Hello New Year

Hello 2012.
How many resolutions will I make that go by the wayside?   Not many, as resolutions have never been my thing.  Its like always starting in the hole.  I have enough angst going on in my world.  I always start out hoping that the year will be different.  Call it the glass half empty person I am, but I don't remember every saying, I want more of the year just past, it was so danged good.  Nope, I tended to think that even with wonderful, momentous events occurring in my years, there was so much more ahead in the new year that would be better.  Somewhere along the line, the time before and directly after Christmas lost some of its cheer and I just wanted to go back to my routine, whatever that was, hunker down and endure the winter until spring would come and I could get outside and feel the sun on my face again.  Somewhere along the line, the summer and long days of light represented all that was good, and winter and dark days all that I wanted to avoid in life.


But things have a way of changing and morphing into unanticipated happenings.  My life seemed to be destined to follow a pretty straight line and while I didn't think excessively about my later years....OK, I didn't think about them at all, I just assumed that at the appropriate time I would have grand children, my children would live within shouting distance and that I would just turn into a reasonable facsimile of my wonderful grandma.   I would bake cookies with grandchildren, take them on walks around the farm and to the Children's Zoo in Saginaw.  I would have all the patience I never had with my own kids, and couldn't wait to rock babies to sleep.  I would volunteer in all sorts of worthwhile organizations and quilt and bake bread, and learn one new thing every year to make me a well rounded older citizen.   None of those things happened.  I have two children who live more than a hollar away.  I thought I would be the last woman in Michigan to get grandchildren, then I got two in one summer.  Not sure if the patience thing will work out any better than it did for their parents, and the quilting thing is kind of haphazard.  I would honestly like to do more but find excuses to not, do it that is.   I do bake bread, but then try not to eat it all myself.   And the volunteering thing seems to be on a "dragged kicking and screaming" all the way kind of deal or one that someone tricks me into.  I have invariably, enjoyed every volunteering  job I have done and know that more would only be good for me, but it seems I can find more ways not to than incentive to go for it.  Maybe that should be a resolution for this year.


This year will be different, I can feel it in my bones and my heart.  A new beginning is truly in the air this year, and I hope I am mature enough to realize time will not always be there and there isn't always a tomorrow.  My Facebook friends have shared many words of wisdom this year, and many I have reshared.  But in the end its the revelations I've received that lead me to know, I can start afresh every day if I so choose.  Perhaps all can be revealed in days, in a compact set of weeks, but it won't make the new me I have experienced any more clear.  On the outside, I am the same, only older, and now have age lines and grayer hair beneath the honeyed blond..  On the inside I have wisdom I didn't a year ago.   Time marches on and its up to me to know "all will be well".  Its up to me to be still and listen for it and then take the ball and run with it.  To take those leaps of faith when they are presented and to know all is relevant.  All that stands behind me and all that is before me....

The first day of 2012 in Hemlock, Michigan was gray for the most part and mild at 45 degrees at 10 a.m.  Rain showers passed through but then we received a brief hour of sunshine.  We walked the dogs in that sunshine and felt the promise of the New Year.  It didn't last but the rainbows seldom do.  We have to reach for them and grasp them for they won't be with us for long.  Before the election year phone calls and endless commercials make me want to live in a cave, before the winter winds wear me down, and before the grind of living and seeing those I love pass from me, I will rejoice in that hour of sunshine and look to the promise of that rainbow, no matter how swiftly it leaves me.

May the good Lord bless you all in the year to come.