These days the sun slowly inches higher in the sky. The morning air seems brighter, crisper, in sharp contrast against the brown lawn.

The bluebirds are scoping out the nesting box (it has a new camera). They peek inside the hole and cock their little heads. Is this a home?

At the end of February or so they will start a family.

In January the world feels new.

And here in the kitchen a luminous softness radiates from my UV lightbox.

It almost feels like summer sun!

My desk is cleared off and I feel energized.

On New Year’s Eve my annual ritual is to light all of the candles in the house – Christmas pillars, tapers, votives, old tea lights, all of it.

I strike the matches to the wicks to burn away the old year.

On the fireplace mantle, in the kitchen, in the bedroom.

And I let them burn all the way down to hard disks.

And when they are all spent I bring out a slim bayberry taper that my sister gave me.

When lit, it’s fresh green balsam scent fills the whole house.

I pause and breathe deeply.

And meditate on what is real and true for me in the moment.

And I let go of last year’s energy.

Or I try to.

Back before Christmas I went into our attic storage area and dragged out a huge blue Rubbermaid container.

Inside were spiral notebooks of various sizes, some bound journals and some stacks of yellowed looseleaf papers.

Two of the tiny books had fake gold locks and keys.

My journals.

I drug them out mostly out of curiosity.

Should I sort out the “good stuff” and preserve it? Or just toss it all?

The lined pages were scrawls starting from my grade school years up until I was in my 30s.

Sigh.

What was important enough to write about?

Did I write well or was it (the dreaded word) trite?

I was curious to read and trepid at the same time.

Mostly I was just afraid of looking backwards.

I didn’t want to re-live some of that stuff.

Most of that stuff.

Let the past stay in the past.

So I had to steel myself before I started.

But after a quick taste from grade school 1975 (Robert Redford crazy), I deliberately left the bin open on the floor so I could dip into it at random.

For some reason it felt important to keep going.

Still it was kind of cool that things weren’t boxed up in chronological order.

It seemed easier to process the material this way: the heavy stuff alongside the ridiculous.

The sadness of my brother leaving home to go into the Navy.

The excitement of getting my first pet rat named Nicky.

The thrill of Halloween and riding our bikes all over town after dark.

Depression in high school after a huge breakup with my first crush.

The endless screeds about my weight.

And the tender entries from the days (and nights) after my kids were born.

The petty grievances against my sisters.

The blowsy love poems I wrote to my husband in college (gag).

And the running, always the running [see hip replacement].

The heartache with the sweet.

And of course the trite.

Anyway, I felt kind of brave for reading.

Turns out that the young diarest from the past was pretty great.

A lot of the time she was self-indulgent and silly and reactive.

And boy could she brood.

And most of the writing was lousy – boring observations and saccharine poetry.

But she was scrappy.

Because it wasn’t just that I had muscled through some challenging times, it was the fact that I wrote it all down.

When I was excited, hopeful and happy, yes.

But also when I was down and out and really struggling to see patches of light.

I was faithful to it.

That was me then.

And that is me now.

And it gives me a little boost now to see the grace in the simple continuity of writing.

Yeah just a bin in the attic, but still.

I was a writer.

So I’m looking forward to this coming New Year and having some days of inspiration.

At least I’m hopeful.

I have no doubt there will be writer’s block, inertia and plain old laziness.

And bad poetry.

But this morning as I flip on my lightbox and shuffle across the kitchen to brew my coffee, I can feel the warmth of the day’s possibility.

It fills up the room.

My dusty journals are stowed away – all the old angst is buttoned down.

But what I hold front and center are the journals’ intermittent words of bright optimism.

Because as a whole, those actually eclipsed all the rest.

Joy and discovery in the mundane minutia of the day-to-day blah.

Kind of a hodgepodge mess – hardly a linear black and white enterprise.

Seasonally disordered at best, like me.

So a new candle, a New Year and a new box to fill.

Today I will write.

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