A new start

A new year has arrived, and with it comes so much promise.  I haven't made any real resolutions yet, at least nothing beyond finishing the unpacking, but I definitely feel that twinge of excitement that comes with the mere idea of a new start.  Just about anything is possible.  I like that.  If I could just have that feeling year-round, who knows what I could achieve?!  Regular blogging, perhaps?

I didn't manage to make any posts in December, obviously.  Moving house was more exhausting than I had anticipated.  I thought I had cleaned up all of the mold in the month of November, but it was so much worse than I had expected.  I could list my mold-saturated moving discoveries until the cows come home, but I'd rather not.  Suffice it to say that unpacking moldy Christmas ornaments was definitely the final straw on my English cake... er, pudding.

I am utterly certain that the worst is behind us now, and it really is a fresh, new start.  I can not only sense it in the air, I can smell the difference.  And with any luck, by the end of the week I will have proper internet hooked up at the new house.  I have been fighting to keep a connection on one of those mobile wifi sticks for the past month.  I had such high hopes that I could keep connected during the six-week waiting period for internet and phone service, but it is only in the last few days that it has actually been working with any sort of consistency.

Consistency is not something that seems to come easy in my world.  On a personal level, I would say I'm as consistent as they come-- ten, twenty years can go by and I'm still wearing the same interests, ideals and ratty t-shirts that you last saw me in-- but in my world, change seems to flow from every direction.  New beginnings slip through the cracks under the doors and tumble off of lamp posts at random.

As much as I like the idea of possibility and promise, open doors and excitement, sometimes I just want to leave it like that.  I want to linger in the space between the old and the new.  I want to stand in that moment between past and future and just savor the electric taste of it.  I want to relish the moment just before my feet leave the ground, because once I land in that puddle of the future, it's going to be wet and undoubtedly muddy.  Change always is.

December brought many changes for us.  A new house.  Bright-colored paint to save our moldy furniture.  New passports for the kids after an excruciating half-day wait in line at the embassy.  And before we even had the dishes unpacked, a phone call inviting Einstein to interview for a new job in a new city.

Clearly I need to be more vigilant about plugging those cracks under the doors and avoiding lamp posts.

In all seriousness, now that the New Year has blown through the door and taken off her coat, I am definitely curious to see what she will pull out of her bag of tricks, but I have not fully given her my attention.  Not yet.  I am in no hurry to greet the bottom of the puddle.  It's enough to know that the doors are open, that possibility and promise and puddles exist.