I'll Be Cleaning Up Bottles With You

(on new year's day)

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Photo by Prchi Palwe on Unsplash

“Good morning, happy new year!” and all of those bright things we say to other walkers-in-parks who laced up their sneakers yesterday and sought out the unseasonable warmth of New Year’s Day in Southeastern Virginia.

I wonder what sort of holiday you had - was it good? Were you sick? Did you get any good presents? Did a devastating family secret come out? Did someone announce a pregnancy? Did someone melt down on a grand scale about holiday plans? Did you forget somebody else in the gift exchange and have to pretend that this VERY INTERESTING ELECTRIC SHAVER was meant for them all along? Were there any courthouse weddings in the week between Christmas and New Years? Maybe, possibly, (for your sake, I hope not) did all of the above happen?

Stranger things have happened, and all that.

We have so much hype about the New Year, and despite our best intentions not to fall into the “new year, new me” trap (ew), there is always a little bit of pressure to at least ward off when you see everybody out here running like Derby horses to reach a goal that they might say goodbye to right about next Wednesday. I like to see the enthusiasm. I wish everybody well. I hope that we do end 2023 with better health, some savings stashed up, more time outdoors, and less time naval-gazing and feeling wronged by the world. But I also hope that in the mad dash to change it all, you take a little time to enjoy yourself too!

This is not going to be a very wise, long, or “important” Substack, as it’s mainly a chance to rally ourselves from the post-holiday slump and take stock. But I just want to say: thanks for being here!

I spent yesterday baking sourdough loaves that I mixed, folded, shaped, and rose the day before. I didn’t mean for that to be as symbolic as it became, but there was something deeply significant about spanning the gap between one year and the next with a slow, intentional practice like baking bread. I liked that NYE and NYDay landed on a Saturday/Sunday, and that our plans were only as wild as “drive out to parents, accidentally sleep on couch for an hour, wake up before midnight for bubbly, countdown, and massive (illegal) fireworks, then make it home alive.”

New Years Day (yesterday) I was awake before 8 AM by my body clock, took a nice leisurely shower, baked the sourdough, enjoyed a hearty breakfast of eggs with spinach and mushrooms alongside sourdough focaccia and a clementine, and then cleaned up the house a bit. Then, somewhere in the afternoon sector, I took myself and a book of Mary Oliver poetry out to Smithfield and joined a friend visiting from Texas for a coffee and chat. We walked for nearly two hours in the 70 degree weather at the nearby park before deciding the right choice was ice cream cones instead of lunch (auspicious). All benches available were either directly facing the sun in our eyes (boo, hiss), or still wet from earlier rain. So we leaned against a fence and ate our ice cream cones and mentioned loudly to a passing group of middle schoolers, “When you’re thirty you can make these choices too!” as I held my cone of banana pudding ice cream like Lady Liberty’s torch. They probably thought we were hopeless old people, or a strange category of local gang: the Mason Street gang, who eat waffle-cones and sneer at loud motorcycles driven by divorced-looking old skullcap-wearing white men.

Afterward we stood in a parking lot near our cars and finished talking till a tiny chihuahua (horribly in need of a nail trim) named Tito came to bite at us, at which point we escaped to our cars. Later, after some raspberry jam on toast and more Mary Oliver, we celebrated my young sister’s engagement at a local Chinese restaurant, then came home and watched a stand up comedy routine before toppling into bed at eleven.

It felt like a strong start to 2023: slow paced, kinda random, mostly healthy, full of laughs.

And honestly, what more could I wish for us all in the coming year? I hope yours is slow and enjoyable too. I hope it’s full of random, entertaining episodes. I hope it’s mainly healthy with some treats scattered here and there, and I hope it’s very full of laughter and sunlight.

Happy New Year, geese. It’ll be a good one.