You know how I feel about New Years. I love a solid clean slate, a fresh start and nothing really does that like the turning of a new year. I’ve written about it at length. This year was different. This year, I hated it. 2022 will be the first year that won’t have my mom in it and that breaks my heart. You may have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time alluding to my mom’s faults and how imperfect she was. I’ve written lots about loving through the imperfections. There needs to be time spent on the awesome. There are some very good reasons why I’m reluctant to enter a year without her…she is one of my favorite people of all time. She did this eye crinkly up thing when she smiled, but only the smiles that went with her teasing you or her about to say something snarky, that I really miss. She was so good about being genuinely excited about anything I was excited about. Coming to see our new baby goats would have been a top priority. I miss her pep talks and her perspective when I wanted to talk things through…like the fact that I am going to have Corra evaluated for ADHD. Mom would have gotten the biggest kick over how excited Corra is to have it (CoCo sees it like a superpower). Anyways. Obviously, I could go on. New Year’s Eve was always a laid back event…the most casual of the big holidays. But, lest you think it wasn’t steeped in tradition, we always had fancy fondue for dinner, played the same games, and (when my sisters were little) watched the NYC ball drop at 9:00pm.
We do nachos, play games, and binge watch some show or movie, and watch the ball drop in real time. We realized this year that misletoe grows wild here and we have some in our front tree…so I got a New Year’s Eve smooch under the real thing. This year we forgot to play the flour game, but added some serious cultural education so I’m declaring the transition to 2022 a rousing success.

We don’t normally own a TV, but we were selling mom’s so we put it to good use one more time. For that serious cultural education I talked about, we introduced our kids to the world of Looney Tunes and they loved it. Although, I’ve spent the last week explaining to Corra that there are no answers to the question “Why?” with regards to Looney Tunes.

The picture at the top of this post is my new kitchen chalk board. It’s the last stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. It’s maybe overused, but the work I still need to do in those miles before I sleep and all the promises I have to keep are very comforting to me right now. Especially when this new start is proving more intimidating than usual.