Happy New Year

Each year for the past two decades or so I buy myself an Ansel Adams calendar from Barnes & Noble.   Then I sit down in January with last year's calendar, my at-a-glance planner, and, now, my iphone and fill in the coming year's important dates.  They include birthdays, anniversaries, yahrzeits, and other memorable occasions.  It's a wonderful, sometimes poignant, reflective time for me, looking back on the craziness of the previous year.  2013 brought so many changes in my life, but that's the way it is every year.  Each year has a character of its own influenced by its events, evidenced by my notes on the calendars:  births and deaths of friends and families; illnesses, surgeries, exercise schedules; weddings and anniversaries; appointments, dinners, movies, dates, visitors and vacations; work schedules, new schools, camp classes, and now pottery.

Last year, the big things were these:

• Deciding to leave Virginia and come to Delaware to be with a wonderful man.
• Updating, prepping, and selling my home of 17 years with sorting, sifting, and tossing accumulated years of stuff from 6 people, many pets, and my creative pursuits. 
• Weekends with Peter, fixing, painting, and cleaning the house, usually with a Friday trip to Auld Shebeen for Irish music and potato leek soup.
• Cathartic trips to the dump.  Excitement watching the big loaders shove piles around. 

  

  The Fairfax County Landfill.  We spent at least ten minutes watching a front loader smash and move that bathtub to the right spot - over by white goods.  I could have kept on watching for another ten.

• Redskins games in the winter, baseball games in the summer.
  
• Teaching 4th grade with a team of amazing young women who inspired and sustained me in what has now got to be one of the toughest jobs going (thank you, Nisreen, Amanda and Crystal!).
  
• Teaching camp at Pinecrest Summer Pavilion for the 8th year running with Beth and the rest.
• Selling the house in four days! All the hard work paying off.  (Thank you, Tracey!)
• Moving in August with Peter and other friends who stepped up to load the rental truck (thanks O'Haras, Swishers, Heather and Robert).  Then doing it again 6 days later!
  
• Cruising from New York to Florida and the Bahamas and loving the art auctions a bit too much. Meeting Katie and Nenad! And Bob and Debbie.

  

  Returning to New York on the NCL Gem.

• Settling in in Delaware and beginning the house building process for our new place and waiting for UPS to deliver the thirteen pieces of art we bought on the cruise.

  

  A Simon Bull piece from the cruise.

• Hosting friends and family first in Virginia and then in our little two bedroom place and also visiting friends and family.
• Travels to see Peter's children in Florida, Colorado, and upstate Delaware.  Travels to see my kids in New York City and Virginia.
• Ladies' fundraising luncheons with Marcie.
• Meeting new friends in my pottery class and picking up a once a week Art Outreach class at a community center.
• Enjoying the lead up to Christmas with my kids, Peter's kids, friends and extended family.
• Sadly, the passing of my mother in May, juxtaposed with a wonderful week in March spent caring for her:  talking, worrying, and laughing together.

  

  My mom, Evelyn, at the Black Bear Bistro.

• Seeing my brothers more than ever, a sweet result from the sorrow of losing my mom.

So the new calendar is on the side of the refrigerator, ready to be the record keeper for 2014.  As always, I make a wish for happiness, health, and good memories.