January may not mean to be cruel

That's just the way it is

Before we begin…

Let’s start the year with an easy one: how do you and the month of January get along? Have you found in it a fresh start or just more of the same? Are there hopes or expectations that are met or dashed? What’s your strategy for beginning a new year smack dab in the middle of winter?

Thanks for reading Spark! Subscribe for free! Then support the work by sharing. Thanks so much!

Welcome! You’ve reached Spark.  Learn more here or just read on. If you received this from a friend, please join us by subscribing. It’s free! All you have to do is press the button below. If you have already subscribed, welcome back! BTW, If this email looks truncated in your inbox, just click through now so you can read it all in one go. 

Why I don’t trust January: three small stories

Photo by Simon Infanger on Unsplash

1: A small dog and a shit storm

This is me, taking a tentative step into 2024. I’m a little hesitant to step anywhere right now; our smallest dog, Frida, has suffered from round-the-clock diarrhea since last Saturday. Every hour on the hour, night and day, she has been rushing to the door or, to her humiliation, been caught short. On the floor. On the rug. On the sofa. In corners where she was trying desperately to be discreet. 

A literal shit storm. With puddles. And smells.

She’s finally turning the corner and last night we slept six hours straight. This morning she greeted us with clear eyes and a wag of her tail. How quickly fortunes change. Storms come. They go. Two very expensive trips to the vet undoubtedly helped  - although even there, she had to endure shame when the vet tech tried in vain to insert the rectal thermometer. He could not, he said, “find it.” Apparently there was too much hair. Well, forgive me, our groomer does not offer waxing. At least I don’t think she does. I hope she doesn’t. Do dogs get waxed? I don’t even think people should be waxed. Unless they want to, no judgment. We encouraged him to keep trying and, finally, penetration was achieved. 

2: A career move

This is the kind of thing that I’ve come to expect in January. In fact, it falls closer to the “no big deal” end of the scale. I’m thinking now of the January that I moved myself and my then 18-month-old son to a third-floor apartment at the top of what had been a paint warehouse in Salem, MA. I was to spend the next three months as an intern at the nearby Peabody (pronounced Peebahdee) Times. He would be starting at a new daycare. We moved in the middle of a nice January thaw.

The day after we moved in – a table, a chair, a bed for me, a crib for him, his high chair – the temps fell. The water froze (the water pipes ran up the side of the house unprotected by insulation), the emergency brake on my car froze, my son began to lose his lunch out of both ends at once. I soon followed suit. The high point of my first week as a working reporter was when I finally freed my car from the ice, loaded my toddler into the VW along with a giant bag of laundry and set out for a laundromat and ginger ale. He erupted three times, once in the car and twice in the laundromat, between the wash and dry cycles. We never made it to the store for the soda. 

3: Honeymoon on ice

I have other January stories, too, ones that don’t involve bodily fluids. There was the day of my first wedding which was to take place a few days before my husband’s second term as a freshman in college. Our parents and siblings helped pack a truck and one car to move into the two-room apartment we’d found at the top of another rickety old building - this one on fraternity row at the University of New Hampshire. About an hour before we were to start the two and a half hour drive south from my parents’ home, snow began to fall. And fall. And fall. The truck made it down the hill to Route 2 and died. We recruited a van from somewhere and, in the snow, filled it with essential items and over the next five hours crawled through the blizzard to Durham.

We climbed the stairs to our new home and found it occupied. The students who’d been living there had been unable to find a new apartment and were sitting on the floor surrounded by furniture and boxes combing the classifieds for a place to stay. We told them to be gone when we got back, without any hope that they would, in fact, leave. I changed into the new maternity pants and top my husband’s sister had made for me and we went to get married in his uncle’s living room a town away. When we returned later that night, sodden, shell-shocked, and stunned at the sudden transition from young and single to young and married, it was to an empty apartment strewn with trash. 

"Bust of the Roman god Janus" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1569. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-605a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

There is a reason that January is named for a two-faced god who catches us coming and going from the old year to the new one. There have been times when I’ve stood, frozen in the metaphorical doorway, unwilling to leave one year behind. I still haven’t taken down this year’s — sorry, last year’s — Christmas tree or any of the little candles and lights I placed lovingly around the house in mid-December. One year, in another two-room apartment where I slept in the living room while my son slept in the only bedroom, I left a live Christmas tree up until February 20th. Every night, I lit that thing up, put on George Winston’s “Winter” and fell asleep to the blinking white lights. When I finally took it down, the tree disintegrated all over the floor. I shoved it out the second-floor window and it fell in pieces to the ground below. Ready or not, I had to face the new year.  

I’m not arguing to change the calendar, I’m just pointing out that beginnings can be pretty rocky and January seems to want to emphasize this point. Even here in San Diego, miles from the horrific storms that January has visited on the rest of the nation, Janus finds a way to remind me that storms come in all forms and I better watch my step.  

On the other hand… 

Knowing that this time of year can be a bit tricky, I deliberately extended the usual winter break from Spark by one week. That gave me two weeks for the holidays and two more weeks just for me and my writing. Yes, there was a shit storm, and a power outage, and a few other hiccups BUT I somehow still began each day by working for at least three hours on my novel. I finished the current draft and will begin a rewrite next week. I didn’t expect to be at this point for another month. Maybe a little adversity helps me focus? 

What about you? Do you gain or lose focus when life hands you a bit of rough weather? 

Where I’m leaning for my next reads

Out in the world, January has just meant more of the same for many people. The same struggles, the same wars, the same cycles of violence, waste, conflict, and suffering that we humans excel in perpetuating. I’ve been thinking what many of us have been thinking – how is it that this is all we can manage despite years of experience and history that offer lessons we refuse to follow? 

What does it take to be a good human? I’m reaching for reads – fiction and nonfiction – that seem to speak to this question in one way or another. Among these:

• Two books by Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst; and Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Here, Sapolsky lays the groundwork and then the argument for the role of biology and free will in our behavior. These are daunting reads for a layperson like me. I will be tapping into his lectures and interviews as I read.

• Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life, by Lulu Miller. I learned of this one from

  Terrell Johnson
  over at The Half-Marathoner. Miller thought researcher David Starr Jordan was in denial when he she read about his efforts to rebuild a life’s work in the wake of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. She came to see him as a model for how to go on when all seems lost. 

• The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine. I’ve already read this novel about an Arab American trans woman, a physician, who travels to Greece to help with Syrian refugees. I want to revisit it because, as with every book I’ve read by Alameddine, it captures the complexity of human existence and shows the cost when we try to dodge this complexity by reaching for labels, boxes, right, wrong. And I love his writing. 

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. This one is a holdover from my TBR list from 2022/23.  I am wondering if pairing this novel with Sapolsky’s books might lead me in unexpected directions. 

What books are you reading as you make your way through January? What are the making you think about or feel? 

If you like what you see or it resonates with you, please share Spark with a friend and take a minute to click the heart ❤️ below - it helps more folks to find us!

Welcome New Subscribers!

If you’ve just subscribed, thank you so much for being here. If you would like to check out past issues, here’s a quick link to the archives. Be sure to check out our Resources for Readers and Writers too where you will find links for readers, book clubs, writers, and writing groups. And if you’d like to browse for your next read, don’t forget to check out books by authors in our community at the Spark Author Page which will be updated with new names and books for next week’s issue. Another great source: the many wonderful reviews you’ll find among the #Bookstackers. 

The more the merrier! Please share with your friends and invite them to join us!

Ciao for now! 

Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…New Year Resolve by May Sarton

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.
Let silence in.
She will rarely mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.
For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

- May Sarton from The Silence Now - New and Uncollected Earlier Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 198

“I like the number 2024 better than 2023. I like the four – a nice open number with arms open at the top. It makes me happy.”  – Jen E. Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!

And remember, if you like what you see or it resonates with you, please share Spark with a friend and take a minute to click the heart ❤️ below - it helps more folks to find us!