Posted in Holidays and Seasonal Changes

Happy New Year! (Four Days Late)

Joyful 2022 to You!

So Robert and I did not get to have our traditional southern New Year’s feast of black-eyed peas, greens and cornbread on Jan 1st. (Because I couldn’t have peas or corn a week before a certain procedure I endured yesterday-which you can read about, with far too much detail, in tomorrow morning’s post).

So we had them all tonight …

Terrific 2022 to You!

Posted in Holidays and Seasonal Changes

Nothing Gold

I know that the poet is right, but just for today, January 1st, I’m going to hold onto gold as if it lasts forever.

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Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

Fort Mountain State Park, Chatsworth, Georgia
Posted in Holidays and Seasonal Changes

The Year

I love this short but oh-so-truthful jewel of a poem, The Year, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, written back in 1910. For we experience, year after new year, all that she writes about, all the realities of life.

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What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

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The weight of our 2021 year—the good (we did have some, right?) and the bad (no need for the same question) and the we’re-not-sure-which-it-was—now nears its tipping-over point into 2022’s own “rhymes” of a “thousand times.”

May we all “rise up laughing with the light” tomorrow and tomorrow.