When I turned the corner of our house, two eyes flashed in my light. Our feral cat, Tiger ran ahead and sat. Why didn’t he bolt for the barn? He ran ahead and sat. My dogs strained at their leashes. Tiger yanked at my heart strings. He snuggled the earth like when Gray was alive. Would the dogs be his friend? Tears welled up. Someone had set out rat poison, heedless of the broken hearts, heedless of poison running up the food chain.
There is no mending Tiger’s losing his brother. The sparrow God knows falls. Some of us will walk into next year with an ache as wide as the person who left. Some of us will crack open the door wondering if this will be the year when loss will smash the good times. Some will dance through with the joy of a new baby arriving, a new job, a new person to love who loves back.
The Storyteller, Dr. Martin Shaw, advises: “Show discernment about what you choose to remember and what you choose to forget. What stories don’t you need to carry anymore? Don’t walk into 2025 with them. Decide what you’re going to curate, bring with you, and we shall see where it leads us.”
Maybe we need to forget the story of those backs forever turned leaving us with stunned hurt. Maybe we need to hold close the people we love, and those who are no longer here.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
If you’d like to hear me read just this, come over to Perspectives on WNIJ.
What are you going to choose to take with you into this next year? What will you forget?
I want to take companionable walks with my dogs into the new year. Saturday morning, four days into the New Year, I walked out at 7:30 and the sun was just breaking the horizon. I thought January was supposed to bring more light, but it’s a long night when the sun sets around 4:30 and rises at 7:30. We’ve got normal January temps in the twenties with enough breeze to burn my legs under my jeans and long underwear. I was headed back home when a guy in an SUV stopped to ask if we’d seen his dog.
“Samson?” I asked He nodded. I’d seen the posts on Facebook, and had started to hit up God with prayers for his safe return. John said that his dog was at home in the morning but disappeared by the time he’d gotten back from work. He walked the perimeter of their farm and saw no evidence of a fight. As a livestock guardian dog, he’s supposed guard the farm.
I am rattled and irritated when we misplace our keys, and our hearts go out, uneasy about barn cats who wander, so I can hardly imagine losing a beloved dog. We’ve set up our Ring doorbell in the barn to keep track of our barn cats, relieved to see them saunter in, when they don’t show themselves otherwise.
Yes, I want to bring these walks, the shadows sliding off the gravel as I hear my feet step one right after the other and the dogs pull me to the grass to sniff. Even the trash I find and pick up, I want to bring along, though I wonder at the time I picked up for Bud Light bottles in one walk.
I want to bring our neighbors along into the new year. We received a couple sets of cookies from neighbors this Christmas. For New Years we were invited to our neighbors across the field to swap stories and cold cuts with long time neighbors, whose history goes back seventy years at least. These are the neighbors who cut the terrible loneliness I felt at Christmas when they invited us to join them right after we moved in. There’s something about the neighborly bond that feels like family. Mrs. R has a big, long table and I wondered about asking her to host another gathering in a month until I realized that I bought a table from her daughter-in-law, that has leaves, that could add more than four people. But I need more chairs So maybe, one day, maybe, I’ll ask a few neighbors in for dessert and games…Maybe.
More and more this love your neighbor, your-local-in-person-neighbor bit, is something to practice because we live in unsettled times. Covid pushed us online and out of the practice of talking over the fence, or in our case, stopping the truck to chat. While online friendships can be real, we need our in-person neighbors who can lift a hand if need be. Last winter, when we had a decent amount of snow T drove in with his truck and plow and pushed it all to the side, saving Bruce from pushing the snow to the side with the bucket on chilly Kubota. T has called him to help with a car fixing project. Our neighbors have helped us with putting up hay, which is way too hard to do alone. Helping each other aside, we need our neighbors just to talk to, to swap stories, to not feel so isolated.
I’m going to bring Mrs Horse and Omalola and Dolly and all the cats, while holding Bruce’s hand into the New Year. I want to find ways to spend time with Mrs. Horse and play with Omalola.
I’m going to bring writing these essays here on Substack with me. I looked over last years archive and noted are essays that would not have seen the light of day were it not for those of you who paid for a subscription. When Russell Nowelty said that writers burn out if they aren’t paid, a bell went off. A decade ago, I went quiet with my writing except for blogging because I worked on my novel for thirty years only to pay for the privilege of publishing it. Money shouldn’t matter but it does. I am thinking of putting some things behind a paywall. I have some long form projects that might work for those of you who are dedicated readers. We’ll see. At any rate I can’t thank you enough for your financial support.
What are you going to choose to take with you into this next year? What will you forget?
To be honest, forgetting is coming disturbingly easy for me. I’m not sure if it’s unsettled sleep or mild cognitive impairment or normal forgetting for my age. I can write one of these posts and forget what I posted the next day.
At the New Year’s neighborhood gathering I couldn’t think of the names of a couple sitting across from me, though she had the clearest, holiest face that I’ve seen in a long time. Her husband is a good ole boy, with great stories even though he insisted I bring another equine home to Morgen. “They’re herd animals. How would you feel if Bruce died?” he said. Finally I said, “Stop it.” (Our vet and I talked about this, concluding we’d ask for trouble with another horse. I’ve said all along, one is enough, two are too many.) Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t remember his name nearly the whole time I sat there.
Though I’ve always been able to forget things. I remember a terrible fight with my aunt and uncle just before I left for grad school. They thought I was going down the wrong road because I went to the local Episcopal church. (The woman who’d been my Pioneer Girls pal went there, and turned out to be a literature major, and often invited me to join her family for lunch at a local diner after.) Once I got to school the memory pretty much dropped like a stone in deep water. Forgetting such things can be a gift. Maybe forgetting leaves a person empty enough for God to settle like fire in the shrub.
I don’t want to bring the hurt from the friends who turned their backs into the New Year. The loneliness is fading like country in a rearview mirror. Sometimes anger sparks out of nowhere and I figure they need prayer for blessing—health, happiness, prosperity.
Like me, a dear friend has asked, “What is it about me that makes people ghost me and/or be cruel?” Maybe the Lord can show us, but can we really change to suit these people? We live in a culture that has been trained in self-care. If a person becomes difficult or just plain doesn’t make the cut in our busy lives, we drop them. It’s easy to say we are too busy. Covid literally split us apart. Our political views divide us. We don’t have time to chat. Even at our church, People rapidly vacate the pews. Why bother with a difficult person, when we have our dreams to accomplish? Maybe some of us are like salt, good for seasoning. Didn’t Jesus say we’re supposed to be salty. Didn’t he say something like blessed are the rejected?
This week, when Bruce got a respiratory virus, my anger surged and my compassion fled. Even though it was just a respiratory thing, I was afraid and angry at how helpless I’d be without him, how alone. I startled myself when I told off a few people.
I’ve done therapy to learn how to stand up for myself, to accept the assorted lions that walk around in my soul and so maybe this flaring anger is a good thing. There’s a lioness carrying her cub, who stands for the motherly, caring side. There’s the cowardly lion who can be afraid, longing for courage. And there’s the regal lion, who carries himself with enough authority, most will not challenge him. Maybe they each need a voice.
But I also landed on the hardness in my heart, with quite a thud. And hold onto the promise that God will replace it with a heart of flesh.
I don’t want to take so many screens with me, starting with television. These weeks have been dead as far as network TV, so it’s been easy to turn off the TV. Evenings would be a good time to charge the phone. I have so many books I want to read. Why let Hollywood determine what I should look at? Other screens like Substack and Facebook are harder to drop. There’s good writing and community there. But it would be best not to nosh on other people’s thoughts first thing, before I walk out, towards still prayer.
The sky was spooky—a belly of a cloud, with lighter clouds behind it, like the moon wanted to break through, but couldn’t. The sky looked like one I dreamed, where I was raptured into clouds, the ground a thousand feet below. The dogs took me over to the corner of the fence by the road. My headlamp, a gift from Bruce, so I could pick up poop on our night walks, flashed on two bright eyes and Tiger crying. We accompanied him to the barn. To the east, the clouds looked like a fierce fire had raged over Chicago, that had been snuffed out. The smoke hung there. I wondered if the spirits were moving. By the time I pulled my phone off the kitchen table, the sky had fallen back to plain gray.
The other day we saw a big black cat sitting at the head of the road. Bruce asked where Smudgie was. I stepped outside and called for him. The cat darted across the road and into the waterway. Smudgie ran up to the closed door. For a cat he has a good recall. For quite some time we’ve wondered why the cats’ dish and water bowl were licked clean. We thought we had a resident raccoon, but when we put our Ring doorbell out there, we saw the black cat saunter in for a meal. One night, just outside the camera range, we heard a cat fight, presumably Tiger and Black Cat. The next morning, we saw tufts of fur next to the door. Since then it seems the black cat has settled here and there is an uneasy peace with the other two. Bruce even found him sleeping on the carriage seat.
What are you going to choose to remember? Choose to forget?
Finally, I don’t care for the New Year holiday. Bruce and I went to sleep early with no neighborhood fireworks to mark midnight. But my reading pointed me to a few things. In The Light of Human Beings, Sister Vassa Larin reminded me that God set the times and seasons on the fourth day when he placed the sun moon and stars in the heavens. “But I’ll reflect just on the faith-inspiring coincidence that we are beginning this year on a Wednesday, called ‘the fourth day’ in Hebrew and Greek, which signifies the Fourth Day of creation, when God created and put into motion the planets and the stars. He thus formed and put into motion what is known as ‘time.’ And ‘God saw that it was good.’”
One of the Psalms for Saturday, January 4 hit me over the head with this:
“to him who made the great lights,
for his steadfast love endures forever;
8 the sun to rule over the day,
for his steadfast love endures forever;
9 the moon and stars to rule over the night,
for his steadfast love endures forever;” (Psalm 136:7 – 9, ESV)
One of the nights, I walked the dogs, I looked up at the moon and Venus, bright against the black sky like a jeweler’s velvet. The sun, moon and stars mark days and times and remind us that even with time marching on, the Father’s steadfast love endures forever, no matter what the new year brings to our lives. Every new year, it’s hard to say Happy New Year because I am uneasy about what the next year might bring. As Bruce and I get older, we move closer to when loss will become our rule of life. The farm will be too much and we’ll need a smaller place in town like with an HOA and higher fees and taxes. We are mortal and one of us will fail before the other. But his steadfast love endures forever. And Jesus himself didn’t see equality with God a thing to be grasped but he took on the form of a servant…so that steadfast love walks with us in the person of Jesu as we set these things aside.
One thing I’m taking with me into the New Year, is how this steadfast love can pull us out of loneliness. He can send people to us. He takes us by the hand, says, Come, come. He leads us out of the desert, back to town, back to friendships and community.
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