Novel yet Familiar - J. Dianne Dotson

So here is my New Year post, I suppose. Today I went for my first proper, long walk in weeks. I had spent a good two weeks battling illness in the household (ultimately I folded just as Christmas dawned). Nothing seemed right, nothing smelled right, and nothing tasted right. It really wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that I almost felt like I might be getting back to normal. Maybe.

I took the chance with a proper, long walk this morning. I’m so glad I did. I went to the Secret Stair and, instead of looking balefully at it as I’ve done over the past two weeks, I set my feet upon it and pushed my wobbly legs up and up. I made it to the top, and then went on my normal walk circuit.

How much I had missed, while I was ill! I missed the final dropping of almost all the sweet gum leaves in the neighborhood. I found the area in transition: Christmas trees dried and butchered and stuffed unceremoniously into trash cans; some houses still decorated, some tidied up as if there had been no holiday. The air was savagely dry, the sky piercing blue. My lungs did well; I only stopped a couple of times to cough. It felt great just to do something familiar and healthy. But it was disorienting.

This holiday season was something of a wash, due to the illness. Coming out the other side of it, into a new year, felt very strange. It all looked more or less the same, except that I had been gone-yet-here the whole time. So the season moved without me.

As I reached the top of the Secret Stair, I ran into a lace of green vines, obscuring the upper entrance from view. Well, hello again! It had been many months since the vines had wound themselves in their special curtain. You can see this curtain in the header of the post. All the tiny little blooms were opened too!

Everything is new again, and yet it is not. That is the way of things. That is my new year.

Now I look ahead. I don’t make resolutions, but I have a rotating list of goals, always.

And so I shift gears back into wellness. Soon I will be writing science articles again. I am arranging for Book Two to go to the final proofreader. Then I will work in earnest on the book’s cover. I am writing three novels: Books Three and Four, as well as an unrelated one I need to push through this January. I have more artwork to make and probably to sell, very soon. And so it rolls from there: a busy year, and a productive one, surely.

I have much to share. Join me as I pull back the living, green curtain of this year.