Happy New Years.

I haven’t experienced a “steady” holiday since my parents divorced between my eighth and ninth grade years. The five years before they separated, I would spend every Christmas with my Mom and Dad and then fly to Seattle with my brother to visit our biological father. We always spend New Year’s with him. All the years before that we alternated Christmas with one biological parent and New Years with the other. Though, I mostly remember New Years with John, the biological father. John, my brother and I would all go up to the Island—actually named Decatur, an Island in the San Juan Islands where John had built a cabin 20 years ago.  We always just called it The Island as if it were the only island of any importance to anyone who mattered. Often we would make a camp fire by the water at the front of our island property even though it was freezing and more often than not, wet too, but we would set off fireworks which made the unfavorable conditions worth it. I seem to remember having fun.

I started thinking about the cabin today because I spent all of my childhood summers there. I have been alive for 19 summers. Only four of those summers were spent without going to the cabin, and I miss being there every summer I am absent. Even though it is the middle of winter and foggy here today in Alabama, it felt like a summer morning on the Island when the air is still cool from the nighttime chill and the fog is still hovering over the water and hanging on to everything that will hold moisture. I could have closed my eyes and heard the waves beating the shore if I had had time to stop and be still.

Before I knew it I was recalling all the events from the last time I had been at the cabin, the last summer I spent there, the last time I saw my brother. It was the summer after my senior year of high school and my Dad decided he would buy me a plane ticket anywhere I wanted. Even though I wasn’t speaking with our biological father whom my brother lived with, my brother made it possible for me to come visit him and for us to spend 14 days at the cabin with some of our close childhood friends who had spent all of their summers on the same island as well. It was delightful. However, in recalling that short summer I couldn’t help to remember my priorities then and to wish I had spent more time with the people I loved, with my brother, than doing other things. You see, that summer I stayed up late after everyone went to bed and woke up before anyone else to text or call Forester whose voice was pretty much made up the soundtrack of my summer along with a little Lady Gaga and Miike Snow. I feel silly now thinking about how much time I spent on Forester instead of spending time with the forests and beaches and brothers I loved and still love so much. I suppose I cared a lot for him back then. It is funny how people change. Forester, at least on the outside, has changed so much from the person I spent so much time with that summer which makes me wonder if I have changed just as much from the person he knew but can’t see it.

This New Year’s I will be working for my mom at this little food trailer thing she has set up in a kinda festival like place where fireworks will be going off in our community. I think it will be rather lame, but I’m okay with that. Life will be too exciting soon and in a matter of a few short days boredom and lameness might be missed.