Anno Domini

The past two days have been unusually mild. Usually, New Years Eve and Day are cold and often blustery, but this year, we had the screen doors open, along with the windows, and the fresh air felt cleansing. I walked in the woods and the fields, enjoying the clouds scuttling above me and my un-numbed cheeks and fingers.

I paused to retie my boot at a rotted, moss-covered stump, and a solitary honeybee wafted over and explored a vine near my foot. She was sluggish and cautious, but she seemed to know what she was doing. I watched her until she flew away, and after she was gone, I sat on a log and watched the horizon and wondered.

Does she see the day as some sort of trick? I tend to think of the little creatures as very wise and knowing; surely she knew that the mild days are a fluke, and that the killing fingers of ice will seek her out, along with anything on which she might be feeding on such a day? I listened to the breeze in the loops of grapevine above me, and I wondered if any of her kind are out foraging with her, or if she is alone. Was she less deeply asleep than they? Did she hear some distant call on a surprisingly warm morning and venture out to answer it? Will she be able to return to where she was resting, and will she survive the next freezing night…which is coming on steady feet?

The land has been given another year. How many who venture out to meet it will be caught unawares and struck down?

As I picked my way through dead brambles and devil’s trumpets and poke weed, the words came to me: “Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.”

I have wandered far from my hive, and sometimes I think I will not be able to make it back before the frost falls again. Sun-signs and whispered pleas accompany me, and the landscape looks alien — did I come this way before? Am I on a true course?

Family secrets and complexities more than a half-century old have begun to stir like a honeybee roused by balmy air. Will these things survive? Will they make the world I know more livable, or less? Will I finally gain the ability to understand what has so long eluded me? Or will Two Thousand Nineteen be yet another riddle to me?

The new year is already buzzing in the air, looking for a place to light and drink. What will come? What will happen?

~ S. K. Orr