New Year

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I took the dog for a wet walk this afternoon, the sky low and sopping, a fog obscuring the top of Mt. Tabor. Hell, it's 4.45 when I write this and outside it's already pitch-black, everything wet, everything dripping, the chicken run a morass, the yard a morass, everything mud and slick. The dog wears a raincoat, a fat raindrop plopped right behind the lens of my glasses into my eyeball. There were hummingbirds high in a tree, crows streaming to their nighttime roosts, the neighborhood flock of robins that visits every Christmas making their evening calls in some birch trees.

R. and D. are in R.'s office playing some space-themed computer game, laundry churns in the basement. My backpack is almost packed--masks, hand sanitizer, a change of clothes,  my laptop, various chargers, a few granola bars--and my alarm set for 3.30 tomorrow morning.  In around 48 hours, we'll all be home again, though J and I  will quarantine until we can get a negative COVID test sometime early next week. 

And so we made it through 2020, though what the gregorian calendar has to do with time becomes less and less meaningful the older I get. The days are getting slightly longer, the edgeworthia has tight bundles of closed buds, we still have our Christmas tree up. The air outside smells of woodsmoke and rain, wet straw, my legs tired from running, my body dysmorphia kicking into high gear (stress, travel, pandemic, etc). And so we made it through and we have so much more to get through. Here we go, once more unto the breach, dear friends; once more.


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