Winter Solstice

I've been rummaging through my photographs, thinking about the year past. So much of what I had intended to accomplish, I didn't. But it's been a good year. A lot of what I have experienced, I never would have expected.

If you had asked me five years ago about my plans for this year in my early 50s, they would not have included becoming an elder in the church, getting most of the way through a master's program, a trip to Prince Edward Island, late afternoons in a Jewish school with Orthodox girls draping their arms around me as we wander down the hallway discussing Gilmore Girls, a child uprooted by a hurricane, the late night vigil as my stepmother died or, actually, pretty much anything else that has happened.

Among this year's delights, pictured above, that 13-degree Thanksgiving morning walk on an empty Michigan Avenue in Chicago (everyone else seemed to know that you could DIE out there), and a walk through the woods on that ONE week-end of fall color that we midwesterners managed to fit in earlier in the month.

And the most delightful day of all, that day of hope, is here: the Winter Solstice came and went this afternoon. It can only get better all the time, now that we are on the road to springtime.

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Oops. It's only Tuesday. The Solstice is TOMORROW. Premature happiness on my part. Hold that thought for another 15 hours.