My daughter says she’ll miss 2020—it’s such a neat number, so even and exact. She likes to round off corners and divide things leaving no remainder, her way of coping with the chaos of the world as experienced through a wildly creative brain, a deep sensitivity to what cannot be enumerated. She likes the look of 2020 on the page, but admits it hasn’t been much fun, this year trapped at home. For her, like most of us, that number ultimately looks—will always look, I suspect—pretty scary.
“The seers predicted 2000 would be doomladen,” I say. “I think they just miscounted.”
We’re sitting in the drive-up spot at Target picking up sparkling water to bring in the new year. It’s cold and rainy and the poor woman putting our bags in the trunk looks stunned, as if the year has done its best to erase her. I feel guilty. Stupidly, dangerously lucky. ‘What shall we have for dinner tonight?”
This morning, instead of waking to the news on NPR as I’ve done now for years, I set a windchime sound on the Hatch machine my husband gave me for Christmas, and stacked up pillows behind me to write in a journal. A cup of hot tea sat steaming beside the pretty, horizon-bloom light.
Outside the window, on the exact same branch I saw it stand last year in the midst of an ice storm, a cardinal perched trapeze-like and looked around with the same sweet curiosity. The mist and rain made the indoors, the comfort of my bed and warm electric light feel marvelous. Best to look out, I thought, and be glad. The bird knows.
So many people want to cancel this year, forget it, move on, go back to the before, and they may have good reason. We have had our own losses and disappointments. But there has been, from my own particular indoor view, so much to be grateful for. This time together as a family, my teenage children close, if often hidden behind their doors, two perfect mysteries. I’ve learned, after a decade of struggle, to embrace this oak-lined southern town in which I’ve come to live. I’ve walked the same blocks each day, then stopped at the neighborhood park to balance in tree pose among the longleaf pines. They’ve looked back at me, reminded me to stand tall and look up, around. Storms are to be lived through, they say. Rain will soak your bark a shade of purple so lovely you’ll never name it, might as well save yourself the trouble.
This would be a long enough list of gratitudes, but there is so much more. My mother on the tablet she’s learned to use, a friend interrupting me via Skype to tell me the news from London, the lights I’ve strung up in my office since I got to teach from home, the masks that have kept us safe. The maskmakers. The scientists. For each thing lost or abandoned, something gained. Humility. Strength. A brain rewired. A big puzzle tipped out of its box and completed. Closeness. Tenderness. The chance to plan ahead another year. Or plan nothing at all.