A Wild New Year's Eve

It's New Year's Eve. Geoff Heeter took this photo off our back deck this morning. We're planning a wild party. Wild in the good, clean, quiet sense, in the listening for coyotes sense.

Building a sweat lodge in which to observe the coming of the new year is becoming a tradition for us. Bill leads the way.

It's got everything a body needs. There is a big fire to stare into. There are tools and saws and lots of lugging stuff around in carts.

There are sticks for some of the menfolk to chew.

There is the artful lashing of saplings into a dome-shaped frame. Kyle and Geoff for scale. Our 2012 lodge is smaller this year, more heat-retentive, more modest than the huge teepee we built two years ago. But it's on the same spot. There's a firehole in the middle. So there's also digging.

And splitting wood.

And everywhere the beautiful snow

and the continuous gift of the birches, seeds for the juncos, goldfinches and tree sparrows

There's a newly cut cross-country ski trail in the meadow and orchard

photo by Geoff Heeter

 and we take turns lapping our property on two pairs of skis

photo by Geoff Heeter

There are good friends and laughter and food and bracing cold

 and the friends are the best of all. The kids would be in this picture if they weren't sledding at the time. We've barely seen them. They show up at mealtime and then run off into the snowy fields again.

All is as it should be. There will be no yakkety television, no Times Square ball dropping, no counting down of minutes tonight. Just a snowy silence, a guttering fire, the hiss of water on firebricks, the slow trickle of clean sweat, as it was for millennia, and still is for some who choose it. 

Wild doesn't have to mean dancing on tabletops.

However you spend your New Year's Eve, I hope you dance in your own way, and take the chance to make your 2013 the best year ever.