This Year

Summery.

Well, the holidays are almost over and it's back to regular life for now. I received many lovely prezzies but one of my favorites is this tablecloth, which I asked my son for. I have no summer tablecloths and I thought this one would fit the bill well.  Only it was so pretty I had to use it right away. So it's July in December here at the homestead. Put on a t-shirt and have some lemonade.

Death of a Princess.

One of the reasons I was looking for cheerful decor was a bit of sadness over the too-early loss of Carrie Fisher.  "Who'll be my role model now that my role model is gone?" sang her ex-husband Paul Simon on a song called "Call Me Al." Indeed. Carrie Fisher was, in fact my role model when I was a teenager and I saw her in "Star Wars." She inspired a generation of girls to be more than just someone's husband or daughter. Be a senator. Be a freaking star pilot. And be a princess, but not the kind of pastel pink, glittered, pouting and preening model we hold up to girls today...once again, sadly. (Feminism is one step forward and a couple back, it seems sometimes.) Perhaps her death will spurn a revival in being more of a kick-ass kind of princess, who wears a dress she doesn't mind getting covered in dung when she hops into the garbage chute to escape The Evil Empire. I hope so, anyway.

Anyway, 2016 certainly seems to have generated a lot of hostility from the world. I know people who are staying up late this year just to watch it die. In many ways, on a personal level, for me it was good. But in others, it was more like that Facebook friend you have no intimate disagreements with but realize from their posts that they have some serious, off the wall cray-cray going on inside their cray-cray craniums. I don't think many would argue that 2016 was a rollercoaster in many ways.

Tide's coming in to wash another year out to sea.

Maybe in some ways I kept 2016's craziness at a distance. But I will miss Carrie Fisher's wit, guts and humor. I'll miss David Bowie's and Prince's music. And I'll miss having a President who did not make me quite so nervous as this incoming one does. We will see. That's all any of us can say at the year's end, and it's no different this year.

Because either way, it's over and we're marching into 2017. Big Ag and I will be at our favorite Italian restaurant -- early -- where we have a standing New Year's Eve reservation. And we'll sleep through midnight like children who didn't manage to stay up late enough. Nothing wrong with Second Childhood if it lets you sleep well. By the time we wake up we'll have at least seven hours of a successful New Year already behind us.

Happy New Year one and all. Hope you are exactly where you want to be at midnight, even if it's just tucked in and dreaming in your own comfortable bed.