Ali is resolute in not showing any favoritism among the days of the year, so for New Year’s Eve we did precisely nothing. Baki was sick — he had woken up with a fever, and as we were still in the city, I took him to the hospital in the morning. They said he had tonsillitis (a sign of changes to come? Time will tell…), and he is on antibiotics. I was fighting something off, so all day I fell asleep the minute I sat down. I probably napped for a total of 45 minutes all day, but by the end of the day I was left feeling that all I had done was sleep. This is probably because it was so rainy that it wasn’t really possible to do any work in the garden once we got out there. When we went to bed, at about 9 I was so grateful for sleep, and the bed was positively heavenly.

Having slept my way into 2012, I rang in the new year the following morning, and I although it wasn’t very sunny, it was lovely in its own way. It had been raining all night, and everything glistened, bejeweled with rain drops. As I went down to feed the chickens, the air smelled of wet leaves and wintersweet (Chimonanthus Praecox) shrubs, which have flowered really profusely for the first time this year. In the distance, I could hear the roar of the river that had, overnight, swollen to consume our road again. At least we made it across beforehand, and have a way back down, I thought to myself.

I’ve been a bit of a grump about moving back and forth between the garden and the city. The seasons seem to lurch along without my noticing. Instead of seeing fruit pickers gathering pomegranates from our neighbors’ orchards, I saw the odd pomegranate dimly silhouetted on the side of the road as we drove by in the semi-darkness. Flowers were tightly wrapped buds one week, and loose bunches of wilted petals the next. I was not around to do a lot of the work, and by the same token I was not able to reap the rewards (and in fact in the garden, the work itself is a large part of the reward).

Buoyed by the loveliness of the morning, I began making promises to myself. My new year’s resolution, therefore, is to make the best of it. Instead of moaning, I will try to appreciate what time I have and get as much done as possible. It helps, of course, that Baki has a two week semester break coming up, right when we need to be starting seeds in earnest. My other resolution is to write more often, and I have not gotten off to the most stellar start, but it is never too late, I hope, to improve.