Happy New Year

I spent my last night at home cooking potatoes and onions on the wood stove and reading by the light of the storm lamp and telling stories of the old country. All right, perhaps the stories of the old country have yet to form, but with an all-day power outage and a cold, windy night, it was not how I expected to spend my last dinner in America. I like power outages though, and I like the way the hurricane lamp smells and the wood sounds in the stove when it crackles and burns. You can hear everything so much better without the constant hum of electricity.

It makes me think about America when the Europeans first found it. Then it was something not yet than a society, or an ideal. It was a land with no name and no allegiance. It was full of wilderness and weather, so very big a place, and a place with no borders. It melted unnoticeably into the dry clime of Mexico and the cold wilderness of Canada. It was massive and all-encompassing place and I can’t help but feel what I will miss most about it is the expansive way I can turn a corner on Route 97 and catch the sun lighting up the clouds from underneath, turning the cropped cornfields to silhouettes. Or the way the evening sun shows through the black trees, and how I can watch it set from the windows of my living room. Or the humidity and the clear blue sky and all the land right outside my window.

The power is still flickering on and off periodically and I still am not packed. At this time tomorrow I will be boarding a plane for Heathrow and from there to Cork, where I will catch a cab and be in my apartment, hopefully before two in the afternoon, exhausted and excited and in someplace completely new.