No big changes

No big changes:  that's my New Year's resolution.  No weddings, no moves, no job changes.  Just settling down, like an old house -- although maybe too much like an old house these days, full of creaks and cracks, with cold extremities and scarcely a level surface.

Despite expectations, we enjoyed a white Christmas.  The snow started to fall on the 23rd or 24th and has continued, on and off, ever since.  Not large amounts.  But the trails have opened in Gatineau Park, and I look forward to a ski through the woods.  I know that somewhere along the trail, I will stop and listen to nothing but snowflakes sifting through the trees.  That moment will carry me a long way into the New Year.

In between snowdays, we've had some spectacularly clear and beautiful days.  Sue and I went to babysit our granddaughters, Ella and Lyla, on Wednesday.  On the way home, along the Micksburg Road, we drove beside snowy fields silver and blue in twilight.  A crescent moon hung bright in conjunction with some planet.  A persimmon sunset silhoutted the distant line of forest and the nearer, solitary individual trees.

And still, each season carries the promise of the next.  Yes, we now enter the coldest part of the year, just as the hours before dawn are the coldest time of night.  But the sun has begun its return.  Within a few weeks, a restlessness will begin to stir in the shorebirds along the coasts of Central and South America.  In the southwest, seasonal rains will cause deserts to bloom.  Around Ottawa, I know that the trees already feel the change in light.  In just a few weeks -- well, okay, eight to ten weeks -- the sap will begin to flow, and the buds will begin to swell.  Almost before we've grown accustomed to winter again, snowdrops and crocusses will begin to unfurl wherever a sunny wall reflects warmth onto bare earth.  Then I'll pull my fly rod from the basement and look to the opening of trout season in Algonquin Park.

Bring on another New Year.