Most of us are making New Year’s Resolutions: lose weight, eat right, organize the basement, practice the piano for fifteen minutes per day…that kind of thing. As of this morning, I have a different suggestion, one for which I cannot take credit. It’s the resolution of a friend with whom John and I spent New Year’s Eve; a simple idea, doable at any moment and without an outlay of time or real energy: gratitude. This friend resolves to be grateful for the blessings of his life. I was half-asleep on the couch by ten o’clock Saturday night. I vaguely recall lifting my head now and then to add a comment, probably puzzling, to the conversation, so I didn’t think much about his resolution until the next morning.

One evening more than ten years ago, I was going to out to eat with a family—a couple and their 17-year-old daughter. It was a longish drive into town, and we had fallen into a companionable silence. I was looking at the mountains, sharp edged and blue against a mid-December sky.
“I don’t like religious people,” the daughter said, without preamble. The only context I could assign to her comment was my having recently sent out cards with a poem I’d written about the meaning of Christmas.

A while ago, I was driving down I-64 in my conservative silver Volvo, which is the kind of car that subtly identifies its owner as middle-aged and law abiding—at least I think it does. I was heading home from Richmond, Virginia, late one afternoon. I was tired. I was tired because I was still responsible at that time for my parents, one sinking into dementia, both with multiple health problems. The last years of their lives wore me to a nubbin, to speak in my native Southern parlance. I slept fitfully; I worried constantly; I too often had to fight like a pit bull for their care. I lived in an almost relentless storm of problems.

In the past six months, I’ve gone from falling asleep quickly, deeply and comfortably to feeling every night like I’m wedged into a tiny window seat, next to a screaming baby. I’ve tried various remedies: getting up immediately to read on my kindle (which does not require the lighting of a lamp), melatonin, a few sips of brandy, brandy with melatonin. My strategies are not creative.

My father will be 84 this spring. For two weeks I was with him constantly, as he lay in a hospital bed, thin and frail and mumbling incoherent phrases. I’ve wondered, despite knowing the answer, how this could be the man who used to carry me, in one of thousands of fatherly deeds, into the Atlantic surf, back when I wore ruffled swimsuits and captured my hair in long twisting braids. When I could not stand on my own against the force of the waves. I can still feel the skin of his chest and shoulders against my body and feel those waves crash against us. I screamed in the delicious fear that happens on roller coasters and in creepy movies. We spent summers in cottages built on spindly stilts that shuddered at night in the strong coastal winds. He felt bad that he couldn’t afford a studier place; I felt comforted by the creaking beams, driven deep in the sand, swaying against the force of the tides.

I recently read Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult, which had, for me, not one but two surprise endings. I’m not often surprised by the endings of books—I figured out Water for Elephants from a single sentence in the prologue: “She looked at me again, bemused.” My immediate sense of how the book would unfold made it no less wonderful. Picoult’s book is about elephants, too, and uncertainty, regrets and dashed dreams. She even tackles mental illness and the nightmare of living with someone transformed by a change of brain chemistry into an illogical tyrant.

I’ve just finished H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald, which is poetry in the long form of a memoir. Reading the book was like visiting an art gallery. MacDonald’s descriptions of her world (“The sky was liquid rust”) are as unique and evocative as any painting. The book is about grief and her way of working through it with the help of a remote hawk, who mirrors, she believes, what she wishes to become: a person who cannot again be hurt by the loss of love. She toggles back and forth between her experience of training her goshawk, Mable, and a memoir she read in childhood, T. H. White’s The Goshawk, in which a complex and tragically unhappy man attempts a similar transformation, to a bad if uncertain end.

This blog is a departure from my usual All-Weather Friend material, but I feel I must respond to the story of Cecil the lion. I grew up in a family of hunters, eating the game my father and brother killed. I don't hunt, never have or will, but I'm not opposed to it. Like thousands of people, tens of thousands, however, I am sickened by what Walter Palmer did. The images of Cecil dying are haunting. There are far worse crimes, I realize—crimes deserving of the most severe punishments we as a rational, thinking society can mete out.

My hair is below my shoulders—the way I wore it when Wayne and I met. The way I’ve mostly worn it. Sometime in our first year together, he told me he thought short hair was charming, and after this revelation, I spent an experimental morning on a stool, draped in a black cloak that smelled of hair spray, and watched wet blonde snips slide to my lap and fall in limp clumps to the floor. I used to run my fingers through the chin length bob and feel, when the ends slipped so quickly through my fingers, that some big part of me was gone. But my hair is long again, unkempt. Size two, slim-styled jeans I got from the bargain bin of a discount store drape in loose folds around my legs. I stood in line that day at a market, a thousand miles from home, waiting to buy a drum of dried algae recommended by a nutritionist whose smile had remained placid and fixed like a doll’s smile, even as she proffered her diagnosis of my problem: deep, profound grief.

Two years ago (actually more like a decade ago, now—I found a draft of this blog recently and decided to publish it), I leaned, for the umpteenth time, what is important. I was making a disco out of my family room to celebrate John’s fiftieth birthday. What better way than to bring back the seventies, when we came-of-age, swaying long-haired under the surreal lights of a twirling mirrored ball? Thirty of his friends were coming to dinner, dressed in loud, weird clothes. John had dug around the attic and found white dress shoes and a white belt.

In October two years ago, I wrote a letter trying to explain to Wayne’s friends and mine something that was inexplicable except in the broadest terms of circumstance. It was my eighth wedding anniversary, and I had ridden a Lusitano mare, with a mane so long it tangled in my fingers when she galloped, to a Portuguese village in the heart of the Algarve. I struggled with words more than I ever had in a lifetime of riding with the willfulness and unpredictability of a horse.

My father tells about a religion professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who gave, year after year, the same final exam: List in order the books of the Bible. Students in pursuit of an easy boost to their grade point averages, of course, clamored for admission to his class. Imagine the chagrin of an unfortunate group he confronted instead, perhaps in a wicked humor, with the much more demanding task Criticize the acts of Moses. One student, not to be dissuaded, wrote loftily, “Far be it from me to criticize the acts of Moses. Here are the books of the Bible….”

Building a website is apparently like building a house. It requires skill and commitment to doing the job right, and much of the longterm success hinges on unseen elements. Unfortunately, I initially went about hiring a website developer the same way I did the last building contractor I hired—to my near financial ruin. When I was thoroughly mired in detached bits and pieces of house, he ran glibly through the proposed budget and took a big swipe at my savings, saying, like a broken record (forgive the dated analogy), “Oh, we’ll be through in about two days. Oh, we’ll be through in about two days. Oh, we’ll be through in about two days....” But that’s another story. Here’s the abbreviated version of the lesson I learned: Never hire a contractor by the hour.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, John and I spent a couple of hours filling two shoeboxes with Christmas gifts for children who live in real poverty, at least as far as having things — the kind most of us cram into closets, drawers, and basements. Can anyone imagine the people of Ethiopia or Bangladesh wringing their hands over the problem of clutter?