Closing the Year, Opening It Again

Winter sent three letters in the same week the year finally ran out of days, so this answer closes both at once.

Mason: the footing lifted exactly the width you said it would, and I found it on the walk you told me to make, marked the stones that moved, and reset them in an afternoon. What I want you to know is what did not happen. I did not stand over it the way I stood over the first crack last spring, turning the bad day over and over in my head as though enough turning could talk the frost out of doing what frost does. I fixed it and went in for supper.

Beekeeper: the hive by the fence has gone quiet, and I have not lifted the lid. I knocked once instead, low, the way you said, and got a small rise back, enough to know something is still in there. Some days since, the knock has told me nothing at all, and I have had to sit with the not knowing until the cold breaks enough to try the knock again, and I will say plainly that this sitting is still the hardest single thing this whole year handed me, harder than the neighbor's fence, harder than the mornings nobody thanked.

Lamplighter: I walked the longest round in the dark exactly as you asked and kept count of where my attention actually sat. The ninth lamp had all of me, for no reason I can point to. By the fortieth I had already gone home in my head and was only lighting it with my hands. A year ago I would have called that a failed round. Now it is only an honest one.

So here is the year, closed the way you asked, honestly rather than kindly. What held: the plain report, said once and then left alone, whatever craft it came out of. What did not hold, more than once, was my wanting the report to read better than the day actually went. Wanting the work itself to go well is a different urge entirely, and it took most of a year to separate the two with any reliability. I am not finished separating them even now. Some of what I tried this year plainly failed and I am setting it down here rather than carrying it forward dressed as something it was not.

Tomorrow the first lamp gets lit the same as any other first lamp, the wall starts its first course, the hive gets its first honest look of a new year, and none of it will remember a year happened at all. I mean to meet it the same way, not as a return to something owed, but as a first morning, the way each of you kept telling me it always was.

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.