This is the day we celebrate the turning of the clock between two calendar years, an arbitrary marker meant to put the past behind us and look brightly toward the year that is to come.
I’ve never liked this holiday whose purpose seems only to remind us time is passing. Since I was a young girl I’ve watched the ball drop in New York City amidst a sea of revelers, and wondered what the fuss was all about. At best, it is a holiday of mixed messages: one that urges us to drink and be merry even as we already regret our holiday gluttony and have made a resolution to do better; one that asks us to be hopeful even as endless news feeds take stock of the right mess the world is in and predict what more grief is coming down the pike (oh, those ‘best of’ and ‘worst of’ lists!); even as the media’s image of glittery people at elegant New Year’s parties make 99% of us feel left out.
Do I sound bitter? I am not. I am getting older, if not wiser. I don’t need a holiday to tell me that. Crazier, too, perhaps. Freer, definitely, and happier. Grateful, above all else. So here’s my only resolution on this enigmatic day: I will spend the evening with my friends, feeling grateful for the grace that’s ever-present in my life. I will go to bed before the ball drops down and the fireworks go off. And I will wake up in the morning simply glad to be alive another day, and welcoming of the earth’s inevitable turn toward spring.
Old History
I suppose all history, by definition is ‘old’, but in the case of our new/old home and neighborhood, the word ‘history’ takes on very personal meaning. This is not only the place where I grew up and the woods in which I played, it is where my grandfather was instrumental in founding a communal arts and crafts community at the turn of the last century. It is where that group of young idealists built a number of stone bridges to crisscross the small neighborhood ‘run’ and where they dammed the stream to form a swimming pond deep enough to skinny-dip. Just downstream and nearer to my grandfather’s old house, the run joins a creek that once powered a snuff mill built by white landowners in the 18th Century and alongside which the Minquas Indians carried furs to the young city of Philadelphia a century earlier, and where abolitionists built Underground Railroad tunnels before the Civil War. My grandfather. My woods. Old history.
This summer I took my grandkids to play pooh-sticks under the old stone bridge closest to the mill, the game I played some sixty years ago - and I suddenly realized that these boys were the 5th generation to walk these paths and cross that bridge, just as their dad had done on his summer visits to my parents’ house just up the hill, just as I had done, playing in the woods, and my dad on his walks, and my grandfather in his own back yard.
I am continually surprised, some nine months after moving back, the emotional impact this old history has on me. To live again at the edge of these woods, to stumble upon these well-worn bridges - I cannot explain the sense of belonging that maybe I have not felt any place since leaving home and ‘moving on’ some fifty years ago. Through luck and good fortune, it turns out, I have come full circle in my life - older, if not wiser - and I feel blessed to wander through these woods today and cross the bridge toward home.
Planting Hope
This week I transplanted a red oak sapling from the edge to the middle of our yard. Calling it a sapling is actually optimistic. It is a very small stem with a few leaves attached that took hold among the vines and brambles probably last year about this time. It probably would not have made it where it sprouted. Its chances to survive and flourish are far better in the wide open space behind the house. If we’re lucky, the tree will serve as anchor and shade to all we can see beyond our window. Not in our own lifetime, of course, but that’s exactly the point. As we work to minimize, over time, the lawn in our yard in favor of native plants and trees, how can we resist the chance to include one that experts recommend above all others (oaks support 897 caterpillar species alone and live over 300 years)? Not many people have room for the breadth of a majestic full grown oak, but we do. It is a luxury that we are willing, perhaps have an obligation to share.
I despair sometimes about the state of the world and the future of our fragile planet. I have trouble reading the newspaper or watching the news any longer, so fractured is the country, so insurmountable, it seems, the problems in both the human and the natural world, and so helpless I feel to make a difference. I am prone to despair when I think about what we are leaving our children and grandchildren. I cannot imagine that next week’s election will make me feel better, no matter who wins, given the rhetoric that seems likely to follow, the anger that seems to grow ever more vociferous. But next week I will squelch my angst and vote, and I will water my oak sapling, investing in a future I will not live to see but am hoping will be better than today.