Create, live with abandon.

The snow is falling outside, making everything like a milky dream. The trees are flocked with white, and I can’t remember the scent of summer: cut grass, ripening blackberries, dust rising up from the dirt road; in the same way I can’t really remember what last year was like, so much uncertain, heartache like broken dishes gathered in a paper sack. I never imagined that I’d have to reach out and cut my fingers on the shards to grow in a marriage; in fact I never really pictured this life at all.

This small boy, this man, this house, these fields dappled blue and white with snow and shadows. How can you ever really imagine how your life will be? Dreams are so fickle, so rife with longing. It’s good to have them—and to send them on whispered breath out into the world like so much dandelion furze. But I’m grateful that the Universe has a bigger dream for me.

Grateful that in the year between then and now, we’ve come together again, pulled towards one another inevitably like the tiny magnets on the backs of Bean’s toy trains that hitche one to the next. Grateful the embering heat of the wood stove, the heat of his love, and the inches of powder that keeps falling out of the sky, making it possible, finally, for me to learn to ski.

Yesterday Bean spent the night at his grandparents for the first time ever. We went out for dinner with friends, sipping champagne and honeyed martinis in a restaurant with silver painted walls. Gold and white balloons bobbed from the backs of our chairs. Our voices carried certainly to the neighboring tables, our laughter rising up ruckus and often among forkfuls of roasted garlic, olives, flatbreads, crab cakes with micro greens, carpaccio, crème brule. Then we came home and were just us, in the soft flannel of our bed when the pale morning light pulled us from slumber. Just us, and the siren song of bare skin and warm shoulders calling for an embrace.

Then we made coffee, buttered raisin toast, and eggs, and talked about our resolutions for 2008.

Mine: Publish at least five pieces of writing. Get more organized (with everything from regular writing time, to planning what’s for dinner.) Kick some booty as an athlete: get to be better at climbing, yoga, running (maybe a triathlon?) and skiing. Grow a garden. Live with abandon.