’t know what to do with a two-volume tome that is organized as alphabetical entries. Its great joy is the meandering pleasure in obscure references, and I suspect everyone would want to edit out the fun bits.  Besides I like the fact that anyone can access it for free.  And they do: 17,000 hits so far)

 

The Woolf community has remained a central part of my social as well as intellectual life.  I’ve been holding an on-line drop-in approximately once a month, and other friends run a Woolf Salon with more academic focus, also once a month.  Perhaps because we have gotten so used to zooming with each other, the two on-line Woolf conferences were brilliantly successful, connecting what is becoming a truly global community of Woolf scholars.  I gave papers with my usual Brazilian/ Australian contingent. Suzanne Bellamy made an art piece for our 2022 panel on Woolf and Shakespeare, and was able to come on-line to chat merrily with people from her bed, wrapped against the cold in shawls.  She was taken to the hospital a few days later by her friends because she was so weak from the resurgence of her cancer that she needed to be cared for.  She passed away less than a week later, leaving my world and that of my Woolf friends just a tad less bright and rich and full of fun. I miss her acerbic and hilarious wit on a daily basis.

 

In October of this year, I went down to Portland for my first face-to-face conference in three years, The Modernist Studies Association, where I met up with a lively covey of old pals from Clemson, touched based with Woolf friends, and got to meet in person a number of young scholars I’d only seen on-line. We were mostly masked during the conference and sometimes had to read name tags to recognize each other: “Oh! It’s You!” being a common cry.  I am terrifically excited for the 2023 conference in Ft. Meyers Florida in June.  The theme is Virginia Woolf and Ecologies—right down my alley. I’ll be collaborating once more with Davi and Maria who’ve been exploring parallels between indigenous Brazilian philosophies and Woolf’s attitudes.

 

Aside from my Woolf life, a lot has been happening healthwise.  In March of this year I took a tumble out on Alki – a totally benevolent but chaotic dog interaction—and broke my elbow: that little bone at the tip end that people call your funny bone.  Not funny. A friend took me straight to the emergency room, and a neighbor came over and insisted on finding the best elbow guy in Seattle. I got a fortuitously immediate appointment and had surgery as soon as the swelling had gone down enough for them to see what they were doing.  I healed very quickly and passed all my PA goals within a month.  I didn’t have a lot of pain. At first I was in shock, and then the pain meds set in.  I hate opioids with a passion (cannot bear being stupid), so only spent a couple of days on oxy, and was able to convert to Tylenol within about ten days.  Lots of metal in my arm, tho; the x-rays look like a door hinge with 4-inch screws.

 

At the beginning of September, as many of you already know, I had another medical emergency, in the form of a heart attack.  I had had a stent put in a couple of years ago, but that wasn’t the problem. The whole event seems to have been electrical.  I went into A-fib a couple of times, but did convert back to natural sinus rhythm on my own.  I had been sick the day before—diarrhea and vomiting—which is an occasional side effect of a new drug I am on for diabetes, Ozembic  (which has helped me lose some sixty pounds and is helping me lower my insulin considerably, a double bonus because insulin causes weight gain). Anyway, the general consensus is that it was partially caused by my electrolytes being so out of whack plus dehydration.  So now I have a stash of pedialyte and am under “medical management.”  I’m almost finished with cardiac rehab, which has helped me feel much less anxious about how much I can do.  I’m enjoying it so much I’m joining a local gym so I can continue my workouts which have allowed me to push my daily step count up to 7000 per day—actually, many days I top 8000. Of course I’ve gotten all five Covid shots and have so far managed to avoid the scourge.  

 

My house is growing ever more delightful. My gardener Jeff is a true partner, and with his help every inch of my small yard, including a parking patch in the alley, has been planted with flowers. I harvested 40 allium this year which I preserved by spray-painting bright colors; many are still standing in the snowfall as I look out my windows.  In the spring when the crab-apple, magnolia, and lilac are all in bloom, along with tulips and irises and daffodils and bluebells and campanula, it is delirious.

 

 I remind you all that Seattle is paradise from May through September and into October (apart from fire smoke in August). I live half a block from the longest beach in town, and I have two guest rooms, three bathrooms, and a bed in the basement.  If you are a Woolf friend, my library is extensive, including ALL of the holograph drafts. I would welcome visitors.

 

Much love to all,

Elisa