Dear Ones,
As is becoming usual, I have once again found myself unable to get our Christmas cards and letters out in time to reach you before the holidays. Thus the New Year cards.

We hope this has been a good year for you and your loved ones and that the coming year fulfills its promise in all our lives and those of our neighbors worldwide. Please let us know how you are.

As you might have expected, medical issues are becoming an increasing preoccupation with us, now that we're in our late 60s. But I'd rather dwell on more interesting topics, so I've put everything relating to health at the end and am beginning with more pleasurable activities.

Of course, the first joy we think of is Americans electing an intelligent, organized, non-hypocritical Christian - with both a dark face and a devotion to the Constitution - to help us dig ourselves out of the fiscal and moral quagmire we are now trapped in.

However, my first personal excitement of the year grew out of an e-mail I received from my Cherokee Councilwoman, Cara Cowan, several years ago, asking tribal citizens to approach their federal legislators for help getting a bill passed that would provide funds for staffing and supplying a new clinic in Muskogee. In response, I called Rose Olver, a long-time friend, to ask her advice in approaching her husband, Congressman John Olver, about the matter, and the next thing I knew I was in the middle of what amounted to an exciting graduate seminar in politics with John, who not only agreed to report it out of committee, but to sign on as a co-sponsor and coordinate with Congressman Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

Soon I was getting notes thanking me for having gotten the bill through - much to my surprise, because, while I was glad to be able to contribute to the well-being of my fellow Cherokees, I felt I had done a very small thing indeed.

It wasn't until I flew down to Oklahoma for the grand opening of the splendid new facility last January that I discovered why everyone was so excited: The bill had been hanging fire for at least a decade before John got involved. I was thrilled at the results: An effective team effort produced a building that makes you feel good just to walk inside! My favorite part is the seven pillars symbolizing the seven clans that surround the entrance rotunda. On the outside of the building, they are faced with brick, reminiscent of the pillars on the front of the Cherokee Female Seminary (my grandmother's alma mater) building in Tahlequah. The building was destroyed by fire after Grandma graduated, leaving only a few of the pillars to remind us of what once was; they now mark the entrance to the Cherokee Heritage Museum.

For articles and photographs of the beautiful Three Rivers Clinic building, go to http://www.cherokee.org/news.aspx?id=2510 or http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080207_1_A9_hItwi05764.

Tulsa World photographer Cory Young

Eddie has become busier and busier maintaining and enriching Warwick's official web site, http://www.warwickma.org, which we invite you to visit to see more about our current interests and activities.

He has begun what we hope will be an ongoing series of hikes to scenic and historical sites in town with natives and others who know the town well. So far, he's hiked, photographed and (where possible) recorded GPS coordinates for the Devil's Washbowl, the Indian Cave, Stevens Swamp, Rum Brook Road, and a new trail through the state forest opened recently by the Open Space Committee. He still has a long list of historical sites in town to visit and document when he's up to it, again, in the spring.

In addition to my ongoing responsibilities as Selectboard Chair, I have busied myself with fostering townspeople's efforts to bring broadband service to town - nowadays an essential piece of infrastructure needed not just for web-surfing and homework, but to facilitate home-based and larger businesses and to make living in our small town more attractive; we should be able to start testing our new system early in the new year! I am especially proud of my contributions to this effort (mainly fact-finding and lobbying with officials in Boston, but also requiring some thinking outside the boxes I'm familiar and comfortable with) because we are such a small, mountainous town, with half our area in state forest land, where commercial providers are unwilling to make the investment required to get broadband to us. We may, in fact, turn out to offer a paradigm for other towns similarly situated.

That project also prompted my recent efforts to establish the "Friends of the Warwick State Forests" as a means of improving relations and communication between the town and the Commonwealth's Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Family Visits: Eddie's English/Canadian cousin Brian visited us again this summer. We were especially delighted that his wife, Gillian, was able to accompany him for the first time in years. Eddie's sister Cathy and her husband, Scott, drove up for a visit last month, and we're looking forward to seeing some of Cathy's children and grandchildren over Christmas. Signe and Teddy have been here several times this year, with and without Paul and Andrea. They were all here for the fiftieth anniversary of our wedding in September. And now that Mary Knight has moved up to Connecticut, Kate and Mike were able to bring her up for a visit, too.

Former Students: Last June, Eddie had a welcome visit with one of his favorite NMH students, Shi Young Roh, now an ophthalmologist and surgeon at the Lahey Clinic near Boston.

My former students all seem to be reproducing - or at least getting married - so maybe I'll have some babies to play with soon. Su-Kyeong tells me that the hedge fund she works for has been administered more responsibly than some of the others and thus has not been part of the current melt-down.

We don't want to bore you with a too-responsive reply to "how are you," but health is such a pervasive part of growing older, that I give you a summary for each of us:

Mel: In April, she had the hole in her cardiac septum repaired, and ten days later she was able to have her hip replacement. She's been diligent in doing her exercises ever since and has maintained her remarkable weight loss.

Eddie: He failed his RMV eye test in June, so now it's official - he's not allowed to drive, even if he should want to. In October, he had a minor heart attack followed by a second, more serious, one in the hospital. That prompted an emergency triple by-pass. As his cardiologist told him, "You were dead. You had no blood pressure at all, so don't complain about the pain." In fact, although he has been taken to the emergency room three times since they sent him home (five days after his surgery!), things now seem to have stabilized, and has resumed his daily walks - and joined a tai chi class with Mel in the Town Hal - and his cardiologist told him he doesn't need any more post-op appointments!

Me: The back pain from my fall last year is just about gone, so long as I don't stand too long, but my balance is still not as good as I would like - a problem because I am determined never to fall again.

Florence: Her breast cancer seems still to be in remission, if not completely gone.

Love and best wishes from the Lemons