2015: a retrospective.

Dear 2015,

I told myself, and perhaps others, that I would blog every day in the year 2015. I did pretty well--323 posts. It's not quite the high watermark that 2012 was, when I wrote 363 posts. But still.

There were times this year when things felt so sad and hard--not necessarily my own personal things, but things in the larger world. Deaths. Suffering on an intimate and global scale. I wanted to speak to these things, but sometimes the daily post seemed an inadequate container for that speech. So: silence.

I'm sorry for those silences, ultimately.

In a year of so much sorrow, there were also so many miracles, so many joys. Two weddings among my children. A new granddaughter. Visits hither and yon. My best friend and I walked down to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. I swam in the North Sea and climbed a Scottish mountain(/hill). Went to Ireland and saw passage tombs and swans in a river and won a poetry prize. I  held my new book in my hands.

It feels incomprehensible to me sometimes, truly, the ways that sorrow and joy braid and intertwine, but I want to be able to speak to that, that twisted fiber that makes the thread that becomes the fabric that is experience. I want to try to find words for all of it. That's why I want to write, to be a writer: to keep trying to find those words.

This next year, I plan to

• write more
• take excellent care of those I love--the historian especially, and my parents
• cook more

We were talking, my family and I, about resolutions the other night. My daughter said she liked to make a resolution, one that was positive, that had to do with how she treated others with greater care. I loved that. I always think of resolutions in terms of what I want more of--more creativity, more joy. Maybe more dancing. That would be an excellent resolution.

Thank you, my dear readers, for reading and talking back to me. I treasure the conversation.

love,

htms

Happy belated birthday.

It's my blog's birthday--turning seven years old this month. That's 1472 posts and 60,000 (and change) page views (only about 30% of which are probably mine, from when I was constantly refreshing to see if anyone had left any comments).

Here's my very first post. And here are a few of my personal favorites:

Open letter to my bed: "Oh my darling clementine, my bed, you are, at the end of a day like today one of the brightest ideas ever to issue forth from the mind of humankind."


The historian quotes scripture: "Historian: Slow to anger and quiet as an . . . owl? And wise as . . . a goat."


Open letter to my proclivity for complaint: "The barbarians are at the gate, and by God, they eat off dirty dishes, the ones that were supposed to be clean."


Me and Almost Famous had brunch together: "Also, Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous looks almost exactly the same as I did in my yearbook picture, junior year."


California sketches: "Also, [my] quick-witted friend, the birthday girl, happens to know where cake is to be obtained."

To the desert:  "I am thinking about diversion a lot, because I realize, what I've been seeking to be diverted from is my life, my actual life."


Like a heartbeat baby trying to wake up: "Sometimes, this little bit of the song keeps me awake at night, because I myself need something more sub sub sub substantial."


Muffin, I presume: "A muffin is not a cupcake. It is a quick bread, which means that, categorically, it has more in common with the scone, the biscuit, the rusk, than it does with any form of cake. It is a wholesome food, falling on the plain side of the plain/fancy spectrum."


Without peer: "Yes, the people, I was brought to tears over a Coke in a west side Mexican restaurant because my husband offered to take me to the mall."


Clam chowder: requiem for a dream: "There it sat, looking like the paragon of chowder, clam-filled and potato-y and even a little creamy. Why was it so nasty? Why?"


Thanks, everyone, for reading along with me all these years.