A new year begins
Back at it: For some of you, the new year began five days ago when you denuded the house of all things "holiday." I stripped the tree and stashed the menorah on the 28th in anticipation of four days in Brigadoon.
Mitch and I have many friends in the mountains southwest of here--the magical Sangre de Cristos--so we loaded up the snowshoes and cross country skis, packed provisions (try finding cornichons in Brigadoon) and headed south, me knitting on a commission project and Mitch happily behind the wheel. The folks in Brigadoon (aka Westcliffe) joke that life there is the never-ending party, which is true in some respects. Small-town American living more closely mimicks European rhythms, people have more time for each other, care more, give more. A case in point, on the evening of Jan. 1 a local couple lost their home to a fire. The winds were high and in minutes the house was a sparking bonfire. From a distance it looked like the clear flame of an oil refinery burning off fumes. Within hours of the blaze, the homeless pair had six offers of lodgings, donations of warm clothing and a new bank account filled with money from neighbors to help until the insurance check arrives.
The social currents run deep here (what else is there to do). We celebrated New Year's at the art-filled home of the local newspaper publisher. We dined on turkey and the all the trimmings in a tiny straw-bail home built by friends sensitive to the land and the earth's limited resources. We made a Tuscan feast--chicken and pomegranates, pasta in winter pesto and pears with gorgonzola--in a stunning log home perched at 9,000 feet; and we set our Nordic skiis on a bed of fresh crystal powder and toured for hours.
Now the rituals of the New Year begin. For those of us still attached to paper calendars, we manually take an old year, paperclip it together and place it in a file. The new year looms full of potential, the blank page, thrilling and daunting at the same time. New Year's resolutions--eat better, do more yoga, finish novel--seem large today, along with the stacks of receipts, books and old files littering my desk begging for attention.
Oh well, it's only Monday.
8:40:32 AM 
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