2010 :: The Year of Caravans and Wagons

It is New Year’s Day and we are sitting in a quiet cabin. So quiet I can hear the hum of the refrigerator and the stilted tapping of the keyboard. We are here without the boys for the first time since their birth. The last time we were here alone was New Year’s day 2007, I was pregnant with them. Back then I used to write to them in a paper journal and I remember I wrote about my hopes and dreams for them as we entered the year of their birth. I feel a little bewildered that four years have passed since those quiet moments.

We called to check in with my parents this morning and Owen and Mason grabbed the phone and sang us 'Happy Birthday' as my Mom gently coached them in the background. It was the best sound ever and I wish I could have recorded their voices. We stayed in bed until 11 a.m., another first since their birth, and I finally read through a sewing book I bought over two years ago. I understood all of it and I was not interrupted once during the reading. And I now feel as if I understand sewing knits and have unlocked the secret of sewing my own T-shirts. It is knowledge worth its weight in gold.

It is odd to be able to hear myself think and actually finish books and thoughts and conversations. There is always so much energy coursing through the space when they are around. We have only been gone two days but it feels like two weeks. I miss them but I am not running for the car to get home just yet. That will probably happen tomorrow morning.

Last night, we rang in the New Year in our own quiet manner, talking about our dreams for them and having a few beers. The cul-de-sac rang with isolated shouts and a few gunshots sounded in the distance (we are in mountain country, you know). We were glad to be home and warm inside after spending four plus hours in the car driving to and from Yosemite. During the drive I reclined my seat all the way back, a luxury I had forgotten, and I knit away at my sock and did not turn around once during the whole drive.


It is a good thing and an odd thing to be away from them. Time seems to stretch and I feel the urge to jump up and fill it with movement and doing, so hard to learn to just sit for a minute. We have spent 3/8 of out time away talking about them and mimicking some of our favorite phrases, just now we are easing into speaking in full sentences and not repeating ourselves five times.


I think 2010 is going to be an interesting year. I have plans, but not too many to be overwhelmed. It is nice to sit and mull over them during this quiet mid-day interlude. I think I want to declare 2010 the year of the Gypsy. The year of creating portability and lightness, flexibility and movement.

I have no solid resolutions but I have made a commitment to dream. I have been wanting to find a way to actualize my dreams. They are truly simple ones, nothing like writing a book or creating another person. In truth, the dreams are so vague that I hope that fleshing them out will come in the space of participating in Mondo Beyondo, helping me to figure out just what dreaming of living like a gypsy will look like.


When I was young and read voraciously, I always fell hard for the characters that lived in wagons. I loved the idea of a treasured interior, stuffed with essentials but somehow always organized and accessible. I could see in my mind’s eye loading and unloading precious needed cargo, easily taking oneself from place to place, unfettered and unhitched from the ordinary, able to explore the extraordinary.

Now, with the children in the picture, the dream has shifted a bit and, yes, it does include dual DVD players and a solar powered battery charger, but it is still there, so real and present. I am not sure how or when yet, but I do think that 2010, the year of the Gypsy, will be quite wonderful indeed.

And you? What are you dreaming of on this fine New Year’s Day?

We are wishing you a year of dreaming big, always a good wish to bestow.