In January in this part of North Carolina, the morning temperature might be 18 degrees. It might also be 40, or higher still. You never know.
In January the sun stays fairly low all day, never rising above the tops of the trees that hem our backyard. Its light is pale and earnest, falling into richness only when setting the tree trunks in golden fire just before it disappears for the night.
In January most of the trees are Entirely Bare, except for the loblolly pines that hold their needles aloft, and whose ruddy brown trunks are coarsely textured in elongated geometrical sections.
I see these trunks from my breakfast-room window, but mostly I see the deciduous trees, whose bare and extended branches spread away from their trunks at eye-level. Next to the loblolly trunks, the barks of these trees look smooth, and I love them for their barrenness, for this frank exposure of their architecture. There is something in the bare trees that is unapologetically honest. I would like to be like them: unencumbered, unaffected with pretense, slender with the truth.
I did not make any resolutions this year; I can’t remember when I’ve begun a new year without them. In my teenage journal from 1984, I acknowledge the coming year as the one with the Olympic games and as a leap year, which someone had told me meant that “girls could chase guys,” and I set my sights on the boy who, the following year, became my first boyfriend. These things take time, I suppose.
But no, I have no resolutions this year, no new resolves. Rather than making plans to improve myself, I am determined to find myself after several years of Hard Labor– these recent months being a kind of culmination of that effort. Who might I be in the wake of this work, even as I continue to come to grips with being a working mother, a teacher, even a minister of sorts? How can I resolve anything when everything feels so new and at the same time so busy, when lifting my eyes to see the fine tips of bare branches comes as a revelation that these branches are there at all?
The days, while less so than last year, still feel like a kind of survival.
I went for a walk on New Year’s Day– of all days, the day of new beginnings, of new hopes, of new intentions. And I thought of the birds, for whom this was another morning. They moved in the air above me, clung to the sun-glossed branches, their little feet curled about the smooth stems. What is a new year to a bird, I wonder, when life means the capacity for flight, among other things?
Emily Dickinson said it, you know, and she said it well: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
And this verse, too. It helps. “His mercies are new every morning.”
Amen. And Happy New Year.
