Life continues to move pretty fast.
Yesterday I lit a fire under my own rear end and decided to put together the family video for the year (a tradition of sorts that started way back when I began making videos documenting each month of our kiddo’s first years), and if nothing else, I can say with confidence that the Hogan family has been on the move.
In the course of this past year: Atlanta, Miami, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Labadee (Haiti); Washington, D.C. with Thomas (the kiddo-trip-with-Dad experience); Cherry Grove (the annual Beach Week); out west–Denver, then Las Vegas, then Zion National Park, then Grand Canyon National Park, then Phoenix; then to Toronto for a Springsteen concert, then to New Jersey to visit family. Not to mention a bunch of trips around Cackalack.
It was the year a hurricane came and devastated so many towns and communities here in western NC, an occasion where I found myself sitting in for my boss while he was out of the country. (This, coincidentally, was roughly where my commitment to working out every week sort of fell apart. See more below.)
Peace be with you.
Peace like a river; an evening paddling down, the river flat and black, chimney swifts swooping down in ashen shadow, clouds of insects wound tight into balls about eye level, the sound of rushing water. All of this a season–no, two seasons–ago. Floating with the current, the brookies and browns and smallmouths slipping beneath undercut banks, disappearing into dark pools to sleep, their shadows impossible to discern, their gills slowing to an ancient rhythm, in and out. Breathe in, breathe out.
Inner peace. The sharpness of a gunshot in the December twilight, sharp and lonesome is the report, the sound racing up the cove and bouncing off these old stone hills and racing back to share. It is a massive sound, close enough to wonder who is hunting so close to the house, but then I remember that we live in a national forest, that out here it might be a fellow stalking a deer, and it might be someone putting down something lame, and it might be just the neighbor shooting down mistletoe. We think of gunfire as anathema to peace, and for a few breaths my afternoon stops in its tracks, my ears perked up, but soon the sounds of the world around me relax, return, and all of that tension leaves.