snowbound on this New Year’s Eve and it is naptime, sweet silent naptime. the flakes float down like feathers, nesting on us, forcing us to nest in on ourselves, and there is coffee aplenty - with Bailey’s Irish Cream, to be festive - and oatmeal on the stove in this yellow kitchen.

oatmeal’s for remembrance, isn’t that how Ophelia rhymed it off?

for me, at least, oatmeal is “Auld Lang Syne” and snowfall, all wrapped up in one: thick hearty scotch comfort food to line one’s ribs in case of power outage and call up all the days and generations gone before, making one misty with the smells and textures of childhood, of heritage, of cultural memory.

or maybe that’s just the Bailey’s in my coffee. really, i’m a shame to the race and ought to be drinking the single malt Dave’s got squired away in the cupboard with the Tupperware that doubles as our liquor cabinet…but i come from a long-line of Methodist teetotalling Scots, so my drinking genes got stunted in that regard, and i struggle to appreciate the liquid gifts of the old country and its usquebaugh quite in the way i appreciate oatmeal.

i suppose a New Year’s resolution to learn to like Scotch whisky isn’t really concordant with the rest of my procreative hopes for 2008…

but it is still 2007. and not only do i have drinking on the brain, but i’m not quite ready to look ahead to the new year, to forge blindly and boldly forward, with hope or trepidation. i am not ready for New Year’s resolutions. rather, here in the last hours of 2007, a different sort of resolution calls me…a looking backward, attempting to pull together the threads of the year gone by, to resolve and cohere what is being left behind.

because when this year is a long-ago memory, deep in the realm of the bygone, its legacy, i think, will be mostly one of contentedness and coherence. of the events of the year, last month’s miscarriage still resonates heaviest right now, a fresh footprint and a scar on the plans i’d stored up in hope and wishfulness. 2007 contains within its bounds the brief existence of the little Junebug who will never be. and always, in looking back on the year, i’ll nod to that little wish, raise my glass. but the year itself isn’t summed up in melancholy. overall, it has been a good year, in its quiet way, a year of healing and growth in which Dave & i’ve gone from two tired, grateful, frazzled people with a baby to a fully-fledged, integrated family of three.

last January 1st, Oscar crawled forward for the first time, scooted his way across a friend’s floor early New Year’s morning. 365 days later, he runs and shouts and plays in the snow, lines up his farm animals and firemen in an orgy of pretend play, expresses wild indignation if his demands for more milk are not met NOW. he kisses (sometimes bites) and pats and generally interacts with us as a member of whatever group we happen to be in, which was not so much the case back in far-off 2006, which seems, suddenly, a lifetime ago.

and on January 1st last year, i had no idea most of you existed, those of you whom i do not know in person. now, you feel like friends, ringing in the New Year around the world…not auld acquaintances, perhaps, but true ones, fine ones. cherished ones.

happy new year to this old world of ours, spinning faithfully. may the year bring you all good things, and may tonight bring you all a little fun, however you celebrate.

us?  we’ll be the ones partying with shovels and oatmeal.  wheeee. ;)