Post-Holiday Reflections

Something about the beginning of a new year, especially after such a roller-coaster year as 2008. Oh, I understand about the arbitrary assignment of the January 1 date; I live too close to the land and to the natural rhythms of the year to think that there is anything inherently important about this date. It's not like it was the solstice, or the first intimations of the breaking of winter in February, or Midsummer's Day. But still...

Those days between Christmas and New Year's have colors all their own: golden honey and a sort of sepia. I suppose it's the low light that makes the golden color, and the sepia must come from the weight of memory of all the years since childhood. All my childhood was spent in one house, a house now lost forever except in our memories ("our" being myself and my sisters). I can picture the setting sun in late December filtering through the snowy pines, striking through the dining room window and lighting up the aquarium with its little fishy denizens. I look up from whatever book I've been reading and watch the gold shift to blue as the sun drops below the mountains, cozy and warm with my family as the evening cold settles in.

Much later when I worked at the Genzyme lab in Santa Fe, that same golden light speared down the long hallway in my building at sunset during those same late December days. Not being on idle vacation, I used to make sure I was able to take a break at about 4:15, though I never told my coworkers why. They may have wondered why I took my coffee out in the hall to gaze out the glass doors on a winter evening, but they were generally too busy to ask.

Now, of course, I can watch the sun sail into the end of day all I want, and I still love that low, honeyed glow sliding through the windows all around my round house, gilding the walls and all those dusty knick-knacks. At the solstice the setting sun paused on the tip of one of three low hills to the southwest, and now it has begun its long slow trek up the edge of the western horizon. And now that it is January, the subjective color changes.

The color for New Year's Day is, and always has been for as long as I remember, white. Too bright, too featureless, as we venture into a year we haven't quite invented yet. As always, it's a year of promise, more so this year than most, but also of fear. On this one day, though, we can hope that the promise will outweigh the fear, that we can be happy in whatever situations we find ourselves in, that we can always begin anew again. So although we watch the January colors change to silver-blue and gray, may we keep a little of that golden light that graced the last of the year.