Clouds on the horizon

H and I just came back from Rutland. It was an aimless sort of drive that began with a purpose but whittled down to merely being together under sunset-edged cloud-filled skies. He returns to Boston tomorrow and I stay in VT for a few more days with a vacuumed living room, new mat on the kitchen floor and a clean bathroom. The bathroom and the vacuuming are fringe benefits of having people over. I need to do more of that in order to keep the cobwebs at bay.

In any case, I am sitting now in the tiny room upstairs where the windows are black with night.The rain is hitting the slate roof and there is a lamp on the desk and I am writing in a pool of soft light. It is a reflective time, and I am struck by something that is not news; we think we know what the pattern of our days will be; we think we know that tomorrow will be Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, and that is dump day and there will be time to pick up the mail at the post office. We think we know that there will be time to respond to the phone call that has lingered too long on our voice mail. We think that we know what we will have for dinner, what challenges await us at work, and how we will answer them, or we churn thinking that we know what it is that we bring to the task, and what is missing. And sometimes everything we know is wrong.

I started the day with a call from an old friend, one I speak to every 6 months or so. We have known each other since I was a graduate student, but we probably knew each other as children, though that is too long ago to be sure. His life has been tuned upside down in ways that no one should confront. His life has been taken hostage by circumstances beyond his control, and he is left coping with trying to "arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Another friend is struggling with a tense marriage and one with the conflicted feelings of an identity turned inside out by the very thing she had wished most in the world. And H and I are coping too, confronting what may be some momentous changes in our lives in 2012. I wrote earlier of the resolutions, and they are part of what we bring into 2012 - our dowry for the marriage to a new year. We bring the things that we value most as gifts to a year, like the Magi to a blessed child. We bring our demons as well, pushing them along like Sisyphus up an endless hill. But we will also confront the things that come unbidden, as gifts and challenges, from a year that is not even one day old. Some are familiar; some serendipitous and some arise like clouds on the horizon. It remains to be seen whether they are edged with sunset, filled with rain or betoken a whiteout to come.

We will be warming ourselves for a few more hours beside the wood stove. We hope you too are warm.