Baby I got a plan: run away fast as you can.

After many many weeks of banging away this year is finally whimpering to a close. Back when I used to write--and you used to read--we probably would have shared these highs and lows together; but as it was, I could only hint and you could only guess. We’ll have to content ourselves with noting that this was a year of milestones even more than of miles, and the miles were many indeed.



We had a sprinkling of snow on Christmas morning and an inch delivered sideways next day, but nothing remotely resembling how this calendar started, let alone how it’s leaving just about everyone else. There are few things I love more than snow, and though I know the nuisance it causes I can’t help but crave the kindness that blankets everything with it. People are just nicer when you and they both are trudging through snowbanks and sliding along sidewalks. Frankly I could use some nicening up myself; these days no matter how gracious I try to be my gracelessness is noticed instead. “You need to watch your face,” I was told this weekend, a task easier said than done.



I booked a room on the beach, the hotel one I once passed often and wondered whomsoever could afford such a place. The trip is not one to which I’m looking forward but it must be made, the first of the new year yet too many weeks late according to some I suspect. But I’ve worked hard to carve out my little square and in consequence I am not good at all at doing what I do not want to do, an ugly habit to match my ugly face I guess. Were I one to make New Year’s resolutions that is one right there in obvious need of tackling, but I’m not so I won’t. Or maybe I will, though I know not wherever to begin.



I’m not entirely sure when negotiations started but we’ve come to an easy if precarious truce, the “two with the Cheshire grins” I think someone called us. There’s not too much else I can or want to write about the matter, except for one last thing: we are at a precipice, a crossroads. From here on out I fear it’s either all or nothing.