Again I find myself on the last day of the year – one of my very favorites of all the days – remembering the year that is about to end. Instead of taking you through our 2025 – the good, the bad, the heartworms – I’ll just focus on the ups and downs of December, as it’s a very good sample indeed.

One afternoon at work a few weeks ago, I suddenly had to move a baby grand piano from the dance studio onto the big stage moments before a kindergarten tap performance started in one room and a preschool piano recital in the other. I also had to locate three pairs of lost tap shoes. It was the kind of absurd chaos that happens to me daily in December. Thankfully there’s always a good friend or two nearby to help my weak little arms and multi-tasking brain. But this particular five minutes also included Huck texting emails for me to proofread before sending them to a professor and an advisor in order to drop an impossible graduate level course at the very last minute. The urgency all around me was, as they say, palpable! Never have I felt more important, more valuable to my society! My society of little children and a 20-year-old!

The recitals were adorable, the emails perfect, and the class was dropped as if it never happened. “I learned a lot of lessons this semester,” Huck has repeated more than once this month. Also more than once this month I have listened patiently to many math lectures, pretending to understand things like combinatorics and set theory while secretly thinking about Pluribus. I will always appreciate our child’s valiant attempts to teach me, just like the good old days.

During our very, very warm Christmas week, we resisted turning on the air conditioner and instead got out the flip flops. After returning home from long. hot dog walks, I would take off Franny’s and Zuzu’s bras – or collars – so they could cool down. Confused like the rest of us, our daffodils started to come up. On Christmas Eve while sunbathing in the backyard with the sisters on their second birthday I heard a neighbor shout on the other side of our fence, “NOOOOOO!!! THE BEAUTIFUL GARDEN IS GONE!!!!” And though the day was warm as May, Troy’s flowers are long gone and the once beautiful side yard is now very bare as if it never happened. “It will all return in the spring!” I felt like shouting. And also: “Look: Daffodils!”

Two days after Christmas, Huck had a minor car wreck while dropping off a friend following an afternoon spent at Crystal Bridges. It was a fender-bender caused by a forgotten blind-spot check, adding one more lesson to the growing list. “If I never have to drive again, I’ll be happy,” Huck repeated more than once, thankful for friends willing to be private chauffeurs for the next week.

As the final few days of December arrived, so did a blessed cold front that has found us once again gathered in the cozy Christmas tree room with candles and a blazing fire. I can tell Huck is beginning to look ahead to semester six – sending TA emails, daydreaming about new math classes, attending Zoom rehearsals and board meetings – one that will hopefully be more manageable and less stressful thanks to lessons learned and only one graduate level course.

For Troy and me, this year was mostly about taking care of Franny and Zuzu – healing, loving, holding, walking, playing – and letting go of Huck just a little bit more. This was best summed up in Troy’s 34th annual Christmas card that did not contain a single human for the first time ever! What can we say; when two little creatures show up and heal your broken hearts, you feel indebted to them forever. Watching Huck take comfort in them every single day has been my favorite part of this sweet Christmas break.

While trying to wrap up these thoughts on the losses and lessons and joys of life, I’ve decided to end this New Year’s Eve blog with Mizuta Masahide’s beautiful haiku:

Barn’s burnt down –
now
I can see the moon.

There’s a naughty list?