ONE YEAR FROM NOW

A year went past.  The days followed one another patiently.  Right back at the beginning they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked.

---  Terry Pratchett

Mark and I did something foolish that worked out very well: we moved our Christmas tree from one room to another, fully upright, with all the ornaments still hung. Nothing was damaged in the process, not even us.  The next morning I lit the tree and contemplated its presence between the desk and the lamp we keep meaning to replace.  A year ago it stood in the corner of our tiny apartment.  And now here we are, and here it is too.

I said to Mark then, a year ago, that at this time next year we would have a house.  It wasn’t a sure thing – barely more than an idea, and a very dim, details-absent idea at that.  There was not even a suggestion of the sunburn I’d be nursing when we signed the papers that made us homeowners, the hours we’d spend scraping off a shoddy paint job in the kitchen, the oven we’d use to cook our first turkey.  There was just an appealing symmetry to it: one year and we’ll be in our own home in a new city instead of a college apartment in the town where we grew up.

Next year at this time . . .

I have no idea.  Next week I’ll play piano at my cousin’s wedding, and a few days later we’ll be home again.  After that is a huge, open-ended essay question of a year.  It’s almost here, but it doesn’t feel close. 

“Two thousand fourteen sounds so much bigger than thirteen,” my mother said a few days ago, during a brief visit.

“It’s one bigger,” said my father, always the mathematician.

I have a mental picture for each year whose origins I’ve forgotten.  I see the months as boxes with weeks lined off inside, like in a calendar, and they’re stacked into a tower.  January rides the top.  December is at the bottom.  I know that there is no gap between them – that they are as seamlessly joined as June to July – but in my mind we’re looking up at the summit of a mountain while we stand at the base of the neighboring peak.  The next mountain over is just a shape in the fog.

A year ago I had a shining picture of what I hoped for in a new year.  But now I’m glad to find the future hazy.  It’s thrilling.  What is ahead can only be an adventure.