New Year’s Fog

This new year dawned, for me, not bright and shiny, making me squint against the light and promise and hope

But foggy and grey. Shrouded.

Dim, to some. Bleary. Disheartened.

But as I paused in the descending dusk (not even supper time yet in these parts)

I felt it.

The promises that grow in darkness, wrapped up in damp

Waiting for the right time to emerge.

Winter is not a time of death. It has gotten a bad rap, a reputation soured by centuries of misunderstanding.

Winter is the gathering-in, the hunkering, the hidden preparations and knitting together of that which is to arrive later.

The whispering of what is to be, what is not yet ready.

It is a biding of time. A waiting.

So a fitting beginning to a new year, not a disappointment, no.

For though we cannot see the beyond through the clouds, they persist nonetheless.

A tire swing hangs from the bare branches of an old tree at the edge of a field of melting snow. A rock wall follows a line of trees. The back treeline is shrouded in fog.