Post Christmas Haze, Looking to the New Year

Sleeping Sylvia with wrappings on Boxing Day

Post-Christmas Haze, Looking to the New Year

Hope everyone who celebrated had as good a Christmas as possible. We Facetimed and Zoomed and Google-meeting-ed with family in Ohio, Tennessee, even Bainbridge Island, watched the new Wonder Woman movie and exchanged gifts. On Boxing day, as you can tell, Sylvia enjoyed playing with the boxes, and we tried to recover. I know this Christmas was hard on a lot of us, not being with loved ones, not being able to enjoy some of our traditions, and some of us mourning loved ones no longer with us. For most of us, it was not the holiday season we might have hoped for. On the side of good news, my sister in law, a nurse who works the covid floor, got her vaccine, as did many of my doctor friends from Cincinnati to Alaska. That’s a good present, right?

I had a little surprise good news on Christmas Eve (see previous post) that one of my personal essays that I published this year – the first year I’ve tried to publish personal essays, really – was chosen as one of Salon’s “Best of 2020.” “Marriage in the Time of Coronavirus” was the first that I wrote and sent out, and Salon was the second place I queried. It felt like a little encouragement from the universe to continue to try genres outside of poetry, especially as I am still trying to place my two poetry manuscripts in the new year. This is also a good time to remind you that even if you are in middle age (say, ahem, 47) it’s not too late to try out new forms and experiment a little.

Looking to the New Year

It can be hard, after the sort of year we’ve had in 2020, to make sense of it, much less process it enough to think about next year. It’s hard to make goals or set intentions knowing that even our biggest hopes might be thwarted by unforeseen intervention from a sometimes chaotic universe. Maybe we need to heal a bit before jumping into the next thing. We need to mourn losses, acknowledge hard facts, come to terms with the fact that sometimes things are out of our control.

But I’m actually feeling mildly optimistic when I look at 2021. I think a new President will not, realistically, suddenly solve all our problems – coronavirus, environmental, racial injustice, economic hardship, undoing the wrongs 45 has done to us. But it will be a little better to have someone at the control’s who not out to actively do evil. The vaccine will not come to me for months – and as someone with anaphalaxis issues, maybe not for a long time – but any amount of people at risk getting the vaccine will lower our numbers of deaths, help the overflowing hospitals, allow some amount of normalcy to return at some point. I’m hoping for antivirals and tests for monoclonal antibodies. So there are reasonable reasons for hope – not for everything to magically become good on January 1, but for a gradual improvement to our quality of life as teachers get vaccinated so kids can get back to school, as nurses and doctors don’t have to be afraid of dying if they spend too much time with covid patients, as nursing homes might be able to receive visitors and front-line workers won’t be risking their lives selling flowers or cleaning teeth or putting out fires. I’m hoping people will prioritize the arts and reading after this tough year, that we can return to museums and concerts and readings, book release parties and casual celebrations of all sorts.

For myself, this has still been a tough year health-wise – I spent almost the whole year on antibiotics for a tricky infection, not covid – and my mental health, for the first time in a long time, took a dive. I hope that I’ve built in some life-supporting lessons that I won’t forget in 2021. I also hope, maybe it’s silly, to try for a new job, to try to make new friends, to find new opportunities. Anyway, I am no collage artist, but I think the exercise of building a vision board both relaxing and helpful in thinking about what our true goals are when we think about how we are leading our lives. Here’s mine for the coming year. I am wishing us all a healthier and happier 2021, and I hope you all achieve your dreams.