A road leads into the new year

~ Live & Learn

wedding-dress-running

A little snap at one side of the room
and an answering snap at the other:
Stiff from the cold and idleness,
the old house cracking it knuckles.
Then the great yawn of the furnace.
Even the lampshade is drowsy,
its belly full of a warm yellow light.

Out under the moon, though,
there is at least one wish
against this winter sleep:
A road leads into the new year,
deliberate as a bride
in her sparkling white dress of new snow.

~ Ted Kooser. “December 26. Clear and Cold.” Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison

Photograph: {peace&love♥} at lullabyexile via raspberrytart.tumblr.com

 

17 thoughts on “A road leads into the new year”

  1. One of the things I love most about Kooser is the way in which he notices a quotidian experience and turns it into something special, e.g., a house settling suddenly becomes ” an old house cracking it’s knuckles.” Magical…

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  2. A road as deliberate as a new bride – how evocative (though I for one broke out in hives on my wedding day and was so consumed with fear, ‘deliberate’ would not have been applicable 🙂 )…This new road – may it be smooth and gently curved, welcoming and a joy to travel. Happy New Year..

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      1. Yup – I was scared out of my mind…There were three little boys that were getting married that day too. Mine were only 10 and 8; Paul was 5. What if we screwed this up? I thought that I’d be much better as a serially monogamous person, that I didn’t ‘do’ marriage very well. So the very last thing I had expected was to be doing this again. And I freaked out. Rabbi had to stop the service at one point, because I was struggling to get the vows out, Paul was grabbing my dress and asking when we were going to have cake, Aaron was just wondering when we’d be done and Matt’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. 22 years later and here we are – and I still start scratching when I remember how scared I was at the whole prospect of matrimony.

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