Blog #16 Snow in Sedona for the new year!

Daughter Alicia Magal writes: It is snowing in Sedona today – December 31, 2014.  Glad we made no plans to go out, and will welcome in the secular new year at home!

My mother Nika was excited seeing snow this morning, and took a couple of pictures from her window.  She also took her first “selfie” on her new smart phone, since there was no one around to snap a photo of her with the snow in the background! 

I remember well the years she took my brother Will and me out of school to go skiing for a week in February when we were children.  Let me see now what she wrote, and I’ll send it out.

Start smiling please!  I have on my pants that fitted into ski boots from many decades ago when Fredziu took us to Aspen on our last ski trip together.  Today before New Year 2015 I just found this pair of forgotten ski pants in one of the boxes… incredible that I kept them all this time.  But today I wanted to wear them because it is snowing outside !!!!!!

These pants tell a fun story.  We were staying in Heddy Lamar’s cottage in Aspen Colorado,  swimming in her hot swimming pool  surrounded by snow and beautiful mountains. These warm pants that I found today I wore every day on that trip, since they were so practical and stylish!

We enjoyed skiing and swimming every day in this great combination of sun and snow  with good food and nice  people. WOW.   

    

Nothing is perfect in this life, so at 4 a.m. as we were returning to our home in Westchester , we finally found a run-down taxi (the one we had ordered never arrived) so in freezing weather with open broken windows, and  holding our skis, we arrived dead tired in our home in White Plains.

   

The next day  Fredziu looked at us and said, “I see we have our  limbs together, so now  the adventure in cold is over for us.  The time has come to decide where to go south  next winter.”

 

Greta Waldas, our artist friend from Wellfleet, Cape Cod, came to our rescue.  “Next winter you come to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico!”   She had a house there.

So we did! We kind of lived like young students in simple quarters, and the next winter we had the luck to meet a ponytailed young woman architect, who had built many homes.  We were at dinner with our new friends Anita and Carl Anton von Bleyleben from Austria who entertained many interesting ex-pats from America and Europe.  This woman told us about a beautiful, romantic town house that she was preparing for her and her husband’s retirement one day.  It was right in town on Los Chiquitos 2A across from the post office.  Unfortunately they would only rent it to us, and we wanted to buy it so we could stay there for many winters to come.

It had a beautiful door which was featured in a book on the doors of San Miguel, lovely Mexican furniture, and 3 terraces so I could hear  the music, which signaled yet another fiesta! We were so upset to find we could not buy it, but nothing we tried worked.

In the evening I took my visiting children to the airport and when I returned, my husband half asleep murmured “I think I bought the house on Chiquitos.”  I couldn’t understand what he meant, so I made him wake all the way up. “Tell me the story please!” So he said that while we were gone, the lady builder (so sorry to have forgotten her name)  called and said, “It is a woman's privilege to change her mind.  OK,  you can have it.”

So for 10 years from 1973-1983 our warm  painter’s  paradise lasted where I painted at Bellas Artes, we met with interesting friends, swam in hot springs, and enjoyed the mild winter weather, until one day  Fredziu could not breath at that altitude of almost 7,000 ft.  high. I had to get him out of there immediately.

Within a very short time I had to swap it for a nice home somewhere lower.  I hoped it would be anywhere but Florida, but you guessed it…it had to be Palm Beach, Florida. This begins another blog later, a whole new chapter.

Now I’m going to have hot soup and enjoy watching the snow fall.  In Sedona it is mostly decorative. Happy New Year to everyone!

P.S. Anne Crosman came over and took this picture of me outside my apartment in the Village of Oak Creek, Sedona.

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