The fifth anniversary of my arrival on the California Delta passed without fanfare. If memory serves, I pulled into Park Delta Bay in the week of December 19th, 2017. I spent the next twelve months with a foot in each world. Every three or four weeks, I spent a couple of weeks in Kansas City, squatting in a spare room at my friend Jeanne Foster’s house and at a spare desk in Patricia Scaglia’s Independence law firm. By the close of 2018, I became a full-time resident and in January of 2019, registered my vehicle in California.
I mark the changing of seasons with the arrival of migratory birds and seasonal fruit. Yesterday I spied the first flock of snow geese on Andrus Island. At the grocery store, stemmed mandarins sent wafts of their sweet fragrance into the air as I leaned on the handle of my cart and eased down the aisle. The rain has overtaken our world. My feet sink into mud on the short walk from my steps to the car.
When the new year dawns, many will list resolutions. Others will chastise themselves for those not attained in 2022. I have my own lists: Mistakes that I’ve made; goals to which I’ve inched closer, people whom I offended to whom I wish to make amends; others who have shown kindness on whom I want to bestow some unexpected bounty of gratitude. If past habits hold, I will open a fresh journal and write a daily entry for a few weeks, dwindling to monthly before the habit fades altogether. My to-do lists will begin as boldly penned in full sentences across a page, then morph into fragments before being relegated to that most tenuous of note-pads, the one we maintain in our heads. But nonetheless, I announce my intentions, if only to myself. I will resolve to smile more often, take myself more lightly, reach out to a wider range of relatives, and lose weight.
Without question, I also resolve that I will not cease this #journeytojoy. I have yet to accomplish its initial, solitary goal: to traverse an entire year without uttering one single word of protest. I have not yet made it; and so, with firm conviction and my customary rueful smile, I shall continue.
It’s the thirtieth day of the one-hundred and eighth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
