The myth of the bluebird of happiness actually goes back thousands of years and crops up in cultures across the globe.  The bluebird is widely associated with good health and fertility, cheerfulness and prosperity.  Native Americans consider it sacred.  It’s featured in European plays and Russian fairytales.  It is at the heart of our popular culture, as well:  “If happy little bluebirds fly away above the rainbow, why can’t I?”

Why it is considered happy, lucky, or a sign of prosperity I can’t say.  The day it paid its brief visit was grey and dismal — just another in this long, strange, unsettled winter. Perhaps it was just that — the unexpectedness of it — that gave it such power. A splash of bright primary color against the season’s basic black and white.  The sudden possibility — going against the litany of February’s cold hard facts — that miracles happen. That spring is coming.

The north wind blows.  Taxes are due. That second helping of Potatoes Anna has come home to roost around my middle.   All the more reason to try to hold onto some of the magic of the holidays. I think we need comfort and joy in lean, cold, workaday January much more than during the boisterous festivities of December. So I’m not letting go.  I’m not going gentle. I’m defying the calendar and some nagging sense of propriety and leaving my stuff up this year.  I plan to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

When I left home after college, my mother gave me two books that I think she felt equipped me fully for life on my own: The Holy Bible and Irma Rombauer’s original edition of The Joy of Cooking. In those days I wasn’t much of a cook — and even less of a baker. And there were no Christmas baking traditions in my family, unless you count the throwing away of unopened fruitcake tins sent by well-meaning relatives. So I believe I was lucky — no, I think actually, blessed — to somehow stumble upon a recipe at the very start of my baking career in The Joy of Cooking for a bar cookie called Angel Slices.

In The Joy of Cooking a little star symbol indicates that a certain cookie recipe is appropriate for Christmas. Pre-dating “Julie and Julia” by several decades, I proceeded to go through The Joy of Cooking and make every Christmas cookie in the book: Lebkuchen and Pfeffernusse, Almond Meringue Rings, Gingerbread Men, and half a dozen more. I’ll spare you the details and save you the time: Nothing came within caroling distance of the Angel Slices.

Cooking has its instances of alchemy, I believe, when certain ingredients, combined or cooked together in a particular way result in something close to magic. To my mind, Angel Slices —made with brown sugar, pecans, shredded coconut, lemon, among other goodies — fall into that category. Glistening with a snowy glaze, these sinfully delicious cookies — packed in festive tins — also make terrific, home-made gifts.

ANGEL SLICES

Makes 12 bars
Time: 20 minutes to prep; 25 minutes to bake; 30 minutes to cool

1 1/2 cups chopped toasted, pecans or walnuts

1 cup flaked or shredded sweetened coconut, lightly toasted

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened

2 tablespoons sugar

1 large egg yolk

1/4 teaspoon plus 1 1⁄2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3/4 cup all-purpose flour, plus 1 1⁄2 tablespoons

2 large eggs

1 cup packed light brown sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Lemon Glaze, if desired, (recipe follows)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9 x 9-inch baking pan* lined with foil, and set aside.
In separate pans, lightly toast nuts and coconut in the oven until fragrant and just beginning to brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Remove from oven, cool 10 minutes, and coarsely chop nuts. Set aside.
Meanwhile, beat butter, granulated sugar, egg yolk and vanilla in a medium bowl until well blended. Stir in flour until well blended and smooth. Press the dough evenly into prepared baking pan. Bake, uncovered, 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, beat 2 eggs, brown sugar 1 1⁄2 tablespoons flour, baking powder, salt and 1 1⁄2 teaspoons vanilla in a medium bowl until well combined Stir in nuts and coconut. Spread mixture evenly over the hot baked crust.

Return to oven and bake, uncovered, until top is firm and golden brown and a toothpick inserted in center comes out slightly wet, about 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from oven and set pan on a rack. If desired, while the bars are still warm, spread evenly with Lemon Glaze. (Recipe follows.) Let stand until the bars are cool and the glaze is set. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days or refrigerate the container for up to a week.

LEMON GLAZE

I was there on Sunday for a reading and signing of my novel So Near.  When we arrived around 10:45 in the morning, the place was already bustling.  The PR manager Christopher DeWitt, who couldn’t have been nicer, explained that they were having a holiday fair — including a raffle to help support a local not-for-profit.  Without in any way impinging on my own reading (which — thank you, everyone! — had a great turn-out), the store began to fill with parents and children. After my reading, the staff started setting up for a young people’s concert.  Miniature violinists and trombone players arrived with grandparents in tow. Decorated for the holidays, the store had the festive feel of a church bazaar or street fair. By the time we left, music filled the air — and the cash registers were ringing.

My talk — “The healing power of nature in poetry and fiction” — evolved out of a poetry course I taught this past summer at Simon’s Rock College in the Berkshires.  But, before I spoke, the club’s president Joanne Conroy made a few announcements and then led the group in a recitation of “A Collect for Tuesday Club Women.”  Having been raised in a Swedenborgian community, I had never heard of a collect before (the stress is on the first syllable) which, I later learned, is both a call for action and a short, general prayer in the Christian liturgy. I was struck by this collect’s simplicity and power.

I’ve since discovered that it was written in 1904 by Mary Stewart, a high school principal in Longmont, Colorado, as inspiration for women working together in clubs for the greater good of the community. Though a shortened version of the original, here is the collect that we recited at the meeting.

A Collect

Keep us, oh God, from pettiness,

Let us be large in thought, in word, in deed.

May we put away all pretense and meet

each other face to face without self-pity or prejudice.

Teach us to put into action our better impulses,

Straightforward and unafraid.

And may we strive to touch and to know

The great common human heart of us all.

And, oh Lord God, let us not forget to be kind.

The place was packed — there were lines around the block to get in — for readings, panels, signings, events for children, some great live music, and a terrific open-air food court.  There were around 400 writers — from headliners such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Ondaatje, and Pete Hamill to such lesser-known worthies as the poets Neil de las Flor and Maureen Seaton.

Andy Borowitz brought down the house with his take on Herman Cain.  Isabel Wilkerson brought them to their feet after her talk on The Warmth of Other Suns: America’s Great Migration.  Though I didn’t get to hear him, everywhere I went I heard how Touré held the audience spellbound during his session on Post Blackness. As did Robert Massie in his moving description of Catherine the Great  — how she struggled all her life against the memory of her mother refusing to cradle her because she was a girl and not the male heir her mother had hoped for.

One of my favorite takeaways was Roger Rosenblatt: “The difference between a word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.”  I could almost hear those microbes multiplying!

How in the world do the French do it?  Combine geraniums, grasses, and giant dahlias in a kind of spirited, swirling floral dance not unlike a chorus line in the Folies Bergere?  How do they make cabbages actually appear beautiful?

The pinnacle of this sort of gardening perfectionism (and perhaps madness) must be the acres of pure obsessive brilliance that comprise the Chateau de Villandry in the Loire Valley.  Take a leisurely digital stroll through this breathtaking creation — centuries in the making — and worth the entire price (even in today’s inflated euro) of a 10-day trip to France:  Click here for the garden website.

Tell me — is this absolutely lovely — or more than a little lunatic?  Next time — some thoughts on the French market.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a small, close-knit community, but something in me periodically needs to break free, sail away, explore the wider world. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” she writes: “What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life/ in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun the other way around?/The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?”

Though Bishop never answers the question outright in the poem, she does make a case for the new and different by describing her trip to Brazil, a country she came to love deeply, in ravishing and persuasive detail.

I believe that a lot of my of love of travel — or wanderlust (what a lovely word!) — is simply the longing to see things “from the other way round.” Waking up early in the morning in Nice, say, and noticing the full moon, filmy as egg white, floating over the still sleeping town. La lune! La ville! La Mediterranae! In a different country, in another language, the moon takes on fresh meaning and beauty. Like Steve Job’s famous “Think different” tagline for the Mac, I think traveling allows you to “See different.”

Or, as I wrote in the opening of my novel Local Knowledge — when you’ve lived in one place all your life, “you stop seeing things after a while. Things and people. Even those you love. Maybe especially those you love.” Even if it’s just a weekend at the shore or drive in the county on a Sunday afternoon, there’s something about leaving the familiar and getting away from it all that forces you to reconsider your own place in the world. To see your life with new eyes. Where have you been lately?

Buffered as most of us are these days from fearsome and daunting experiences, I don’t think we very often come face to face with something that is truly awesome in our daily lives. I did yesterday around noontime on the eastern spur of the Pennsylvania Turnpike when, in a matter of seconds, the wind-driven rain hardened into freezing sleet and icy snow. I was on my way to a reading/signing of my new novel SO NEAR at the Barnes & Noble in Jenkintown, and I was determined to get there on time. But I’d hit the ruthlessly advancing front of the Surprise October Snowstorm of 2011. Trucks skidded. Cars spun out. Traffic slowed to the defeated pace of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow. While all around us, the heavy, silent, unstoppable snow descended.

It was terrifying. It was magical. It was an unsettling and, I think, important reminder of how little control you actually have over your life. How it is by the grace of much larger forces — nature, fate, whatever higher powers there may be — that you get to go about your business. Until you’re forced to stop. To hear the tick, tick, tick, of ice against a windshield. To see the road and cars in front of you dissolve into a wall of white. To face the fact that you’ll have to turn back. And to realize: this is awesome.

Here are some thoughts about my “writing place,” from my recent guest post on a blog called Savvy Verse & Wit, dedicated to all literary and poetic works:

During the years I worked in advertising in New York City, I would try to fit in an hour or two of writing every morning in my cramped apartment. I used to dream of one day having my own writing studio. If Henry James thought “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in the English language, I began to feel that “writing studio” took a close second. I imagined it in the woods somewhere with a fireplace or wood-burning stove — rustic and musty and so quiet you could hear the mice scrabbling around in the walls.

Fifteen years ago, I was able to sell my advertising agency and buy my dream — a place in the country — or, more specifically, the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. It included a small farmhouse and an old horse stable which became my “writing studio.” It still has the old iron stall feeders and leather harnesses on the walls. It remains permeated by a wonderful smell of animal and old hay. It’s where I wrote most of my first novel Local Knowledge and my just published new novel called So Near — both set in the Berkshires area.

I wake up early and reread and rewrite on my laptop in the house, but in the afternoon I go out to the studio, bolt the door, and start the hard work of writing the next new word, sentence, paragraph, chapter. In the winter I have a fire going in the Jotul stove, in the summer I have all the windows open and can hear the seasonal brook and birdsong. This summer, I watched a family of wild turkeys — 17 in all — parading up and down in the old paddock. Other sightings: woodchuck, coyote, fox, and early last spring, when the trees were just greening out, a big black bear. It was a breathtaking moment when this wall of darkness lumbered right past me — so close that, if the window had been open, I could have reached out and run my hand through the bear’s ink-black fur.