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.