Happy New Year

Sending you best wishes for 2024.

I had meant to write this sometime around Christmas, this being our usual family Christmas photo, but life comes at you fast and I’m just trying to keep up. How does one keep up? Please let me know if you have any clues. Or please come keep me company in my whirl of disorientation.

We got robbed. We went to Montreal for a thing and I forgot/lost a pair of pants there.  I tried to put Junia down for a nap but the city was cutting branches off the trees in our front yard and then shredding them into mulch chips. I made a bean salad that no one ate except me. At Costco, I made a big deal about how no one was going to eat the dried figs with me if we got the pack, so Jon promised he would eat some, and he hasn’t eaten a single one, and we now have a giant bag of dried figs that I’m working through one fig at a time. Get your daily fiber in.

It has been a wonderful Christmas and a wonderful year with all of its uncomfortable grit and flagging stamina and tender surprises and goblin projects. Children who don’t pay the water bill and who also are leaving the shower running “to warm up” for 10 minutes and cats who don’t eat the cat treats that they received in their stocking. People who don’t eat their dried figs. Our little menagerie.

And here we are in 2024. I write this in the dark of night, babies and cats snoring, little minions coming alive and scuttling around me, meeting the borrowers in their world of daring adventure. I have no resolutions for the new year, although I have some plans, some dreams, some life ahead of us on the road of the new year. Every year is so different, especially in the long shadow of Covid, the dawn of post-Covid. Every once in a while I have a chance to “reminisce” about those Covid days, some consequences of those brutal early months still felt now, and it’s with gratitude and disbelief and a shake of the head that I think about where we will go into 2024.