When you move into a 98-year-old house, it is the house that owns you and not the other way around. No matter how attentive or inattentive the previous owners may have been, after most of a century, gravity has had a long time to do its worst, and even the best-kept homes will start to sag at the corners after nine decades. Since moving into the aforementioned house three months ago, I’ve learned that no project is as simple as it seems it should be.

Of course, there are few things that come easily that are worth having. I was 19 before I discovered the uncomplicated joy that hard work can bring, and with each task, I am thankful that I not only have the work to keep myself busy, but the good fortune to have a home to live in and a job to work at. There, but for the grace of God, go I, I think as I watch the "human interest" stories on the news of job loss, foreclosure, and the pain of a struggling economy. I do my best to remain thankful and to take nothing for granted.

This month’s issue of InTheFray features a piece from Suzanne Farrell, titled Spotlighting the neighborhood, about the effect of the recent U.N. General Assembly on ordinary New Yorkers. Shelley Horner shares her opinions of Elsie Sze’s new novel in her review Chick lit, Bhutan style. We will once again feature the exquisite poetry of Rae Pater in her collection Circles of memory. We also have an impressionistic, behind-the-scenes look at a recording session in the short video The marina is too shallow.

As is in keeping with the season, we at InTheFray are thankful for our wonderful contributors and our wonderful readers. It is you who make this site what it is, and we humbly thank you.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.