An End and a Beginning

The end of one year and the beginning of another is always cause for reflection.  We look back at what we accomplished in 2021, and we look forward to what we intend to do with the opportunity of 2022.  Christmas has come and gone, and in only a couple of days we have taken down the tree and all of the decorations.  What is left behind is the warm memories of the holidays – visits with Martha’s two aunts Anne and Mary, with our daughter and her husband, with friends and neighbors.  That means more to us than any gifts we might wrap up and place under the tree.

For 40 or 50 years, I have received or given myself a copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a quirky little publication containing detailed but dubious weather forecasts for each part of the country, some good gardening and nutritional advice, weird but interesting articles such as “The Art and Science of Animal Tracking,” and back pages containing outrageous and thoroughly enjoyable advertisements for everything from Spiritual Oils and Lucky Eye bracelets to “Powerful Soaps.”  But I think the thing I like the most is the dense, detailed descriptions of the motion of the moon and the stars and the planets, of Ember Days and Halcyon Days and moveable feasts.  They remind me how small we are after all on this little blue planet beneath the great revolving constellations.  With little ceremony, I will consign the 2021 edition to a dusty bookshelf somewhere and open the first page of 2022.

Another tradition we have kept for many years now is to print out the things we took turns writing on the little blackboard in our kitchen throughout the year.  It is a record of holidays celebrated, funerals attended, hopes and dreams and promises made and kept.  The first thing Martha wrote in 2021 was in Atlantic Beach:  “More long walks, more books, more music, more dancing, more sunsets, more hugs, more road trips, more laughter, more fun, more love, more memories, more beach.”  We sought and found most of those things last year.  As I scan down the page I see Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Anniversary.  “Workers in the driveway,” we wrote when our new addition and carport were under construction and we were greeted by the sound of construction early every morning.  Right before that is “Bells in the Night,” the book that I published this summer.  “Take every chance you get in life,” Martha wrote just after that, “Because some things only happen once.”

Now I have written the last thing on the blackboard to mark the end of a long, tumultuous year, a year that began with a violent insurrection and a deadly pandemic, but pivoted into new and competent leadership in Washington, the return of some justice and truth to the political arena, the hope of a vaccine and new treatments.  We are looking forward to a New Beginning.  It is time for our annual Sabbatical.

It was John Muir who famously wrote, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”  But now we are looking forward to the opposite, to returning to Atlantic Beach for another Sabbatical, a time for reading and reflection, for writing more poetry, for drawing closer together and struggling to find peace during a time of turbulence and change.  And for hiking and running.  This year, we managed to complete eight races since September after an 18-month hiatus due to Covid, and we are looking forward to continuing to race with two already on the calendar.  Because although it has been unusually warm for the past two or three weeks – breaking an all-time record in Asheville just after Christmas by four degrees, and here in Highlands yesterday a balmy 60 degrees in the morning – the weather will soon change, and the older I am the more I seem to feel the cold.  The Asheville weather report predicts an abrupt arrival of winter on Monday which it is calling a “Weather Whiplash.”  While we don’t expect it to be 70 degrees in Atlantic Beach very often, neither will it often be 23 degrees, and we hope we can avoid that icy blue face with icicles.

Yes, we are looking forward to the wide Atlantic Ocean, the moon and the stars, the sunrise and the sunset, and the unending rhythm of the surf.

Tell me . . . have you walked out today,
Out the short walkway to the top of the dunes,
Where the sea oats are quivering in the breeze,
And children are running heedless with joy into
The abundant surf, the gracious wide-open ocean?