annual.quest

The year opened with the sound of rain on a tin roof and the smell of cold coffee reheated three times. I sat at the window watching the neighborhood cat consider the weather, decide against it, and return to the porch.

There were no resolutions this year. Only intentions — soft, folded ones, like letters never quite sent. I wrote down what I hoped to remember: the names of birds I did not yet know, the shapes of the hills at dusk, the difference between quiet and still.

Spring arrived the way it always does here — in nervous fits, retreating twice for every step forward. The magnolia on the corner bloomed in a single weekend and by Monday the rain had knocked every petal into the gutter, where they lay like spilled milk and candlewax.

I learned to proof bread. I failed at proofing bread. I started again. The yeast, I think, was sympathetic; it kept trying.

— a small thing, but a true one

The days stretched until they would not stretch any further, and then they snapped back quietly, one by one, without announcement. I kept a small notebook by the kitchen window and wrote the temperature and the color of the sky at 7pm every evening. The notebook is now mostly amber, amber-rose, and the amber after rain.

We drove north one weekend and saw three deer in a field at twilight. They did not move. We did not move. Then a dog barked three streets away and everything resumed.

Autumn is the honest season. It doesn't pretend to be anything but an ending, and it is beautiful for exactly that reason. I raked leaves into small mountains and then stood back and let the wind undo an afternoon's work in six minutes.

I made a soup from a recipe my grandmother almost wrote down. The almost is the important part. I added too much thyme. It was still her soup.

— in which one realizes the ghosts are friendly

Dear next year: I have left the light on. There is half a loaf of bread on the counter and the kettle is still warm. I have fed the cat. I have written down what mattered and left the rest for the wind, which has its own filing system.

Be gentle with the people who loved this year. Be gentle with the people who did not. Be especially gentle with the mornings, which are the hardest part of any year, and with the evenings, which are the best part of any year, and will forgive you almost anything.

— yours, always, in amber