The final days of 2021 passed by in a flash. Nature, in her personified form, being the fickle and sometimes spiteful entity that she is, waited until after Christmas to give us snow. Monday morning it started just after dawn and by 10:00 a.m. the ground was covered. Unfortunately, that was also the morning that Tabor and the Fosters left for home. There was some concerned praying until we knew they were all home safe. But then, fickle as she is, Nature flip-flopped back and forth – snow, rain, sleet, snow, rain all week. By the end of the week, it was more like spring than winter with barely a trace of snow left and temperatures hitting almost 50°.
With Rachel and her girls here for the week, things were lively, sometimes hectic. We spent a few hours on Monday taking down all the Christmas decorations. It’s always a long process that I find to be sad and tedious. I was glad to have lots of help this time. I usually spend the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve giving the house a pretty thorough cleaning, but with the house still full of family, I had to forego that. There were just too many people doing too many things all the time to manage it. I’ll work on it this week.
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| Undecorating. |
With school out all week and New Year’s house cleaning on hold, I had time to do other things. I spent a few hours every day working on family history. I spent time perusing seed catalogs making notes and plans for the coming gardening season. And I spent time reading. I got some good books for Christmas and I read two of them. This year our course of study in Sunday School is the Old Testament, a book I particularly love, and I spent time studying for the first lesson.
On Wednesday, with what little slushy snow was left, Hazel, Josiah, June, and Miriam decided to build a snowman. Actually it was a snow woman. The snow/slush was perfect for packing and sculpting. They assembled her and then named her Lucille Ballard after the snowman on Meet Me In St. Louis. Over the rest of the week we watched as poor Lucille slowly deteriorated. By New Year’s Day she was reduced to just a pile of dirty slush.
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| Making Lucille Ballard. |
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| The disintegration of Lucille Ballard. |
With Christmas past, the music in our house changed from carols to Strauss. All week long we filled the house with the waltzes and marches of Johann Strauss. It is our traditional New Year’s Music. It has long been my dream to be in Vienna for the New Year’s celebration, a dream that has now infected Miriam. With the world as crazy as it is, I doubt we’ll ever make it there, but we compensate by playing Strauss.
Thursday the 30th was my mother’s birthday. She turned 93. That evening I called to wish her a happy birthday. She is doing well. She is still recovering from a fractured tibia, but she is making great progress and is walking without a walker now. It’s hard for me to believe she is 93. She is a remarkable woman.
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| My parents at last year's reunion. |
Friday morning was gray and dreary, but it was not very cold (42°), so I decided to take a long morning walk. It had been a while since I last visited the beaver pond. I was amazed as I walked along the road beside it to see how big it has become. We see it every day from our upstairs windows and when we drive to town, but I guess I haven’t paid close attention. The beavers have expanded their dam and increased the size of the pond. And now they’ve built a second and even a third dam along the Genesee stream going west upstream. The ponds behind these other dams are almost a big as their original pond. I don’t see a lodge on either of the new ponds, but the lodge in the lower pond looks bigger. And they’ve stockpiled twigs and branches beside the lodge for their winter feeding. I didn’t see any beavers as I walked, but there were hundreds of ducks, mostly mallards, on all three ponds that flew up as I passed. It was wonderful to see and hear them rise into the air. After walking the length of the ponds, I turned toward home again and came back through the orchard and along the long flowerbeds. Out on the edge of the orchard, the poor Christmas tree, stripped of its glory, is lying desolate, awaiting its immolation.
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| Friday's morning walk: heading to the beaver pond. |
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| The lower beaver pond. |
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| The middle beaver pond. |
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| The upper beaver pond. |
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| Coming back through the woodland garden. |
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| Along the flowerbeds. |
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| The poor Christmas tree. |
Our New Year’s Eve celebration was at the Shillig’s house. At 6:00 we carried the food we’d prepared across the yard to add to the delights the Shilligs had prepared. We always have excellent food and lots of it at our celebrations. We ate and danced and did some karaoke. At 9:00 Kurt lit off some fireworks and we sang Old Lang Syne. Then some of us came home and some stayed on to continue partying. I was in the group that came home. I do not usually stay up to greet the new year. I prefer that it arrive to find me sound asleep in my nice warm bed – a great way to begin a new year. I fell asleep listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. The late night revelers tried to come in quietly after midnight. They woke me for a moment going up our creaky stairs to the second floor, but I went right back to sleep.
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| The savory table at our New Year's Eve celebration. |
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| The sweet table. |
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| Dancing. |
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| More dancing. |
I keep a personal tradition on the first day of the new year. I try to do, for at least a moment, things symbolic of my hopes for the coming year. So the first thing I listened to on January 1st was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, symbolizing my hope that such beautiful music will fill the year ahead. And although it was dreary and overcast, I took a walk to greet the rising sun. I didn’t actually see the sun rise because of the clouds (I hope that wasn’t an omen), but the world at dawn was full of the singing of cardinals and I took that as a good sign. During the day I made sure to spend an hour reading and another hour doing family history work. I tended my houseplants and looked through a few seed catalogs. Later in the day, I took a walk through the garden and pulled a weed. I made sure to play a game, one game among the many that were played that day. In the afternoon Josiah and I took down the outdoor Christmas lights. We usually wait until a warm day in spring to do that, but it was like a spring day and I wanted to take advantage of Josiah’s lack of reluctance to go up on the roof. So all the decorations are put away now.
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| My New Year's morning walk. |
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| The most colorful thing in my garden - a variegated yucca. |
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| Josiah taking down Christmas lights. |
The main New Year’s Day tradition in our family involves food – of course. At Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which happens at the beginning of fall, they eat symbolic food that expresses their wish for a sweet and prosperous year – challah bread and apples dipped in honey, tzimmes, which is a sweet, carrot-based dish eaten because its Yiddish name, merren, means both “carrot” and “increase,” symbolizing a wish for a year of abundance. We keep a tradition from my Pennsylvania German ancestors, nothing as sweet as bread and apples and honey. We eat pork and sauerkraut. According to the German custom, each shred of sauerkraut signifies a bit of money, so the more kraut you eat on New Year’s Day, the richer you will be. And pigs represent prosperity, health, and good humor, so eating pork represents well-being and good luck for the year to come (for the person who ate the pig, but not for the pig that got eaten). But that symbolism only goes so far at our house because some of us don’t like sauerkraut and some of us don’t eat meat. I love pork and sauerkraut. We eat ours with a side dish of mashed potatoes and rolls. This year’s sauerkraut was from a batch I made in the fall and it was delicious.
Yesterday afternoon, despite a bit of drizzly rain, we went on an excursion to get out of the house. We went to visit our friend Laura Dunn and her horse Trooper. Hazel is crazy about horses. Because it was raining, Laura didn’t take her horse out of the stable, but Hazel, Mabel, and Miriam got to ride him inside. When we got back from that, it was time to prepare for yet another celebration. June will be seven on January 5th, but since we were all together now, we decided to have her party early. She wanted a Princess Pizza Party, which mostly meant that the girls dressed up and we all ate pizza. There was a Princess Birthday Cupcake tower and ice cream and June opened presents. Afterward there was game playing on into the evening. So our New Year’s Day was full of fun and family.
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| Hazel and Mabel riding Trooper. |
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| Hazel, Mabel, June, Phi and Frejya at the Princess Pizza Party. |
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| Josiah was commandeered to be the Prince at the party. |
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| At the adult table. |
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| Princess Juniper. |
Today the temperature is falling and it is decidedly more wintry. A little bit of snow fell while we were in church, but barely a dusting. For lunch we had New Year’s leftovers. The Thayns are leaving to go home in a few hours and tomorrow Josiah leaves to go back to school in Idaho. After so many days of jollity, the house will seem desolate. We will go back to old routines in a new year, something I find both comforting and sad.
So we’ve come to a new year. The biggest change for me at first will be remembering to write 2022 instead of 2021 when I date things. I know a lot of people anticipate big changes as a new year rolls in, but for me there probably won’t be much difference, at least not here in the little world I inhabit. Great changes may come over the course of 2022 globally and nationally and they will, to some degree, affect me, but it seems more and more as my years advance, that the seasons just roll on, the sun rises and sets, the patterns of life hold as things begin and end. I realized long ago when I was twelve, in an epiphany that came to me while watching a beautiful moon rise on a cold night, that every day, every sunrise and sunset, every moment of time is unique, they come and go and are never ever the same. It was a startling thought to me then, and I remember still the way I felt when it occurred to me. The patterns might be similar, but time is ever new. I am a passenger traveling in a world that is always new. I do not know for sure what 2022 will hold, but I know there will be births and deaths, new things coming and old things passing away, some things will be good and some things will be bad. But one thing I do know for sure – there will be gardens and flowers and fruit because I will plant them. Happy New Year!
