New Year, 1996
© 1995, 1997 Leonard Smith

Our weather has been rather mild so far this season but the absence of snow leaves the landscape raw and ravaged. The squirrels venture from their nest on sunny days and frantically run about the yard searching out seeds and the treasures that make their lives interesting. The birds that remain here roam about the neighborhood stopping here and there to search the litter for food.

The cold air cleans the sky and at night we see the eons-old light of distant stars against the black universe. In the distant fields the coyotes call and gather to hunt and converse in the silver-gray moonlight. The Great Horned Owls hoot in the trees, keeping track of mates as they wait the coming of late Winter and parenthood. On cold wintry ledges and in icy creaking trees they will raise their young. The ages old genetic code will once again be tested and the fledglings will have slipped from the nest on newly feathered wings before the return of warm Spring days and Robins.

The gray-rose light of pre-dawn brings hunters out of warm motel rooms to attack the frozen layer that now covers their windshields. They climb into their cold trucks and 4-wheelers and look for the lights of restaurant windows, their first quarry for the day. They talk through mouthfuls of potatoes and eggs, stopping to gulp down bitter, black coffee. They pay their bill and hurriedly rush into the cold air and smell the icy dawn, gazing at fading stars for omens of a good hunt. In a rush they climb into their rigs that have warmed while they ate and speed off into the brightening morning with their guns and dreams. Stories for old age start here.

In the early light the Harriers course the ditches and road banks searching for the errant mouse. Their hunts are less of dreams and glory and more of need. They go about their serious business barely noticing the hunters, adjusting their feathers to the passing wind of the hunter's trucks. So goes the Winter.

It has barely begun though the nights have been cold for a long time. There are four months before May and its promise and we must wait like Druids on an icy plain for the Equinox and new life. The marsh is frozen, the broken and dead cattails that sheltered birds and muskrat stand shredded and brittle. When the icy grip of winter tires and slackens at the end of February the Red Wing Blackbirds will return to the cattails to greet the coming Spring. But for now they await to the south for the increasing length of day to stir the ancient wanderlust that with its siren call will bring them north. The year comes to a close.

Sometime in the night an astral alignment will mark the end and beginning, but like the degrees of a circle there is no first and last. We mark a random point to anchor it in the vapor of time. The chain is short and the anchor never finds a hold. Grabbing the tiller we strive for control and the distant shore holds our vision till lost in the mist. We voyage on into the New Year. Waves surge against our craft and the owls hoot in the trees on the distant land. We travel on.