Year's Last

All day I've been skirting the edges of this space, wanting to sign on and begin writing but not signing on, wanting to write but not knowing what, wanting to say something with absolutely no clear idea how. Well. I finally realized I was ignoring my own advice, or at least what I always tell my students: it's a mistake, I say to them, to think you already know what you're going to say when you sit down to say it. You miss a whole lot that way, and I really mean it when I say it although usually, it's advice that's meant to quell their early-onset writer's block. I tell them it's okay--preferable--not to know, that you sit down and start anyway and see what happens.

So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.

But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.

I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.

And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.

The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.

Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.

So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.

In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!

So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.