The last day of the year and I have to scrape windshield ice
but I don't even care. My broken laptop has been resurrected and I whisk it off
to a coffee shop to warm its chips and wires, to warm my belly with fancy mocha
and pumpkin bread, to warm my hands and my soul with inspiration and words,
again.
It's been too long, friends, and I'm sorry. Life and hiccups
have kept me away but all is well and all will be well.
Happy New Year.
Our Jacob is finally home, and we are grateful. The holidays
are still lingering in a hush, woven into this creamy gray vapor that hangs
around us, barely noticeable upon the cracked cement sidewalk, the aged headstones
peeking out behind bare branches at the cemetery I drive past to get here. It's
a fitting sort of state, as weather often is, for the end of things, this year,
a little dreary but not unpleasant…a wash of whiteness and stillness like a
curtain being dropped. The romantic in me will see the same sights in Technicolor
tomorrow. I'm a dreamer that way, and new years always hold new promises, new
adventures, and I'm game.
I declared 2012 the year of Home. I thought, perhaps, after much
weariness from our nomadic years that it might have been the year of settling
down, the year of tying up loose ends, the year of holding down the fort in
pajamas and feeling like a normal family for a change. It sounded so healing
just a year ago, so safe and warm, a year of Home, a year of family and
laughter and too much good food. What I wanted, looking back, was a quiet place
for my heart to nurse its wounds, a space to linger long on whatever was
supposed to come next.
It was that. Sort of. In some ways.
Just not like I expected.
Because the year of home…the year I planned for coming
home, was really about becoming home, in a million ways that were
nowhere in sight on the milky gray horizon of last winter. And this next year,
too, will be a series of blind-sighted developments, surprise plot turns, and new
things big and small. I return to college in seven days, four days before I
turn 33.
So I'm pondering today all the words that I think might mark
2013 in a way I can't even imagine from where I sit right now. Bloom. Revel.
Embrace. Worship. Jubilee. Inspiration. Wonder. Explore. Listen.
I hope, no matter what, that this new year will be full of
words, full of life and connection and a still sort of dwelling on the magnitude
of every present moment, for me and for you, my friends.
Stay safe, tonight.
