Laying the beautiful new runner on the table, a birthday gift from Manon, Forrest, and their boys (from Sweden, via Genoa), I am thinking how the year begins now, the moon just past full, begins now, my slow kilometre already swum this morning, a bottle of Steller’s Jay brut to celebrate my 71 years, yesterday’s lunch with a book club who’d done me the honour of reading a novel in manuscript (they are all artists and I wanted to know if the painting elements were accurate), anyway, yesterday’s lunch still warm in my heart. The year begins now, in rain, with the table laid with figs and pomegranates woven in fine cotton, the anticipation of lake swims in a few months, my feet firm each morning in the sand scribbled with bird tracks, heart-shaped deer prints, and sometimes bear paws clearly delineated at the water’s edge.
I know this place like the back of my hand
The way that it bends and how to get back
Concessions and lines, rhythms and rhymes
Furrows and rows, rivers and roads
Push away under a dusty eye
I know my place in the shifting sandOne more dance around the sun
To know where to start again
One more dance around the sun
—“One More Dance Around the Sun”, from Caught Light, the Great Lake Swimmers
...Theresa Kishkan 
I left a comment previously (that has not appeared for some reason) saying this same thing: I love photos of the interiors of other people’s homes. I love the colours of these walls et al. -Kate
I love this particular yellow. Ceiling is white, sponged with blue (due to a hissy fit years ago when I tried to wash the white ceiling and it kept streaking so I got a can of the blue paint we’ve used for all our trim and just sponged the whole thing and somehow it turned out really well). I love photographs of the rooms that real people live in. We have a lot of clutter — shells, pinecones, fossils — and every year I think it might be time to get rid of some of it but I can never bring myself to change a single thing.