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A New Walk for 2026

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The joke is I celebrate the New Year with Papua New Guinea, and then have the rest of the day to go about my business, sweep up dropped Christmas tree needles, nap, and retire around eight to read and dream of 2026, to be startled awake later on as neighborhood fireworks disturb my sleep. 

I no longer desire the riotous New Year’s Eves of my youth and young adulthood.  No longer spend hours, days, really, figuring out what to wear, who I will be dressing for, who I will be celebrating with, where I will be and kissing whom when the ball drops and the countdown ends and everyone around me is roaring and laughing and having a high old time. 

My earliest New Year’s Eves were spent with my brother and Granny Opal.  We begged to stay up until midnight and she made a show of allowing it, knowing we would never make it, not really.  She gently shook our shoulders at the stroke of twelve, bells and firecrackers going off  in the distance, so faint a sound that by morning we wondered if we heard them at all. 

Now I hatch a plot to babysit on New Year’s Eve to give exhausted parents a small break at the end of the year.  I am not so kind; I want to spend time with the little ones and this is the stunt I pull, and I need an excuse in case some well-meaning but misguided friend or friends should invite me out to celebrate in that desperate “are we having fun now” way I remember from years past. 

I might deign a late lunch, the late part making it festive.  But that is all. 

I crave quiet and contemplation and a new notebook with blank pages too pristine to make a mark on, not yet, not until I am sure.  Odd how the waves of white pages invigorate me, all that  possibility, and everything hopeful and glad. By February the careful penmanship will be abandoned, goals and plans having given way to lists and chores, reminders for doctor’s appointments, trips to the dentist. 

But every new year deserves some thought and consideration.  Especially since this past year was such a stinker.  A nagging health issue, nothing life-threatening or dire. I just couldn’t walk.  Hardly at all.  I didn’t even have the good grace to break a bone, just a repetitive use injury that took forever to figure out. I tackled the holidays last year like I was crazed, and messed myself up.  And now, a  full year later, I’m still not recovered, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

And it was a dark tunnel, too, giving me a glimpse of what old age can look like, feel like, be like.  I didn’t care for it. 

I have found a new intervention, a protocol that is working well, finally, and I am grateful for the skilled and kind practitioner who helps me. The tunnel is less dark, and not even a tunnel anymore, as I think about it.  A little bit of a wobble, I think now, but a year-long one, and it is my job to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

I’m often lazy about my health, my intentions, so many things.  I am not my age; I truly believe I am 35, maybe 40, but that’s about it. My body begs to differ.  But you know what?  I come from prairie stock and that is going to come in handy as I work through my exercises, build strength and recover. 

My father went about everything like he was killing snakes. A broad-shouldered ‘bull in a china shop” kind of fellow. My mother’s people were delicate.  So tuning in to that sensibility can’t hurt, either. Had my parents visited Giza, my father would have not truly experienced  the pyramids until he had walked over and kicked them. My mother’s attitude?  “I can see them from here.”


Somewhere in there is where I live, between the avid adventurer and the diva in the sedan chair, swooning in the heat. The brawny outdoorsy type and the petite fleur with fallen arches. I resist the fainéant approach that was my mother’s, although I am every bit as lazy.  It just isn’t how I see myself. Now, though, I might need to embrace both approaches  if I am going to thrive into my dotage. 

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Cold, Then Warm, Still Christmas

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The bitter cold of the past few days will give way to warmer weather, with the possibility of downright tropical heat as we near Christmas.  Or that is what my little buddy, Ryan Hall, is telling me.  Sweet Ryan is teasing the possibility of record heat on Christmas Day.  Seventies, y’all.  Seventies.

Now.  Let that settle. 

Two days ago I traveled to Louisville, leaving home in the single digits.  I had extra coats in the car, a sleeping bag, gloves, an unbecoming hat but one that would see me survive, should I somehow get stranded during the two-hour trip.  Nuts and chocolate, water, a working flashlight. I wasn’t heading out to explore the Northwest Territories, but I was ramped up like something big was about to happen. 

Next week it looks like I may have to break out the shorts. 

But Ryan–who you can find on YouTube at Ryan Hall Y’all–promises lots of drama getting to those record temps.  Cold, then warm, with storms and unsettled weather every few days, so there is that to look forward to. And I do. 

We have had warm Christmases before, and the worst in my book, are the ones that are just like the fall, all that warm weather protracted, a sameness I find maddening.  I would never choose to live in a perpetually perfect climate.  Would prefer a place that builds to the crescendo of a true and snowy winter, ebb into glorious spring with some dramatic storms for visual interest, then settle into a verdant summer, but one that gets cool at night.  Autumn, well, autumn can do what it likes,  as long as the leaves put on a show. 

Our recent taste of true winter, though, has been sufficient to put me in the holiday spirit, and I will happily drag through the coming rains and warming temps to finish my shopping and make incessant trips to the grocery store.  By all accounts, this winter will be changeable and dramatic and that suits me just fine. 

What then, to do with a summery Christmas Day?  

Usually I would  pout and spend most the day bemoaning my bad luck, as if the thermometer is the true meaning of Christmas.  I know better, of course, but being bundled up and happy as I visit friends and family is the linchpin of my holiday fantasy.  Candlelight Service with my family on Christmas Eve, then walking home in the cold, the air crystalline and our breath billowing clouds of white. Laughter, and gentle ribbing as we bump along to the warmth of a welcoming hearth.

In fact, that last bit really happened one year, so not a fantasy.

The promise of more snow later on has improved my mood immeasurably. In fact, I am looking forward to this late December warm-up.  There are leftover leaves to rake.  There is a box of anemones I never got around to planting, and wood hyacinth, too, which I think I ordered by mistake.  Maybe it’s not too late for them, and I love the idea of one more dig in the dirt before the New Year.  

And Christmas Day seems a hopeful time for coaxing new life. In the bleak mid-winter, and all that.

I don’t know.  Maybe just buying all that down outerwear has shifted my mood, or perhaps I have grown reasonable, tempered, let’s say, as life spools out in its own way. But I can see me come December 25th, sipping mimosas on the deck, mariachi music in the background, sun on my face, dirt under my nails, happy as a Christmas clam.

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HEAT WAVE

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There was a heatwave, not unlike this one. I was living in Bowling Green then, my sister was spending the summer with me, taking classes, and we were fiends for tennis. Boys wouldn’t play with us. Well, they would, but they didn’t like it.


We hit the courts one fine bright noon. Kathy remarked how deserted it was. We had our pick of courts with the sun bearing down on them, our little water bottles sweating in our hands. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.

“Inside, where they belong,” I replied. “You know people are dropping like flies, right?”


“Huh? “

“This heat, it’s killing people from Chicago to Memphis and anyone with sense is in the air conditioning, if they can find it.”


She looked blank, I shrugged, like it was of no more importance than if I was passing along something interesting I had just read about King Tut’s tomb. We played three sets of tennis, and feeling fine, but not total idiots, decided maybe we should go in search of some air conditioning, too.


We gathered our cans of balls, our tennis rackets and tiny tennis towels, our skimpy water bottles and took ourselves off home.


What I remember most about that afternoon is this. We were young, not too bright, and as fit as we ever were or ever would be. We were golden.


I write this in a chair that rocks, swivels and is in possession of a matching ottoman upon which my feet rest. The sprinkler rakes the big windows to my right, but I am not going out there any time soon to turn it off. I calculate the window of safety in which I might venture out to save my plants. It is a grave kind of arithmetic, even though, while it is hot, I have been hotter, and I am not sure it is so awful out there. I mean, it feels bad, but not that bad. Yet, I peek through the drawn blinds — no I don’t, I wrote that for effect — and take my pulse and try to remember when I last hydrated.


Because now I’m old.


Decidedly unfit.


And if I am honest, a bit of a scaredy cat.


There have been medical issues, not many or long-lasting enough to say I have a (fill in the blank) condition. But I creep around like maybe I do. I stay out of hot tubs, am cautious in a sauna, I weigh up my stamina for a walk around the neighborhood.


As if I could walk around neighborhood, anyway. I am almost recovered from a wonky hip issue, one that has vexed me since Christmas. The pain has migrated all over the place and is now, I think, in the last and only place left to be. And I am so much better. I can pick stuff up off the floor now. But it has gotten my attention.


I suppose I’ll never hold another tennis racket. I can’t get a bead on pickleball, and I suspect it is a pride thing. And while I have never been the biggest fan of summer, I have a soft spot for the girl I was once in it. The one with that backhand, the mean second serve. That one, who thought nothing of tennis at high noon, and 96 degrees. That one, who was always game, even if she wasn’t always best suited for the weather. I want a piece of her back.


She would be out there right now, mulching or pulling weeds, She wouldn’t care if it was hot. She would be at the nurseries this afternoon, looking for plants. Come home. Dig some holes. Maybe I need to quit twitching the curtains and just go out there to meet the day, whatever kind of day it is. If I only make it to the porch to drink iced tea, well, that is something, too.

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Decoration Day, Then and Now

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My grandmother called it Decoration Day and told stories of picnicking among the stones of her departed family members, in a prairie cemetery in Indian Territory, in what is now east Oklahoma. The Paxtons would descend on the windswept and flat parcel of land and spend the whole day. They sang. They played games. They cleaned the graves of dead flowers and planted new ones to be buffeted by the wind, but that was just fine, because it gave the impression of dancing, those bobbing heads, in a stark and lonely place, there, on the outskirts of town.


I think she wanted us to recreate the picnic at Elmwood Cemetery or, rather, she wished we could, but knew such a thing would be impossible, unseemly, not done. The story appalled my mother. But Granny never failed to mention it on those long-ago Saturday mornings as she popped the trunk and hauled out tools, watering cans and washtubs full of flowers.


We followed her, our Keds and Red Ball Jets growing wet at the toes, then cold and uncomfortable as we trudged up the small rise to the place where our people lay, all of them, a case of serendipity having orchestrated both sets of grandparents with plots in spitting distance of each other.


“Look for the statute of the girl missing a finger,” she called over her shoulder. “That is our landmark.” And there she is, Bernice Fitts, who left this world at the age of eighteen, a giantess missing a finger, pointing, and not pointing, in the direction of the grandfather I never knew.
We were always excited, but subdued, too. We understood, as much as we were able, that this was a solemn duty and there were things here, mysterious and big, echoes of Sunday sermons, bellies of whales, lion’s dens, the dead to rise again. All of it scary and thrilling and incomprehensible.


But it was fun, too. An outing. A tradition. We were not a family to visit the cemetery regularly; we didn’t decorate graves for the seasons, on holidays or the birthdays of the departed. We might wander up to Elmwood on a pretty day, a moody afternoon, but never to linger.


Yet, Memorial Day was sacred, although we never used that word. But to ignore it, to miss one, would wrack me with guilt, and my sister, too.


Now, we call up, half-ashamed, asking if the other has taken flowers to the cemetery, hoping the answer is yes, so we are off the hook. The answer is always, no. We scurry around then, and gather plants and a watering can, and tend the graves in the most perfunctory of ways. But we feel better afterward, and both of us sigh with relief and satisfaction as we pull out onto Breckenridge and get on with our day. A duty done.


My mother was in the habit there toward the end of buying hanging baskets she would place on the graves and retrieve later for her summer garden. This was a great idea I thought, yet it worried her someone would steal them, so she sent me out early on Tuesday morning to bring them home. And people do steal them. Never our pots because they weren’t special, just some impatiens, still too small to make much of a display, but the nice ones, the specially made arrangements, these disappear.


We need not discuss what makes people do this, how low-bred, how disrespectful. We know exactly the sort to help themselves to a remembrance left for a loved one. To dwell on it is to wish for a stone hut on an isolated island in which to live out our days, away from people, just about all of them. To give up on them.


And some days I do give up on them. But not most days.

And some days I remember so clearly being a child of four, seven, ten.
The cool and damp of a May morning, the bucket of peonies in my grandmother’s trunk, children running in a game to find their grandparents who are only stories to them, faded photos, this gray stone. Another child, or just so recently a child, her head bending on a slender neck, her upraised and fingerless hand, showing the way.

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Thanksgiving, My Way

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The week has arrived, the time I can see my sweet family gathered around the groaning table, all sharp angled elbows and knees, girls in stiff blonde pigtails and patterned dresses, little boys with freckles and gap-toothed grins, as we admire the golden bird, mama in her cocktail apron and papa in a suit, a suit, mind you, big smiles all around, for Thanksgiving is HERE!


Someone ought to smack Norman Rockwell in the face.

No one’s Thanksgiving looks like that.


I have gone from nostalgic, warm-hearted, expectant, aggravated, downright mad, exhausted, and back again. I am hosting and the list of things to do has been long, with incessant trips to the grocery, the hardware store, the on-line stores, and still I realize I have nary a decorative pumpkin to grace the dining table.


And right about now, I don’t care.


My sister sets an impossibly high standard with her home decor. Her house would be festooned with tiny pumpkins, exquisite turkey figurines, and other things I can’t name but find beautiful…the first five minutes I am there. Then the babies arrive, and I intend to hog them, and nephews and nieces arrive, and I want to hog them, too, but they are adults now and they no longer get the appeal of putting fat cardboard puzzles together.


So, my lovely guests will only have the struggling amaryllis on the counter to gaze upon. But the little ones will know right where to find the toys, and will make a beeline for them. From where I sit right this minute I spy two toy trucks, purposely placed by my nephew, Cy, “charging,” just like the Roomba he is obsessed with. I debate moving them. He will look for them as soon as he hits the door.


There has been more to pulling the house together than I anticipated. Fortunately, I have my pal, Ruth, who was here two days in a row and worked me like a dog. She worked, too, and honestly, I would be in a weeping, wobbly mess right now if it hadn’t been for her. She should be around my table on Thursday, too, come to think of it, so grateful am I for her help and friendship.


As I write this I am in the early stages of making Chef Jean Pierre’s turkey gravy. It will take hours. But gravy is my spirit animal and I could eat it with a spoon, and have. That I can make it early and reheat it on Thanksgiving with no ill effects, well. I’m pretty grateful for him, too.
Early this morning and driving to get the last of my cooking supplies, I worked myself up into a right state. So put upon, so taken for granted, what was I thinking? But then a checkout person was kind and helpful, and I felt–begrudgingly–my mood lift a bit. Still not done with it I called an old childhood friend, and she finished lifting my mood the rest of the way.


In my snit it occurred to me I might ask for help from my dear hearts. What a concept. They are not mind-readers, after all, and then I thought of my Granny Opal, a widow who didn’t drive, spending a solid week preparing for our Thanksgivings. I always helped in the kitchen the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but that was about it. Her table would already be set, the house warm and inviting. I honestly used to think she loved preparing for us, all of it, the cooking, the cleaning. But, did she? Who knows? I am sure no one ever asked her.


So, I sent out the word: I need someone to bring me two large bags of ice. Go get the dishes and silverware from Kathy and bring them over here. Here is what I will have around here to drink, feel free to bring whatever libation you might enjoy. Come early if you want, and I would love that. Appetizers at one. We will eat at two.


Watch out for Cy’s trucks tucked under end tables. And please leave them alone. They’re charging.

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A Slothful New Year

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For as long as I can remember the week between Christmas and New Year’s was its own thing, suspended in a weird time space continuum, where, about mid-week, we awoke, all fuzzy and confused, not knowing the day, much less the time.


Then COVID, and we spent almost two years suspended and unaware of the calendars growing cobwebs on our walls and desks and in our purses. It robbed us of a great deal, but especially that delicious sense of floating through a day, a week, innocent as babes. We COVID we floated a lot longer.


It is my favorite post-Christmas activity–falling asleep sitting up, at nine, at noon, at three. To fall asleep at the drop of a hat is charming, especially after all the activity and stress of holiday preparations, the buzzing of chores banging around your brain just as you lie down for the night, the hectic activity to make things perfect, although the slobs for whom the effort is made never notice, and certainly never toss a compliment your way.


My niece, the young mother of a two-year old and ten-month old twins couldn’t believe how tired she was, how much she craved sleep two days after she threw a family celebration for thirty people. There were kids running everywhere, games going on, food to be refreshed, toys to corral and corral again. And please don’t step on the babies.


Two days later, nestled in a corner of the couch, she thought she was coming down with something. Well, yes, she was coming down, but not with a virus. She was coming down from the holidays. I think she hadn’t experienced it before. I get it. When I was younger, the week between the holidays was dedicated to meeting up with friends, sleeping late and making excuses to avoid lesser family obligations. About the only thing I had to do was laundry, and that was so I would look cute when I went out–every night.


I am in awe of how she and her husband do it. This year they have moved, worked on the house, with three children two and under, kept that house tidy and inviting. They speak sweetly to the babies, work hard all the time.


But, eventually, everyone’s energy runs out, and for the first time ever, you don’t know what day of the week it is. And that was Kate on Monday. While she took a bath, I played with Gretchen, who is named for my mother, but I pretend she is named for me, too. We have fun, old Gretch and I, when she isn’t glued to Miss Rachel.


Katie seemed genuinely surprised to learn that sleepy feeling after the holiday was perfectly normal. That some of those yawns signaled a state of relaxation, not just exhaustion. She hadn’t connected those dots, but it’s true.


I’m not very good about knowing what I am feeling from one moment to the next. I’ve trained myself to take a moment, check in with myself, but I’m not always successful at it. But I have nailed, absolutely nailed, a high level of sloth between Christmas and New Year. It rejuvenates me.


Then, in these first gray days of January, I keep the feeling going. Gently. I get moving a bit more, take down the tree, organize a closet, or at the very least, my purse. But what else should we do in these first weeks of January? Nothing, I tell ya. I watched several documentaries about medieval Christmases, where no one worked at all between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night, which is January 6, Epiphany. It surely kept the letdown at bay. And the holiday was given so much space and attention, with a new feast or celebration on almost every single day.


Such a contrast to the way we run around, shop, wrap, bake, decorate for a month or more, all frazzled and cranky, culminating in a twenty minute meal and a short frenzy of flying wrapping paper and spilled eggnog. In the absence of a medieval celebration, I think I will keep the holiday going in my own little way. Ease into the New Year, nothing much doing until the day after Epiphany. Join me.