Happy New Year

Not that Seattle is all that cold in the winter, but I grew up in warmer, sunnier places than this, and by nature I am a sunshine and blue skies kind of girl. When I visit back East in the winter, I come back to Seattle and am reminded of how fortunate we are to have so much green to look at in the winter, but the skies are often still gray and grim and the clouds hang really low, and the days are just way too short. The light does come back quickly, but there's not all that much difference between December 21st and January 1st -- nothing to make me feel as though we've turned a corner and are headed into more congenial territory. So it's hard for me to think of January 1 as the beginning of anything.

But now it is mid-January, and already there really is appreciably more light than there was on the solstice - at 5 pm it is merely dim outside, not pitch dark. I went for a long walk yesterday, all through my neighborhood and down to a botanical garden near the water, and I saw winter-blooming cherries shedding their petals in soft drifts,


rhododendron buds getting fatter and fatter, and the tips of what I think are irises pushing up out of the ground.All signs that day by day we move farther away from those days when it hardly seems worth it to get out of bed because all too shortly it will be time to go back to bed again.

It's mid-January, and today is my birthday, and today finally feels like I have turned that corner and left the old year behind. And oh, it feels good to face forward with energy and interest and the desire to get out of bed every day and do stuff. Happy New Year, Happy New Year, Happy New Year!