Yesterday, when the power blew because of the 60mph winds during the blizzard, I took my birds into the bedroom and read by candlelight until it was too dark to see anymore. It is, for the record, possible to keep a room from freezing if you burn enough candles but eventually the air smells strange. That was the point, when I worried about what I was breathing, when the lights blinked back on and I heard the water heater kick in so I knew it would be warm soon. It continued to snow through the night only stopping forty-three hours after it started, and I‘m not surprised that what I wanted most besides a hot cup of coffee was my Wifi connection.

This was not my first Cape Cod blizzard; it may not even have been the worst. Two years ago, power went out several times during a series of nor’easters, once for twenty-three hours. The winter I was in Yarmouth Port there were storms that knocked trees down and when, as I lived in the basement, I couldn’t leave the house. Or, I could get out but not off the property since so much snow was piled up against the fence I couldn’t open it. Yesterday I heard someone outside yelling for help. I couldn’t see them from my window so I went downstairs but the snow was so deep I couldn’t open the front door. Someone else must have called the cops because shortly thereafter I saw flashing lights and glowing neon vests through the white out, although a plow had to come dig them out. But at least it didn’t flood like on Nantucket. The beaches around Herring Cove took a beating and a bad breach in the Truro barrier dunes flooded the Pamet again, but unless it snows Friday as predicted, most of the snow will be gone by the weekend, unlike in Boston or New York which can hold on to their snow for weeks.

There was a blizzard in January of 1978 during a garbage strike and I remember getting out of the subway at Rockefeller Center and not being able to see across Fifth Avenue since there were piles of trash under the plowed up snow along the sidewalk. I worked at Saks that winter and was in a boutique in front of the elevators on the seventh floor when the doors of one slid open and out stepped John Lennon and Yoko Ono in those famous fur parkas. I was stunned; they basically had the place to themselves because of the weather, and he was very charming when he told me Yoko needed sweaters. I would wait on them again at the Soho Charcuterie. I was a busgirl when there was no such thing - I’d show up at a table with water and customers would always comment on their busboy being a woman - and the waiter had sent me over without warning me who was being served. They were with Peter Boyle and his wife, and John asked for water with boobles in it. I capped his ashtray, I still have his cigarette butt in a little green box, and Yoko, who was cranky and picked at her food, needed a doggy bag. I also saw the Beatles first US concert; they played the Ed Sullivan show and then took the train, if you can believe it, from New York to DC where my family lived at the time. There was a snowstorm then too, I was 14, it was February; my life would never be the same.

Donegal Chronicles Redux is not my first blog. Before I left New York, I had three more. One was Maureen Donegal where I posted my photographs of downtown Manhattan, but when I moved to the Cape and started taking new pictures of the dunes and moors, my followers lost interest. Another was the original Donegal Chronicles, which was created about six months prior to the move to address events that led to my leaving and the memoir I was working on at the time. I continued write on it while in Yarmouth Port, but stopped by the time I got to Provincetown since it was no longer relevant to my life and what I was working on. I liked the title though, so I revised it when I began blogging again. Both of those older sites are linked to this one, neither is active, but the third, Archetypal Angels is not although it is still there, (here’s the link to it) http://archetypalangels.blogspot.com, but you have to go to the beginning to see what it’s really about because it evolved into something else. At first it was my paintings, then it expanded to include other artists I saw while working at galleries in Soho, Chelsea and Brooklyn that I felt a connection with, whether their art was angel related or not.

Archetypal is a Jungian term referring to an image that transcends cultural boundaries and spiritual practices. Westerners usually think my pieces are ghosts but for me, as a Buddhist, they're angels, which are basically the same as ghosts except less scary. The earliest example I have is a mug I made with my grandmother, who was a professional ceramicist, during a family visit when I was five. There are seven sloppy winged and haloed figures on the mug with my name, which matches the messy blue handle, written in Grandmother’s scroll. Later, in college, I did a series of prints and paintings that were literal angels, but even as an adult, my abstract work had something like wings in them. That was what I was doing, abstracts, when the Archetypal Angel series was born. I’d gone to a Native American drum ceremony at the outdoor plaza of the World Trade Center in the late 90’s. We arrived before dawn and sat inside a circle of musicians who sang and drummed as the sun rose. I went home and started a new painting in honor of a friend who’d recently died of AIDS, and once the sketch was done I realized there was a howling face in it. I went on to do over a hundred paintings as well as a series of small collages that incorporated more traditional angels along with astronomical imagery during the period after 9/11 when it was too painful to put a brush to paper or canvas because of what I saw that morning.

I don’t paint angels anymore; I actually don’t paint at all since I became serious about writing. They’re too New York, people in Ptown find them alarming, but I don’t feel that energy, the need to be guarded, anymore. So I just write, I love my characters, but it’s nice to know my angels are still around.

In 1974, I lived on Avenue C and 7^th Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The block was always on fire and the junkies shot up on our doorstep. It was, supposedly, an improvement on where I’d previously been, which was a shack in the Ozarks where I had a wood burning pot bellied stove, and an outhouse because there was no running water. I went briefly downhill from Avenue C while I slept on a rollaway cot in the back of the stockroom at the boutique on West Broadway where I worked as part of my salary. It was thrilling to look at the lit up Trade Towers as I snuck in at night and quietly pulled the security gate down behind me. Once inside, I’d sit silently in the dark so the landlady wouldn’t know I was there, and I bathed in the industrial sink in the morning. But at least I got to be alone, which was part of the draw for the old shack in the woods, and eventually I found the rent-controlled apartment I then lived in for thirty years before that landlord paid me to relinquish it.

We moved constantly when I was a kid growing up in the military. In fact, my parents were driving from Texas to Michigan when I was born. They stopped in Fort Sill, Oklahoma so my mother could have me, then two days later they were on their way again with me asleep in a wicker laundry basket on the back seat. Even in college, I switched dorms and then apartments five times in four years. So I was afraid, when I moved to the Cape, that those nomadic days were back because I had four addresses, including the one in New York, in less than a year. I have a gypsy style, lots of black, lots of shawls, and lots of small scaled furniture I'm able lift myself, but transience makes me nervous. I can do it, I can stand it, but I want to stay put and be grounded. Luckily, I won my current apartment in a lottery and it’s the nicest place I’ve ever been in. Not even my parents had it better, and because it’s brand new, nobody else has lived in it. There are shiny floors and plenty of closets, luxuries in New York, as well as a tub and a shower in the same room as the toilet, which for me, was unheard of. But I was so intimidated by my fancy kitchen appliances, it took me months to use my high-tech oven.

I baked cookies in it last night. And ate them watching the big TV in the living room. There’s a smaller TV at the foot of my bed, both of them were given to me, as was the Pottery Barn sofa I was lying on and listening to the parakeets I rescued this summer try to sing louder than the background music on Downton Abbey. I had a life in New York, I was young and pretty then, but it got scary on 9/11. I have a life here now, I’m safe, I have a great view of the backside of the Provincetown skyline and I’m making friends. I even have hot water and heat that whisper instead of those old metal radiators clanking away all night. Oh, have I mentioned my dishwasher? It changed my life. So stay in the moment, wait for the miracle, I know for a fact they happen.

Monday, I had my first foray into Cape Cod jury duty. This entailed waking up at 5AM to get ready to catch a 6:30 bus to Hyannis. It was still dark and the full moon was flirting with stormy clouds as I walked my usual shortcut into the center of town, although the sun was creeping up by the time we drove east along the Beach Point section of the harbor. That was the easiest part of the morning. Once I reached Hyannis, I caught a pokey little shuttle bus that meandered through a myriad of what pass for malls on Cape and a multitude of medical centers to get to the Barnstable courthouse.

The trip took a little over three hours and I arrived with just enough time to hit the ladies before my group of prospective jurors began being processed. This was jury duty, after all, with the typical hurry up and waiting until the judge finally started individually asking us questions. I was, miraculously, number six on his list and all I had to do was show him my stack of letters from the New York State Parole Board Commissioner's office thanking me for my Victim Statements, they are entirely another story and always get me out of jury duty, before I was excused. Then, equally a miracle, as I left the courthouse, the pokey little shuttle going back to Hyannis pulled up and got me to the terminal just in time to catch the 12:30 bus home so I didn’t need to wait for the one at 5:30. I was having lunch at 2:30, I hadn’t eaten since the oatmeal I wolfed down before leaving at dawn and I was starving.

Somehow, the trip back was shorter, less time in Hyannis, and my favorite part, as always, was that moment when the bus comes over the rise in Truro, you know it if you’ve seen it, and you get a glimpse of Provincetown and the harbor before they disappear behind the strip of summer cottages that line the water side of the road. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, in every season, both night and day, and it still takes my breath away. Monday, on the way back from my brief stint of jury duty, the bay was full of white caps cresting across the water under an icy blue sky. Today it's grey, but you can get a better look upon re-entering Provincetown at Beach Point, which is always pretty, coming or going. And, for me at least, the place where I know I have, once again, found my way home.

Twice now in the last few days, as I came out of the bank and again, walking passed the school, a fox, all bushy and gorgeous, trotted by me.  This would never happen in New York; there, it’d have been a huge rat digging in trash or terrorizing subway riders.

I had a rat in my Soho apartment once, I’d dealt with mice and they were bad enough, but a rat is, as they say, a whole other animal. For the record, they do smell. And shriek like a two-year-old, and charge at you in the middle of the night if you get up to see what the hell is going on. I threw shoes at mine and trapped it under a metal bucket. Then I hid in the bathroom trying to reach animal control on my cell phone. Somehow I got transferred to 911 and they sent two burly cops who, on seeing the size of the tail whipping around outside of the bucket, debated about whether to shoot it but decided against blowing a hole in my floor. Only slightly less afraid than I was, they finally shoved an old cookie sheet under the bucket and carried that thrashing, screaming nightmare out the door. A Manhattan moment if ever there was one; but at least the damn thing hadn’t leapt out of my toilet after swimming through the sewer or actually bit me.

Perhaps my favorite interaction with a non-human species was at a loft party one New Year’s Eve where Zippy, the world famous roller-skating chimpanzee, plopped down on the sofa next to me and held my hand. His paw felt like a leather glove, and with his toothy grin and little suit and bow tie, he looked exactly like George Burns. We sat holding hands until one of my friends half jokingly said I had better watch out or I might have to get married. Not that I haven’t dated worse, my ex-husband, for one, was a bit of a beast - but I do remember Zippy fondly.

Happy New Year!